Isotopica

Isotopica today treats with good friend and (official) national treasure Dudley Sutton, to mark the end of his lino cut illustrated poem exhibition at the Chelsea Arts club.We talk of his 1960’s adventures in New york with Joan Littlewood, dope fuddled filming in Antigua and more recent collaborations with Andrew Kotting (testing soil temperature with bare buttocks and poems in a pedalo). Delishhhh!

Dudley Sutton performing in Andrew Köttings "This Filthy Earth"

Dudley Sutton performing in Andrew Köttings "This Filthy Earth"

This Filthy Earth is the story of sisters Kath and Francine, whose lives are disrupted by two men – a brutal villager greedy for the girls' land and a gentle stranger who offers the possibility of escape. Amidst a landscape of rural hardship and a community consumed with superstition, events unfurl which threaten their sibling bond.

This Filthy Earth is the second feature from Andrew Kötting, whose debut film, Gallivant, won him Channel 4's Best New Director Award at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 1996. It features an exciting line up of acting talent including Rebecca Palmer (Intimacy, Quills), Shane Attwooll (Porgy and Bess), Demelza Randall in her feature film debut, Dudley Sutton (Up at the Villa, The Devils) and French actor Xavier Tchili (La Perme). With a script co-written by comedian Sean Lock, This Filthy Earth is a tragic tale of rural passion and survival inspired by Emile Zola's novel La Terre and John Berger's Pig Earth.

A grizzled and dystopian Seasonal Serving

bah humbug christmas is so unsocial

Isotopica strongly suggests you join us for our 100% guaranteed jaded, Nihilist Christmas special.

We will attempt a seance, bringing carols and christmas chills from 'The Other Side' and generally revel in our very own Brutal Meta Modernist and Miserablist Seasonal spirit....

Join us and forget all this tinsel cheer (repeated forever and ever and ever and........)

Isotopica today is a series of compositional performance, plumbing lessons, plumbing lessons that become performance, and collaborations with and excerpts from performances of The Clapton Ensemble. Please do not attempt any of this at home without a doctorate level composer present. (we ended up semi flooded in the making of this episode).

plumb 1

verb      the actor's attempt to plumb the twisted psyche of Richard III: explore, probe, delve into, search, examine, investigate, scrutinize, inspect, sound out, go into, understand, fathom, get to the bottom of, penetrate, unravel.

elo masing with stringed instrument

the peerless ClaAptOn Ensemble

restless  adjective

1 .... was restless, moving uneasily about the hut: uneasy, ill at ease, restive, fidgety, edgy, on edge, tense, worked up, nervous, agitated, anxious, on tenterhooks, keyed up, apprehensive, unquiet, impatient; Brit. nervy; informal jumpy, jittery, twitchy, uptight, wired, like a cat on a hot tin roof; Brit. informal like a cat on hot bricks, stressy. ANTONYMS calm.

2 he had spent a restless night: sleepless, wakeful, insomniac; fitful, broken, disturbed, troubled, unsettled, uncomfortable; tossing and turning; archaic watchful; rare insomnolent.

ANTONYMS peaceful.

Restless

 As our thoughts turn towards hibernation, isotopica peers inwards to the restless pink noise of the artist's soul. Marking just over a year since our last notable exhibition (UNFunFair Beaconsfield London), and without even the lingering fumes from a barely remembered sale, we use unpaid bills for warmth on the fire as we look for reasons to get out of bed, and Sisyphus like do what artists do… Therefor we present a gentle soundscape entitled ‘Restless’ which perhaps echoes (we love echo) the winter lives of of the creative at the fringe of one of the most monied art worlds in history.

Restless’ 58m 32seconds Tyszko 2014

You know that moment when you meet someone at the ICA and then find yourself a special guest of an Eastern European Hells Angels chapter as part of an obscure performance art work?

Yes, that moment.

Today’s guest is uncategorizable artist David Ellis, we talk categories and how to stay out of them.

EMOTIONAL PING PONG

Mekas tribute: David Ellis and Simon Tyszko from Serpentine Galleries

An admittedly scatty episode with our fabulous architecture correspondent Herbert Wright,

that somehow  left Herbert feeling 'mortified' by the superficiality of my conversational style or somesuch, yet we cover lots of ground, spin to the left and end up right as such in (un)typical Isotopica style.

From Zagreb, to Split, to the Leaning towers of London, both brutal and Meta Modern, Herbert Vows to return to Isotopica in more cogent form, yet personally I loved it.

 

In a thought experiment, today we listen to some of our earlier Gaza Live streams backwards, we hear heartfelt yet well scripted  reports from the earliest days of the NHS, and hopefully, as the best of art should help us

do, we consider...... the world

Something Foul in our world

So lets go back, way backwards in time, in fact backwards through Gaza.

Perhaps some will come back to life,

perhaps not,

and then some Jazz......

DATELINE ICELAND

Pirates have proposed a congressional statement, directing the Welfare Minister to implement a guaranteed minimum income, what in recent years has also gone under the name of universal basic income or citizen wage.

More precisely, the proposal, made by Halldóra Mogensen, Jón Þór Ólafsson and Birgitta Jónsdóttir on Monday, would instruct the Minister to form a team to “map ways to ensure an unconditional minimum income for all the country’s citizens, with the aim to support economic and social rights and eliminate poverty.”

Therefore Isotopica treats with Icelandic MP Halldóra Mogensen, who as a Pirate Party member is also listed as  Poet, Dreamer. Dreaming a society free of mindless doing. Nurturing the human being versus the human doer.

Dóra read us us a poem and we happily digress while floating in an algorithmically generated pentatonic composition.

Political balance is maintained with a delightful viral clip from a recent LBC phone in show in which a UKIP supporter demonstrates the nuance and subtlety with which the United Kingdom Independence have gauged the pulse of this Foul Britannia.......

A smile rearranged.

It’s as if I’m standing still,

orbiting our collective will,

a string tied taut

with me caught

and then applied to the world,

but I am soon to be hurled off course

by a planet dying,

an imploding supernova

defying my steady cause,

eroding in space

where matter is grace,

how it recombines

at the pace of a pause,

and redefines the cold landscape

that I mind

during my time without time,

behind the unseen,

beyond reason and its fallible doctrine,

where life has no beginning and no end,

where being is winning

and everything else is pretend.

A pantomime that I will no longer

attend to nor pretend to partake in

for how can I forsake this gift that I am

to conceive a belief

where I’m adrift in grief,

believing that I’m alone,

a clone of mistrust

and misfortune

spawned from the seeds

of societies ill deeds

and soon to be dead.

In a bed.

In a room.

In a house.

My tomb full of things

that were never enough,

a life spent collecting,

not wisdom, but stuff,

experience traded

for faded belongings,

a smile rearranged for a tear,

joy exchanged for fear,

life in a prison for the free,

all this when all I need to do

is just be.

Tyszko, Naked, hurls Molotov Cocktails at Mother Nature's Frozen Best,

From the perfume palaces of Persia, through Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, to the anarchist squats of 70's london, soundtracked to Hawkwind’s Silver Machine:

The joss stick has left it’s lingering aroma, and indelibly marked the memory of this artist.

We talk ingredients, methods, place and time with master of  the joss stick Paul 'Happy Hari' Eagle.

Hari's delicious incense is available here Happyhariincense.comSimon and Paul are discussing a PsychoAromatic memory project together as part of Tyszko's long journey into the tragedies of his past, heading back to Notting Hill gate in the mid 1960's when Tyszko lost his brother and where much of his practice first originated... watch this space