Dean Whitbread 2020
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I complain a lot about London in these pages, but every so often it still provides me with something so deeply refreshing and life-affirming that I give thanks for my location. The Barbican have a cultural festival on at the moment which celebrates the 70th birthday of a composer who changed my life – Steve Reich. The reason Steve changed my life was that David Cunningham, the man behind a lot of progressive music in the UK, gave me a copy of Reich’s “Come Out To Show Them” one day when I was at art school. I was already scratching with audio and video, using cassette and reel-to-reel tape and off-line video editing, and David just tipped me towards something which was to make a lasting impression on me and very definitely shaped my career. Within two years I was exhibiting internationally, and although my art career has been carefully neglected since that time, I’ve never stopped making recordings, making music.
So I spent the weekend at the Barbican – which incidentally is also showing Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings – multi-screen, generative art – in a state of exultation, feeling that I had very much returned to my roots. I rarely if ever think about having roots, I scarcely ever feel really connected to the crazy golden dirt heap of London, just merely passing through for the last 25 years… but this weekend, I was elevated by the experience of feeling a part of this living history.
I’ll write a review later.