Before the pandemic, around 2015 maybe, a lumber yard across the road from Edinburgh College of Art closed down. A terrible loss, possibly inspired by the constant rediscovery that painting was hard, and making videos on the phone didn’t need wooden stretchers for canvas. A hipster barber shop took its place. A fantastic memory I have from that time is of walking home in the darkening November evening to see illuminated and framed in the window the perfect surreal image of four barbers with beards giving four identical beardies haircuts. Charles Dickens would have stirred.
There is a lot of stuff in a beard…
Romance https://www.moma.org/collection/works/46634
Religion https://www.huffpost.com/entry/religious-beards_n_5947438
Music (terrible) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmFnarFSj_U
In summer of 1991 I was in Moscow waiting to leave on a series of visits with the Soviet Union of Artists to various parts of the now crumbling CCCP. Suddenly Mikhail Gorbachev went missing, and tanks were rumbling in through the streets towards the White House, where Boris Yeltsin was making a stand (the other White House and the other Boris). Bit scary. The only thing on TV was the Bolshoi Swan Lake. I think the idea was that it would placate the masses. It was interesting that after that particular coup, polls of favourite ballets made the Bolshoi Swan Lake the least popular.
Anyway, to mark the event I shaved my beard off, and made an artwork. I’m not quite sure why I did this, but it had a startling effect on Anne-Marie Creamer who was sharing the trip with Catriona and I, and didn’t recognise the stranger suddenly appearing in the flat at such a worrying moment.
I still have the beard, and it is still black. Hurrah!
No comments:
Post a Comment