Antony Gormley and Morton Bartlett

I wandered into the Antony Gormley show at White Cube the other day because I had a bit of time to kill and was pleasently surprised. Upstairs are some figures made out of little rectangular pieces of metal which are ok but it is the 3d metal scribble that is really nice. The whole space is filled with a twisted piece of metal like a giant doodle which you can enter. The best thing is that it feels really dangerous, the whole thing shudders and vibrates if anyone knocks against it and you constantly have to be aware of what you are doing in case you trip which takes away that art gallery self conscious "I'm looking a art" feeling. It's so nice to be able to touch and engage with a piece of art.

I also wandered into the excellant Bookartbookshop and bought a book about an artist called Morton Bartlett. He spent his whole adult life making perfect half life size children which he made clothes for. He's a kind of Hans Belmer, Henry Darger type. Its a really good book and if you ever see it anywhere I recommend you have a look, it's called Family Found: The Lifetime Obsession of Morton Bartlett by Marion Harris

Heavy Metal Kids

I'm in a show at the James Coleman gallery in September called She's No Angel with a group of other artists including Damian and Delaine Le Bas, Stella Vine and Iris Palmer. We did a group photo for the invite card last week which was really funny, made me feel like I was in a band again! The weird thing is that the name of the show comes from a really obscure song by a really obscure band called The Heavy Metal Kids and they were on Top of the Pops 2 last night singing you've guessed it She's no Angel. The singer of the band was a guy called Gary Holton who went on to act in Auf Wiedersehen Pet before dying of a drugs overdose in the 80s. Another really uninteresting (to you not me) fact is that when I was about sixteen I met Gary Holton in a pub in Guildford (he was in a play at the theatre there) and he was really nice. I've just had a search around on the web and apparently The Heavy Metal Kids are still gigging around today, with a different singer of course. It seems like every band reforms, I think it is a kind of mid life crisis thing where they desperately want to recapture their youth, examples off the top of my head - Stiff Little Fingers, The Pixies etc. etc.