Kevin Blake's Blog

Gibson are running a really cool set of two exhibitions in London right now as part of Gibson GuitarTown London. Thirty 10-ft high guitars are displayed around More London (Tower Bridge / Mayors building) at the moment, with another 30 normal sized Gibson guitars at the O2, Greenwich. Each of them has been hand-painted with a different design by a wide range of artists, and signed by musicians endorsing the event. More London will be hosting the event for a total of 10 weeks, (that’s another 7 to go), so you’ve got plenty of time to go and check it out. It’s worth it, being free and all

At the end of it all in September – they’ll all be auctioned off with all the proceeds going to The Prince’s Trust, Teenage Cancer Trust and Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy.

It’s a really cool exhibition, and if nothing else you can walk around it and pretend you’re really tiny. Then hop on a boat down to Greenwich, and pretend you’re a giant.

Antony Gormley is probably most widely known as the man behind The Angel of the North. Actually, he’s the man of the Angel of the North, using his own body as the subject for a huge number of sculptures designed to challenge our perception of ourselves and the space that we live in. Recently, as part of the Blind Light exhibition at The Hayward, Gormley has erected 31 casts of himself and put them on rooftops and walkways around London. Well, not personally – I’m sure he had some help. Every one of them faces the Hayward gallery, turning the watchers into the watched – and keeping Londoners looking skywards for the last 2 months.

Putting aside the rumours that Gormley himself is actually inside one of the life-size casts, I naturally wanted to find them all. So since I had this afternoon off from work and it’s not far from the office, I decided to stalk Antony Gormley’s creations for a little while. And I think, armed with a trackstick and camera I’ve managed to find all 31 of them. It’s very difficult to tell now, which are the same statues from different angles.

Three viewing terraces at the Hayward provide the means to see all of the statues, and as Gormley’s previously commented – it’s very interesting to become part of the small community on that rooftops, trying to find them all. Whether actively pointing them out – or passively seeing other people do the same. It’s also rather eery to have all of those lifeless bodies staring back at you.

And Event Horizon isn’t the only attraction nearby. Inside the gallery, there are a huge number of sculptures and exhibits , including Allotment II, 300 reinforced concrete life-sized units each modelled upon the inhabitants of Malmo. Every single one is different, and you can’t help but be impressed at the sheer number of them, as well as yes – as the guide says – it’s anthropomorphic heaven. Throw away all your 20th century ideals of not being allowed to have first impressions any more. These are concrete blocks, and you won’t be hauled off to jail for being sexist, racist, ageist or judging someone by their appearance in any way. You can’t help but find your favourites or make random judgements over what sort of person they would be. Well I couldn’t.

Blind Light, the namesake of the entire exhibition is a massive glass box filled with a bright white fluffy cloud. The result of this, is that once inside you can’t see a damned think. After wandering around, barely able to see your own hands held out in front of you – you will have no idea where you are. Ghostly shadows will occasionally pass by and if you keep going, you’ll find the edges of the box where spectators will see your face emerge from the mist. It’s very surreal, but a great experience, and yet another example of Gormley making the spectators a part of the art. Not one for the claustrophobic, perhaps.

I won’t list everything else, I promise. Go for yourself and experience the world through different eyes. What I will do, is talk about another Gormley gem in the mostly forgotten area of London that we call Greenwich. The Quantum Cloud stands at 30m tall, making it even larger than the Angel of the North at Gateshead. In fact, until the construction of the B of the Bang sculpture in Manchester, 2005 – it was the largest sculpture in England. The Quantum Cloud sits on the Thames, by the pier at the newly opened O2 Arena, formally known as the Millennium Dome. It’s formed of hundreds of 1.5m lengths of random steel rods, at the centre of which you can make out the 20ft tall man standing amongst the cloud. But don’t look too closely, or you won’t see it. Magic eye, eat your heart out.

No, it’s not the title of the next Doctor Who Christmas special.

But, hot on the tails of the Gherkin, City Hall and the still forthcoming Bankside 123 architecture foundation and London Bridge Shard, is the newly proposed glass skyscraper at 11-19 Monument St.

It’s another of those multi-use buildings which stops the realists from screaming out in disbelief over more offices being built in Central London that we just don’t need. So you’ll be almost as happy as I am to learn about the roof gardens, the visitor centre for Monument and eye-blindingly-bright light-up front. “Flexible accommodation” also sounds like an extremely interesting concept to me, and if your apartment doesn’t shrink when you exit the front-door, allowing extra space for those inhabitants still occupying the building – frankly, they’ve missed a trick. You wait. It will happen.

An impressive looking plan, all the same – and I look forward to gazing into the ripple-effect facade that starts this Fairground ride for giants. And if that doesn’t work, maybe the reflections from the glass will set fire to Monument. How we’d laugh.

The big news of the day is the unveiling of the London 2012 logo. There’s no denying the 12,149 signatures on the “Change The London 2012 Logo” petition. The logo had quite clearly made its mark on the population. And why not? We’ll be seeing this logo and branding that it implies for the next 5 years at least.

I don’t like to tackle the contentious minefield that is design and branding. It’s better left to people who give a damn in my opinion, which perhaps isn’t the most healthy stance for a web-site developer. But… I can make random analogies for anything, and they easily spiral out of control…

A brand is a lot like an iceberg, see. You can only give it a gentle shove in the general direction you want to go in. Standing on the shore you can shout encouragement or wave it off – but you’re still on the shore. It’s out there and sometimes there’s not a lot you can do except for frantic splashing in the waves. The best brands will evolve, picking up more icebergs along the way until one of two things happens.

1. It’s a huge success, travels for thousands of miles, but they eventually reach warmer climates, melt, and disappear. In which case you’re going to need another block of ice.
2. Your brand gets in the way of another body at sea. It causes unimaginable damage to everything around it as well as itself. It’s time to walk back down the beach and pretend you were nowhere near it when it drifted free.

So to get back to the point. Which of these is the London 2012 logo? Well it’s different, which some might call brave, or stupid. It’s brightly coloured and stands out, which is meant to appeal to the young people of now and 2012. Actually, let’s not circle this point any longer. It’s ridiculously stupid, is what it is. It lacks the finesse of London 2012 candidate city logo and absolutely deserves the ‘Lisa Simpson giving head’ description circulating all around the country at the moment.

And therein lies the genius. No publicity is bad publicity and everyone is talking about it. I don’t feel it represents the England of today, or tomorrow for that matter. But it is simple and already stands out as London 2012 Olympics. Wherever the London 2012 committee want to take this branding or whatever it was supposed to mean at conception – it’s released and it’s out at sea. Maybe we can all help it along in the right direction.

This week, I heard about a really amazing project coming to a London Bridge near you soon. If the Shard London Bridge, or the London Bridge Tower is built, it will be the tallest building in Western Europe. The Shard will pierce the landscape of London bridge for a massive 310 metres, over twice the size of the Millenium Wheel, and containing residential areas just below the viewing platform near the top. Due for completion in 2011, I think I still have a little while yet to save some money, and convince the banks to depart with large quantities of mortgage(s) so that I can be rehoused alongside some of the best views in London.

And yes, the early computer generated depictions of the Shard do look absolutely ridiculous. And yes, this is probably how it will be for quite a few years following the construction. There are no buildings on the south bank that even come close, so it does literally look as though it has been casually flung from a much larger city somewhere up in the clouds. But this should be no reason not to build it, and I fully support the decision to show the rest of the world that we can bravely spend copious amounts of money on huge controversial structures to make mankind stare upwards in awe. This really does seem like an amazing project, and one that I would have great pleasure watching evolve as I travel to work every morning. Long live the Shard!