Coastal Currents, day one.

Coastal Currents launched this weekend. So far I've visited Laurence Poole and donated a few cars to his latest assemblage, which looks like it should be interesting. Baldly put, he's mounting a bunch of model cars onto a bit of board - arranged chromatically. Is this art? I'd say definitely, yes; it's the kind of thing I could put on a wall and stare at forever, considering the relationships between the models, the colours, the models themselves, etc etc. But then, I'm a middle aged man who collects model cars. His other assemblages involve pens and pencils, stamps and old vinyl records. I like them a lot. Take a look at them here.

Going from the sublime to the ridiculous, last night I visited the Stade Open space and watched the Karavan Ensemble combine 'promenade elements, dance, physical and visual theatre, interactivity and object animation in a site responsive context'. Or, to put it another way, they put a lampshade on their head and waved their arms around mysteriously. Then they hid behind a sheet and did some basic shadow puppetry (they waved their arms around in front of a torch) while someone else above the sheet, arranged so she appeared to be wearing it, waved her arms around as well (if you've seen Wicked, you've seen this done much better during 'Defying Gravity'). On my 'Emperor's got no clothes' scale, this performance scored a 'completely naked' rating. However, I award their publicity material the full five pseuds.