Since that time, much has changed and much has not. Egyptians have not yet got the government they dream of (nor have we, but that is another story) but they have fully won one important victory – perhaps the most important one. They have conquered fear.

And so I want to commemorate today as the day we – and by this I mean humanity – can see that we can be courageous and selfless. We are not all just about money and status. Egyptians have shown us much in the past 7000 years and just when we could have thought that maybe they were worn out, old and had it, they rose up to show us something new.  New for our generation anyway!

I know the doomladen press wants to concentrate on its doomstories, but for once I say, ignore that. They are just trying to sell us pessimism cos when we feel bad we buy more. Let’s be positive and happy about the fact that, one year on, Egyptians have not let go of their revolution, and continue to inspire.

So, congratulations Egypt.

So, am I expecting a Mayan-style 2012 metldown a  la Roland Emmerich? Not really but you never know.  Recently declassified British Government docuemtns remind us just how close wer were to nuclear conflict during the Cold War. Our dear leaders were all ready, codewords to hand:

A top secret copy of the Cabinet Office’s War Book, dating back to 1962, has been released to the National Archives, revealing that one of the secret codewords authorising government evacuation from London before a nuclear attack was “orangeade”. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/dec/30/gems-national-archives-30-year-rule

“Orangeade” being something like TANG (sickly vile artificial sweet beverage). The UK had good reason to be afraid, the presence of the Trident nuclear weapons made the UK a target, which is why the Germans for example refused to host them. Canada – where I was during the cold war – didn’t have nuclear weapons but since we are tucked in tight to the USA [physically, economically and politically] it really didnt’ matter.

So – 2012. I don’t remember being scared during the 1980s and I am stil not scared today though I am older and wiser and probably should know better.

Let me now just get rid of this virus.

Review: http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/1818680

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hanging out in the studio, a crazy collage

A couple of things I want to recommend:

http://tacitadean.tate.org.uk/ Tacita Dean’s film installation at Tate Modern

follow Studio75London on twitter. That’s our studio, giving news views and a daily piece of art.

follow Nazir Tanbouli’s blog. http://nazirtanbouli.wordpress.com/  he’s doing a really interesting new thing, blogging the very last drawings he does every night before he sleeps.

follow CINEMANIA my own blog which is devoted solely to cinema. Well it was meant to be, meant to be a place where I could quickly blog up my thumbs up and thumbs downs, as well as put in links for film related articles etc. But the year got off to sharp start when I found myself blogging flagrant instances of race and bigotry in mainstream cinema. I would not say I am the most politically correct person, but crikey it’s pretty bad out there. What are the film and TV people thinking? I’m angry.

I’ve decided to use a Sony Alpha as a video camera now; a smaller version of the A77 (more or less a Canon 600D but with a fab screen) it takes my Sony DSLR lenses and so far my test shots look great. Haven’t really used it for anything yet. I dont want to puff a product but I have relied on Sony’s cameras and camcorders since my very first, and have been really pleased, esp with the lenses.

What inspired me the most?

Documentary film: hands down the best doc I saw was Wasteland by Lucy Walker, a film about an artwork by Vik Muniz and how the work touched the lives of dispossessed people in Brazil. Brilliant, moving and empathetic.

Brain – blast: that would have to be a film called Fantasia by a mysterious person or collective (?) called Cosmotropia de Xam. It is amazing, really mind boggling – 45 minutes of brain blast. It’s rare to find a film about the subjective experience of hallucination but this one works.

Literary adaptation: that has to be Maldoror, which I blogged about earlier this year http://gmc1ver.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/maldoror-the-neglected-masterpiece/

I was also really impressed with von Trier’s Melancholia. And How to Re-establish a Vodka Empire by my friend Dan Edelsteyn.

In literature, I enjoyed Giuseppe de Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard the most of all the books I read.

Art exhibitions: Nam June Paik, Miro, Pipilotti Rist, Magritte …

looking forward to another year of creativity and inspiration!

Cousins is a film maker as well as a critic (a very rare case of putting your money where your mouth is) and so I believe he has a special insight into the process of making films.

Cousins demonstrates conclusively that film is an art form and that, even as the mainstream industry goes through convulsions and crises, there is an enduring desire to make and to see cinema. As humans we desire to represent ourselves and to see ourselves on the screen.

As a film fanatic (and sometimes lecturer), I don’t know if I have learned a great deal new from the series, which has just concluded (I expect there must be a DVD release planned, and I am itching to buy it!) although Cousins has opened my eyes to some films I haven’t seen yet. What Cousins gave me over those 15 hours is a wonderful sense of the pleasure of film, celebrating the incredible marriage of technology and art that is cinema.

Links:

review by Sukhdev Sandhu

the series on channel 4, with and interview with Cousins

the BFI, home of film

Video artist Pipilotti Rist had a huge show in London’s Hayward gallery this season and it is fabulous. I had seen bits of her work but was not prepared for the sensorial overload of delight that was “eyeball massage” a show that definitely lives up to its name.

my eyeball being massaged by Pipilotti Rist's amazing show

I want to praise Rist for two principal things: she is the sole author of her work. In an era when so many artists, especially moving image artists, don’t take any technical control of the tools (cameras, editing etc.) Rist is fully hands on. She is in charge of her work, does much of the technical stuff and the result is a real singularity of vision that is complete and fulfilled. It is a heady, hallucinatory artistic space she offers us, one soaked in colour where the visceral realities of the body mingle with the natural world and the constructed environment into one strange and unsettling yet oddly – and paradoxically – comfortable whole.

The second thing I want to praise Rist for is her devotion to video art. Video is what she does, she is devoted to it and in her hands video is an ever expanding constantly enlightening creative medium. Her video is embedded in the floor, part of sculpture, immersive projection or tiny as a pinhead. Video art is often maligned and usually deservedly so (see my article http://gmc1ver.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/videoartmciver.pdf) but in Rist’s capable hands it is rich, thrilling and mature, a medium that creates wonder, delight, fright and the gamut of emotions. And it is utterly, unreservedly beautiful.

I was so astonished by Rist’s show that I will go and see it again before it closes, simply to soak myself in it and emerge inspired and refreshed by colour and light.

http://ticketing.southbankcentre.co.uk/rist/exhibition

Here’s a really good review of the show by Anneka French

http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/1836144

I’m rounding off 2011 with some thoughts about remarkable people or things that have added something positive to the world. Rather than dwelling, in these tough times, on the negative, I want to fulsomely praise some people here! And so to begin:

Czechs

For such a small country and population (about 10 million) the Czechs have managed to produce many great people, especially in the arts. 2011 gave me reason to praise two of them.

Jan Švankmajer

the animator and film maker, who at 78 is not only going strong but has just managed to release his best film to date, Surviving Life. This is a superb, darkly comic story of a man’s problems with the women in his life, and his troubled recourse to psychotherapy. It is also deeply moving and emotionally honest. And all told through thousands and thousands of animated paper cuts. Brilliant. Švankmajer’s body of work shows us the enduring vitality and potential within surrealism – fulfilling the early Surrealists hopes and aims for the movement, harnessing both the dynamism of politics and desire for change and psychology. Surrealism lives.

 Václav Havel

Photograph: Lubomir Kotek/AFP/Getty Images

Václav Havel the former Czech president, who died this year, was never really a politician. He was put into that position through his determined and dogged pursuit of human rights and artistic freedom in Communist era Czechosolvakia. A poet and playwright, Havel fought for art and the right of people to have art that is honest and true and life enhancing. He fought for intellectual freedom for writers and for ordinary people. Through this, his fight became bigger and wider and he became a figurehead not only for his own country, but for a movement that is still alive and well and gaining strength.

Havel cannot be blamed for the ravages of “free-market” ideology that invaded the former Eastern bloc after the fall of Communism, which sadly has been the thrust of few nasty obits that appeared recently. I know about that, because I was there. I was in Czechoslovakia in 1990 and again in the mid 90s several times, and in Russia. On thing I noticed, apart from people being very glad to energetically express themselves freely – in the street as well as in print and in art, was the number of “economic advisers” from US multinationals and universities that were present in the capitals, living life high on the hog, “advising” the new democracies how to take their economies out of communism (by privatising then selling everything cut price). And evangelical Christian groups intent on saving previously atheistic souls. Often these seemed to be hand in glove if not hand in hand. I know because I saw them congregating – in hotels I was staying in and restaurants there I ate. As I was “one of them” they made no secret of their aims, regaling me freely with their plans for total renovation of these benighted states. The evangelicals did not get very far, but the neocons did, which is why Russia is run by oligarchs and there are almost no Czechs in central Prague. But this was not Havel’s fault: he, like the rest of us, did not realise what the game was, and so like all of us, could be said to have sleepwalked into the kind of oligarchic dictatorship of extreme market capitalism that we have now.

Havel’s legacy as a champion of freedom of expression and freedom from tyranny, will endure, as will his commitment to nonviolent change.

Sometimes it feel this way – you’re not a young gun anymore, about to set the world on fire and being described as “dynamic young …” but at the same time you’re not the venerable elder statesman/woman of the craft (nor are you out to pasture). You’re just plugging away at it, sticking to it, not giving up. Your work is better than ever, but the spotlights have moved away. Jorg Colberg has a great article on this dilemma vis-a-vis photography, but it applies to all creatives:

What happened to the mid-career artist?

Jörg M. Colberg

http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/2011/10/what_happened_to_the_mid-career_artist/

this is a screenshot of something i saw for sale on a web page yesterday. I am not going to have a go at the company and say whose web page, because although I am outraged I do assume they commissioned this design and put it for sale in good faith. And who does not want to celebrate the “spirit of Tahrir”  – ?

But the reality is that Tahrir today is not a place of  freedom: it is the site of an ongoing revolutionary struggle by incredibly brave people – and incredibly scared people. Although all my support is for the protestors, who are fighting to be free of dictatorship and tyranny -  I am also sensitive to the many who are confused and scared by the events, who fear for their homes and livelihoods, who fear the future.  I even feel for the army recruits (it is a conscript army) who are carrying out the violence – how confused they too must be!

Revolutions take time. Revolutions are bloody nasty. With all the books I’ve read, I have no idea what it would be like to be in the middle of a revolution.

We who are not today in Egypt, we can’t help them. Not really. We can help spread the word, so what is happening gets out there.  We can try to be informed. But we can’t do much.

But at the VERY LEAST we can refrain from commodifying their revolution!