Set in the theatrical Dennis Severs House, an exhibition of illustrator Pierre Le-Tan's artworks marks the launch of the new online art salon East of Mayfair, with the new website also conceived in collaboration with Pierre-Le Tan and Thibaud Herem. Le-Tan's watercolors, featuring cult figures such as Truman Capote, Andy Warhol and Jean Cocteau, are staged across ten rooms within this Grade II listed Georgian Home in Spitalfields. This is the first exhibition to be held in this house, once home to Huguenotsilkweavers and then inhabited by the late eccentric Dennis Severs from 1979 to 1999. Over two decades, Severs transformed the home into a mysterious time capsule of the 18th and 19th century London, creating a sense of memory, nostalgia and ancestral presence through a narrative of its imaginary tenants, the Jervis Family. An avid collector himself, Le-Tan's works evoke a poetic dialogue by candle-light in this dramatic space. Pierre Le-Tan is on view through April 28, open daily 17.30-20.30 (or by appointment with East of Mayfair) at the Dennis Severs House, 18 Folgate Street, London. Photo and text Sophie Pinchetti
Replacing the advertising space of the Piccadilly line tube trains with art, Art-Tube celebrates ten years since its maverick takeover. In 2001 Canadian artist and gallery curator Robert Gordon McHarg III specially commissioned 42 artists to create visual panels for each carriage. Over six carriages, a trip on the tube took thousands of commuters to experience artworks of heart-scattered skies by Juergen Teller, blank canvases with the words 'Add Colour' and 'Draw Circle' by Yoko Ono, works by British artists such as Corinne Day, Damien Hirst, Pam Hogg and Jamie Reid, and McHarg's own work with phrases such as 'The World in Peace or The World in Pieces'. The exploit played a transformative act on a mass public space, rendering the train into a temporary art gallery and opening up traditional arenas of interaction between art and viewer. Works explore vast subjects from the absurd and fantastic, identity and issues of veiling by French-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira, others imbued with a punk sensibility and satirical wit such as Christopher Landoni's Monocaine abuse. Amidst the potentially propagandist edge, essentially their performance is an honest, transporting escape. Art-Tube is on view through November 26 at the Subway Gallery, Joe Strummer Subway, Edgware Rd/Harrow Rd, London. Photo and text Sophie Pinchetti
Curated by Elias Redstone, ARCHIZINES celebrates the recent resurgence of publications about architecture presenting 60 magazines, alternative publications and journals. From over 20 countries around the world, from Mexico City to Portugal and China, creative visions speak a discourse around architecture, its expressions in life and the future. Fighting back at the age of digital tyranny, photocopied publications and newsletters such as Another Pamphlet, Preston is My Paris, and Scapegoat experiment with the immediacy and living aspects of architecture in a personal, informal, and sometimes humorous way. Some even revert back to the nineties CAD fanzine publishing system, like the Portuguese Friendly Fire. Running through the exhibition, ecologically responsible planning and imaginative sustainable alternatives are driven particularly in publications Conditions, Mas Context, and KERB. Denmark's MAP, produces a fold-out poster for constructive ideas on habitat survival during floods. Others take sarcastic or critical approaches, with magazines Criticat and New York's textual Log journal ("a reaction to the consumption of images"), critically deconstructing architecture and its place within culture. Private, voyeuristic environments of anonymous couples at home and mental hospital wall studies even infiltrate through the pages of German publication Ein Magazin Uber Orte. Challenging authorities of vision in architecture, the new generation publications redefine its concept and communication, some going as far as being produced entirely by non-architects. They assert it's not a specialist discourse, as globally embedded and influent as it is, but something everyone can be critical about.
Now over seven months since the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency has disclosed TEPCO's 170-page manual for operators at the no.1 reactor unit of the Fukushima plant. Instructions in the manual highlight the lack and failure of instructions for workers dealing with critical situations, the Japan Times highlighted. Acting as a major factor in the crisis, the lack of preparation and knowledge delayed the relieving of pressure for reactor 1, leading to its meltdown - one of the few examples of dangerous and threatening inadequacies in the manual. TEPCO has been arguing against the disclosure of these documents, claiming that such information release could serve to terrorists and raise serious concerns about the security of reactors. Last week, France's nuclear monitor declared that the leakage of caesium 137 into the Pacific Ocean from the Fukushima disaster, was the greatest single nuclear contamination of the sea ever. According to the the Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN), the dilution of caesium levels poses no great threat. Yet the IRSN continued to say "significant pollution of sea water on the coast near the damaged plant could persist… because of continuing run-off of contaminated rainwater from the land". In September, the Japanese Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) had issued a statement estimating the amount of radiation released during the first week of the incident to be double what the government had originally told the public.
GALLERY
