I still have my shoes on

Manet's Olympia, 1863

Well, it was a question posed to me in the course of conversation - what sex and intelligence have to do with each other. I don't really know. I'd love the time to do a bit of poodling around - there must be aons of intelligence out there exploring the nature of relationships and Do Rocket Scientists Do It Better.
Snow has fallen heavily last night and today it's a chore to wade through it, getting from here to there and back again, but everyone's out and about, snow is sociable that way. Equally sociable, the Private Views this weekend at White Wall Space: Look Hear profiles Chalkleys' contribution to rock'n'roll photography: clean, cool, analytical, posed an emotive, moody in a theatrical way. It's a pleaure to see the quality of photography above the heads of yet another jammed Private View and it feels like a subversive pleasure.


Subversive pleasure: Manet's Olympia, a beautiful painting. She looks at you, the viewer viewed, her face a much discussed at the Mona Lisa's. The frontality of her gaze, her posture, her elegance: graceful portraiture. Controvertial for the depiction of her apparently brazen but gentle gaze; today we look at the camera as a flower to the sun, so in love are we with celebrity culture, and to turn our gaze away implies an overexposure, an impartiality, a romantic notion of another muse of mental place and space. Apparently.

Katie Surridge has just completed her residency, hence her solo show, at the Winch Room at TAP that opened on Saturday evening. Animal skins, reflective pools of water, bones in jars, there's a newness about this installation that will develop like a good wine. It deserve to grow, rot, and regrow, evolve and become the living microcosm that this shed-on-shed installation suggests. There's a comfort of home against the non-synthesis of flourescence. Utopia, dytopia, mysticism: mythology.

Having had a quick peek at types of intelligence, Gardiner 's unproved theories outline multiple intelligences, of which body-kinaesthetic is one. Does your left hand know what your right hand is doing? Well, there's the anwer, for me at least: a kind of knowing, rooted in the everyday, the practical, the ease at which we move through the world; as with Olympia, a sanctuary in the physical pleasures of life in contrast to the otherworldliness that we may gaze upon.