'I liked the John Singer Sargents'

The exhibition night
I left thinking ‘is that all there is?’ just like that song that Polly covered, beautifully. I think this because the show is small, ever so small. I’ve seen floor plans of this place, thinking as I was that I might use the space to show things in, but in being there it seems shrunk to miniature. So small. I enter tentatively, and hover near some large three dimensional shining acrylics on canvas, slide past slowly the summer coloured abstracts and then plunge down the corridoor expecting another chamber, expecting a large central room, only to find the corridoor flanked with Polaroids of someone with their bodily fluids pouring out is the last of the space and I am now outside in an even smaller space squeezed between the paling fence and the wall of the building, dark, thin, pausing for other people to push past, until I emerge into a thoroughly anticlimactic courtyard as big as my bathroom. Ok maybe as big as my bathroom and toilet together. And completely lacking flair – where are the sculptures, the candles, the pot plants, the warm fire in a tiny cast iron vessel? Where is the orange tinged moody lighting and dramatic shadows? Where are the women in sculpted black hair and large necklaces, ironic makeup, complex scarves and gallery laughs? This is, after all, an art gallery, and I expect a certain amount of sensual stimulation. The bright back of the brick wall lighting and cold people huddled in padded brown coats just isn’t doing it for me. I make my donation for my glass of red and look around furtively, weighing up my willingness to mingle versus my laziness, with the latter winning, and head back down the dark walkway into the corridor room to read the artist’s statement about her bodily fluids, back back through the abstracts, finding myself mesmorised with a small family in matching hooded tops, handmade looking, all the hoods lined in loud black and white houndstooth, the outsides a medley of coloured fabrics, somehow this side of eighties retro cool, a little bit ‘I just got a new sewing machine and learnt how to use it’ and a little bit ‘we belong to a really badly dressed cult’. I couldn’t stop staring. I found them much more intriguing and thought provoking than anything on the walls. I head outside and pause to check the front windows, for the display there and then realise that these people out the front are friends of the front-window artist, they are standing on the street in their own front-window-appreciating breathing cold puffs of winter street air exhibition opening moment. The artist swoops on me excitedly and gives me an A4 flyer, photocopies of line drawings, school desk style, school excersise book in the margins style, and his email address (I marvel that it’s not a his-space site) and I am flung back to a time when there were many more boys making scratchy images on small scraps of paper, and everybody’s half baked anything was full of immense wonder and promise. Listen to me – jaded. It’s these heels I am wearing. I wander back down the street which is a pattern of African-Thai-Pizza places and children’s-handmade-secondhand clothes shops, the occasional African-Tahitian-Turkish homewares shop offering cushions. I watch skinny women and bag-eyed children dressed like gangstas, I see altercations ‘no mate that’s just fucken rude, you shouldn’t disrespect my missus like that’ ‘that’s fair enough isn’t it? Isn’t it?’, and stand at a bus stop, swapping weight from foot to foot and looking forward to that moment when I can unzip these relentless shoes and immerse my feet in ugg boots.