I'm lucky to be one of the recipients of Miles Gibson's great Postcards.  They appear in the post at random intervals.  I think the postman enjoys them as well.

Sometimes there is a random intervention on these 'Guaranteed Genuine Works of Art', as it says on the back.  What could be more apt for today than this belle, receiving a shower of well-deserved hearts from the franking machine.  It must be love! Happy Valentine's Day!

After reading Adrian Searle's article in the Guardian, I went down to check out this art installation for myself.  

Bloody hell it's odd.  Well worth a visit.  Swiss artist Christoph Büchel has taken over the Hauser & Wirth art gallery in Piccadilly, and took two months to convert it into what appears to be a genuine community centre over four floors with everything you'd expect to see there - a fully working canteen with cheap kitchen, lino floors and public service furniture, a large room available for hire for everything from tea dances to yoga, a computer skills room, counselling rooms and so on.  Pinboards are overflowing with boring local information of all kinds, have a rootle around and you'll come across folders of admin documents relating to staff meetings and safety procedures from a few years back.  And if you need to relax after a stressful class there's even a dance floor and saloon bar area in the basement.

The reason this appears to be a genuine community centre is that it is an actual community centre - the facilities are in use by genuine practitioners offering services to the general public, often free, to a timetable you can read at the brilliant Piccadilly Community Centre website, which covers the scale of activities better than I possibly could.  When I arrived I passed the closed, but still slightly unsettling loans office and made my way to the canteen, where I was offered some baklava left over from a class earlier that day.  The computer room next door was full of pensioners learning about online something or other.  As I wandered freely around the building, baklava in hand, I watched a tango lesson - even though I felt I was intruding a bit by loitering, the teacher was very welcoming and had pamphlets out for his next classes.

But look beneath the surface - that's the point of course - and things start getting a little more confusing.

Just why is there a Cash Loan office in a community centre for a start?  And some of the classes are, er, unusual... If you're of a certain age you can enjoy the Pensioner's Fencing class, or Senior Speed Dating for those looking for a fencing partner.  And while half of the top floor is currently used by a genuine charity shop, the other half is occupied by the Conservative Party Archive, selling Conservative Party merchandise on the other - buy a mug and Vote For Change!  

It was only when I tried to buy some Conservative Party postcards, for slightly pathetic ironic reasons it must be said, that the mask of the Centre slipped for the first time; I was told by the girl at the till that they weren't actually for sale, unlike the charity shop items.

Then you get to the nub of it - take a stair ladder up into a roof space and you crawl into a fetid squat - half eaten food, TV and music blaring, messy beds, drink and drugs, a filthy toilet behind a curtain.  I took the photos at the top of this post while I was alone up there.  The walls are covered with Crass posters, Socialist Worker slogans, 'Wanker' scrawled across a picture of David Cameron.  An allegory for Broken Britain, albeit a bit of a teenage one in places.  It reminded me a bit of when I was live mixing John Cale's Dark Days installation in Essen last year, I snuck over a fence to check out the disused coal factory next door and found myself in the frankly terrifying 10 storey concrete stairwell where the junkies hung out. 

And at at the other end of the building in the basement bar, you open the Do Not Enter door to find the bad-smelling caretaker's room, shelves covered with tools, cuckoo clocks, medicine, nick-nacks old and new... and can squeeze down the hidden, tiny corridor at the back - are you meant to be here? - past dusty boxes of junk piled high, around claustrophobic corners.  It's genuinely intimidating, like something out of Seven.  You come to a dead end filled with another filthy single bed pushed up to another toilet, with attendant stack of 70s porn and dodgy VHSs.

Piccadilly Community Centre is part urban exploration, part community spirit fun, a very slick analogy of a Britain where we all strive together for a better future but beneath the surface it's all going really wrong.  It feels quite obvious in places, but it sure is done well - you do start questioning what's real and what isn't.  It's open until July 30th, so I'm definitely going back for another look.  I might even sign up for a class - anyone else for the Kathak Dance Workshop?

I'm looking forward to seeing this exhibition.  I can't help noticing how successful sculpture has been at looking into the future without completely alienating the general public every step of the way, unlike say modern classical music.  (Of course there are exceptions to this observation.)  Look at how modern Jacob Epstein's work still is, nearly a century later - here's Anthony Gormley talking about it.  And I find it hard to believe that this sculpture by Alfred Gilbert, Jubilee Memorial to Queen Victoria, was from 1887 and not an ironic work from 2003.  Looks like the sort of thing the Chapman brothers would have done, a grotesque addition to an existing work.  Or something by Glenn Brown.

Alfred Gilbert - 
Memorial to Queen Victoria, 1887.

Jake and Dinos Chapman - Insult to Injury, 2003.
(Painting over original Goya 'Disasters of War' cartoons.)

Glenn Brown - Architecture and Morality, 2004
(God knows what he's done here as I haven't seen it in the flesh, but he takes existing artwork and paints on top it, does photo manipulation, all sorts of stuff.  This blog describes it in detail.)

Anyone who hasn't yet been has to get to Tate Modern before September 5th to see Francis Alys' exhibition.  It's quite exceptional, had me roaring with laughter at the time and then thinking about the world in a different way long afterwards.  I'm going back to watch his Rehearsal on loop, it's a brilliantly funny, and a great allegory for the spirit of a South America I've never been to, but think I now know a little bit better.

If you do go to Tate Modern don't waste any time going to the Exposed photo exhibition on the same floor, it's just rubbish. 

Here's Alys' ice: (try saying that out loud, over and over - go on)