Friday, November 28, 2008

For Rauschenberg

I was obliged to go to North Acton this morning. I had to walk about half a mile from the underground station. The walk took me along an alley sandwiched between a graveyard and the railway tracks. It was littered with dead leaves, plastic bottles and sodden newspapers. The steel railings, warehouse walls and lamp posts were all covered with graffiti. A mournful sign on the railway tracks said 'Whistle'. It was cold and raining. I would not, on balance, walk through there at night. But this morning it made me deliriously happy for reasons I did not at first understand. Then I realised this place had been romanticised and redeemed by the work of that recently late and timelessly great artist Robert Rauschenberg. And it was Rauschenberg, I also now realise, that prompted me to take the above picture on a quite different occasion.

12 comments:

  1. Ah, now this is why I visit Thought Experiments.

    Anyone can post about the recession (it's always somehow disappointing when you write about Gordon Brown etc, as if a concert pianist is playing chopsticks), but you could only find stuff like this on Appleyard's blog: a postcard from a quite different plane.

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  2. If you had an expandable baton you could walk through that alley anytime you liked. You could even live there - like a troll lurking under a bridge, a troll equipped with an expandable baton.

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  3. De nada. It is intended in the spirit in which it is meant to be taken.

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  4. So you have been to OZ recently on your travels (you are right they are on the chubby side)

    Looks to me like Victoria state (not just because of the beer logo on the store) but because Victoria has a lot of British 4 seasons in one day weather, its looks cloudy. At a stab Kangaroo island.

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  5. God, that's scarily brilliant, passer by

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  6. Sorry, that should be South Australia? did you do the great coast road?

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  7. No much more complicated than one road. But I will be writing about this so that's all for now

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  8. I see :0) Ive drove the whole way around too, the Nullabor was my favourite bit, racing the Indian pacific. living like Mad Max. I wonder if you eat any roadkill?

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  9. Victoria Bitter is ok...

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  10. I also walk in that gap between art and life.

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