Financial Times Europe - 07.10.2019

18 ★ FINANCIAL TIMES Monday7 October 2019

ARTS

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney

“I sing for good listeners and tired danc-

ers,” Bill Callahan sang near the start of

his Hammersmith Apollo show. The

singer-songwriter from Austin, Texas,

makes careful, unhurried music, full of

pauses and subtle amplifications. His

sing-speak vocals are uttered in low,

deep tones with a streak of dark humour,

as though dredging either for profound

truths or a punchline. It is not material

for hoofing: not a single tired dancer

would emerge from the all-seated venue

at the end of the evening. But good lis-

teners were rewarded.

There was a good number of them

present. Callahan, 53, has amassed an

avid following in acareer going back to

1990, first under the name Smog, then

his own. The concert was the first of two

nights at the Apollo. With a seated

capacity of 3,500, its dimensions ini-

tially threatened to overwhelm Calla-

han’s sparse staging. He and three

accompanists were clustered in a circle

of light, each rooted to their spot. At one

point, during “Watch Me Get Married”,

Callahan walked to the edge of the stage

as though to test the truth of the line he

had just sung: “Oh, I know it’s a distance

from here to the stars.”

He opened with “Angela”, a drily

funny, slightly cruel tale of a relation-

ship ending from his new albumShep-

herd in a Sheepskin Vest. “Like motel cur-

tains, we never really met,” he intoned,

like a hard-boiled character from a

dimestore novel. “I’m somewhere

between a gumshoe and a journalist,” he

once said: a dispassionate observer, not

a confessor. But other new songs ad ah

more autobiographical bearing, dwell-

ing on marriage and parenthood — the

reason for his unusually long absence

from the studio.

On electric guitar, Matt Kinsey was a

versatile but unforceful presence, add-

ing delicate flecks of feedback and

muted solos, a quietly expressive con-

trast to Callahan’s deadpan vocals. Brian

Beattie bowed his electric upright bass

to evoke the string arrangements that

appear on the recordedsongs. Drum-

mer Adam Jones played a small drum

kit with a delicate touch.

The biggest reward for the audience’s

patience came with the last song before

the encore, “The Beast”, performed with

support act Dallas Acid, which ended

with the shimmering sound of a gong

and sustained electronic drones, like a

moment of revelation.

P O P

Bill Callahan

Hammersmith Apollo, London

aaaae

Above: detail from

‘Transitions’ (2019),

a permanent

commission for

Canary Wharf’s

Crossrail station

Above right: artist

Michal Rovner

Francesca Ferrara/Pacific Press/

LightRocket via Getty

Norman Foster, she was shortlisted for

the UK Holocaust Memorial project.

In her own country, she is responsible

for the installation that opens the

Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum

in Jerusalem.

There could be no more fitting practi-

tioner to create a work about movement.

Rovner specialises in a style of anima-

tion that demands she film people as

they move about — marching, circling,

weaving through each other’s trajecto-

ries — in collective bodies. After shoot-

ing, she edits out all details of their

appearance so what remains are figures

that are universal in their featureless-

ness, yet — thanks to to their diminutive

size and codependent relationships —

express individual vulnerability with

every step.

Over the years, Rovner has shown in

venues ranging from the Venice Bien-

nale, where she represented Israel in

2003, to New York’s Whitney Museum

and the Louvre. But it’s extremely rare

for her to display her characters against

an identifiable backdrop, as with the

Canary Wharf installation.

“It started out as a grid,” she recalls

when asked how “Transitions” arrived

at its final incarnation. “I was inspired by

the subway of the tube map and the esca-

lators and floors of this site,” she contin-

ues, gesturing at Canary Wharf’s swoop-

ing, futuristic architecture. “But then it

evolved. never intended to make a por-I

trait of the city, a postcard, a still life... I

wanted to make a work about London,

yes, but I really wanted to get the soup

stock and not the soup.”

L

ines of tiny people march

across a cityscape, its grainy,

mist-wreathed skyline stud-

ded with monuments that are

at once familiar and strange.

At times, certain rows of figures shift

through registers of light — black, grey,

diaphanous white, neon-red — to evoke

the rattle and shimmer of trains along

high-tech tracks. Sometimes the flicker-

ing colours reduce the figures to signals,

even warnings. Here is a vision of move-

ment at once industrial and digital,

human and uncanny.

Entitled “Transitions”, the newly

unveiled 16-metre-long video montage

by Michal Rovner is installed in what is

currently the lobby above a swish under-

ground gym and cinema in the heart of

London’s Canary Wharf. However, if

Crossrail, the £17.8bn east-west London

railway project, keeps to its current

timetable, by this time next year “Tran-

sitions” will be the public face of the new

Elizabeth line stationbelow it.

“It’s all ready, it’s all done. It was ready

three years ago,” Michael Cassidy, a

former non-executive director of Cross-

rail and still a key adviser on the public

art programme, confirms when I ask

him what the state of play is with the

Canary Wharf station. Meanwhile

Chris Sexton, deputy chief executive

of Crossrail Limited, assures me that

this section of the track will definitely

open “between October 2020 and

March 2021”.

Co-funded by the Canary Wharf

Group and the City of London Corpora-

tion, with support from the artists’ gal-

leries, Crossrail’s public art programme

is an entirely private initiative. It has

commissioned nine artists including

Rovner, Yayoi Kusama, and Chantal

Joffe to make work for the central seven

stations along the Elizabeth line. When I

observe to Sexton that the art project

appears to be running more smoothly

than the railway, which has been

beleaguered by delays, Sexton laughs

ruefully: “I couldn’t possibly comment,”

he replies.

To be fair, the engineers’ concerns are

far removed from the quiet dazzle of

Rovner’s vison. “How do I represent this

movement, this undercurrent, these

intense lines of energy that are con-

stantly underneath us in a metropolis

like London?” says Rovner when I ask

her how she tackled the commission.

Now in her early 60s, the Israeli artist

— vigorous, elfin, engagingly warm — has

form when it comes to public art. In

2015, she unveiled “Passages”, a hand-

painted and animated fresco in Naples’

Municipio train station. Last year, in a

collaboration with British architect

City dreamscape to smooth the Crossrail journey

Rachel Spence meets Israeli

artist Michal Rovner and

marvels at her new video

montage, soon to grace

London’s Elizabeth line

“Transitions” expresses the vital

broth of the British capital more evoca-

tively than a painted view could. Lon-

don’s iconic sites are there — Nelson’s

Column, Tower Bridge, the skyscrapers

of the City — but Rovner has elided them

into a single, ghostly panorama that has

touches of sci-fi and film noir.

Every now and again individual

figures — a figure in a billowing

white cloak, a man with a dog — appear

alone in a shadowy no man’s land at the

centre of the mystical metropolis. Their

presence obliges our eye to pause, to

wonder, just as the city’s real anima occa-

sionally rouses us from our iPhones and

Kindles to marvel at its powerful, unpre-

dictable pulse.

“What are we doing in this life, coming

and going?” muses Rovner. “Sometimes

we are leaving a mark. Sometimes we

want to be located. Sometimes we want

to be dislocated. But there is this con-

stant desire in me, in us, to move from

place to place.”

Yet as an Israeli citizen based“on the

old road to Jerusalem”,Rovner is only

too aware that for Palestinians, mobility

is far from easy. “I wish there would be

freedom of movement for Palestinians,”

says the artist, who has made efforts to

employ Palestinian people in her work-

ing teams. “I wish the border between

them and us was more widely open. I

wish too that it would be open from

other sides, from other countries in the

region, that they didn’t insist on this kind

of encapsulation.”

In Canary Wharf at least, Rovner

has ensured the river of urban life is

flowingstrongly.

Bill Callahan on stage in July— Getty

suspects her husband has had a

threesome with their son and his large-

bosomed fiancée. Julia’s letter prompts

assorted stream-of-consciousness

reflections on the best way for a

mature lady to flash her genitalia at a

man on a train. Meanwhile, the

response to Margaret and her straying

spouse is too dark to repeat here, but,

suffice to say, bodily fluids are

discussed, the husband is given a free

pass and Margaret is advised to stop

being so uptight.

There are clear echoes of Derek and

Clive, the uproarious spoken-word

albums made by the comics Peter Cook

and Dudley Moore in the 1970s, both in

the improvised style (you can

occasionally make out Davis and

Pepperdine stifling laughter) and in the

hosts’ misanthropic world view. While

Joan and Jericha approach each new

letter with a benign tone, the

conversation invariably veers off into

excruciating territory as they let their

imaginations run riot, in the process

gleefully skewering the condescension

and faux-empathy that often

characterise real-life agony aunts. In

their opinion, every problem is the

fault of the woman, who must set aside

her dignity, submit to her partner’s

whims and please him at all costs. Joan

and Jericha are the absolute worst, and

I can’t stop listening to them.

It was with little fanfare that the first

series ofDear Joan and Jericha, the

comedy podcast in which two agony

aunts dispense disdainful sex and

relationship advice, arrived in the

spring of last year, prompting

incredulous spluttering among listeners

on the morning commute. The series

has quite a pedigree, having been

masterminded by Julia Davis, the writer

and comedian best known forNighty

Night,Hunderby nd the Bafta-winninga

Sally4Ever, and Vicki Pepperdine, of the

BBC sitcomGetting On. Now a second

series has arrived and, true to form, it is

the purest, funniest filth.

It features “everywomen” Joan

Damry (Davis) and Jericha Domain

(Pepperdine), who “have between

them worked in the fields of life

coaching, female sexual health,

psycho-genital counselling and sports

journalism”. The format is simple: after

a preamble in which the pair catch up

on one another’s news, they set about

discussing their correspondents’ sexual

dilemmas. In the first season, questions

covered everything from role-play

and saggy breasts to a query about

what to do when your husband buys

you a voucher for a facelift and

threatens to leave you unless you use it

(answer: have the surgery and count

your blessings).

The first episode of the new series

brings letters from Julia in Staines, who

would like to have a “torrid illicit

affair”, though her attempts to stare at

men seductively in libraries and on

trains has thus far yielded no action,

and Margaret in Harrogate, who

The Derek and Clive of agony aunts

Vicki Pepperdine andJulia Davis Getty

PODCASTS

Fiona

Sturges

OCTOBER 7 2019 Section:Features Time: 10/20194/ - 18:03 User: raphael.abraham Page Name:ARTS LON, Part,Page,Edition:EUR , 18, 1