Why Not Bring Your Own Cup?

I love coffee. Not instant though. That was one of things that took a while to get used to when I moved to the UK. You’d go over to someone’s house; they’d offer you a coffee and get the jar out of the cupboard and the teaspoon out of the drawer. Now, in New York, out comes the grinder and then into the coffee pot. There is a distinct difference between American coffee and British coffee, although Italian coffee tops the list for me.

Being the Editor of Aesthetica Magazine, means that from time to time, I get to sample things, like earlier this year the Nissan Cube (I love that car), and so I was contacted to see if I’d sample the KeepCup. There’s not too much to this product, basically, it’s a plastic cup that you carry around to get your take-away coffee. It’s solid, in the respect that it won’t spill and it has a stopper to make sure that coffee doesn’t dribble out into your bag.

I decided to test this out at Costa, and it worked a treat. But then, I started thinking about all the cups of coffee I’ve had in my life, and how many times I’d thrown away a paper cup. I started to get dizzy with disgust. It must be hundreds and maybe even thousands! I am up-to-speed with recycling, and keeping my impact on the planet to a minimum. I cycle often, have an allotment for growing some of my own veggies and I compost, so I’d say that I’m pretty on the ball, but when I started thinking about how many paper cups I use, and then I started thinking about how many people in a city, a country – the world, well it seems completely pointless, don’t you think? A waste of resources, and a greater impact with the production of one paper cup, so it’s not only about the cups making their way to the landfill (I know paper is biodegradable, but the cups are sprayed with polyethylene, which renders them both non-biodegradable and most often, un-recyclable), but really, it’s about the energy and effort that goes into producing one paper cup, just to be thrown away, and discarded after only one use.

We will be called the disposable age. That makes me sad – how do you feel about that? I began thinking about how people are very much up to speed with taking their own bags to the supermarket, so why not take your own cup? Makes sense.

The KeepCup does what it says, it’s a durable, reusable cup, and I know that Starbucks, et. al offer their own versions, but I think there’s a bigger picture here. It’s about sustainable living, and respecting our environment. Just what would the impact be on our planet if we all used our own cups? Golly.

New Issue: August/September Out Today

August/September Issue- Extract from the Editor's Note

When we look back in fifty years, what do you think we’ll remember about these times? Technology is moving quickly; it’s hard to keep up. My new phone isn’t even that new anymore. As a society, we’ve changed – we can access anything we want, create our own user-generated content, and expose ourselves to the world on blogs. There has been a shift in power and we are more in control of our experiences, but this begs the question, what legacy will this leave?

This issue examines the current state of play, and offers answers to this resonating question. In art, we look at the interplay between digital technologies, performance, and installation with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer in his exhibition, Recorders, which opens this September. Stuart Brisley is one of performance art’s instigators; with a prolific career spanning five decades, we review his seminal works from the 1970s. The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today is a new exhibition that surveys over 100 works and illustrates how our definitions of sculpture have been altered by the photograph. Finally, a look at multiplicity and the defiance of categorisation with photographer, Jannica Honey.

In film, Javier Fuentes-León’s Sundance winning film, Undertow, reaches our screens. Abandon Normal Devices: Festival of New Cinema and Digital Culture opens in October, examining the intersection between art and cinema. In music, Canada’s Born Ruffians are back with their new album, while we chat with Rob Da Bank about the boutique festival experience. Writer, Maile Chapman, discusses her debut, Your Presence is Required at Suvanto, and Wesley Stace otherwise known as John Wesley Harding chats about his new book, Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer. Finally, a look at the crossover between immersive theatre and live action gaming in The Games of Nonchalance.

In this issue, we’re exploring several important topics of the day, as well as bringing you previews and reviews of this season’s latest exhibitions and releases. Enjoy.

Cherie Federico, Editor

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Review: Nothing is Forever - South London Gallery

Review by Elisa Caldarola

Nothing is Forever celebrates the renewal of South London Gallery, based in a late 19th century building in Southwark. It is not an exhibition of works in a gallery, but of works on the gallery. The works are mostly directly painted on the walls of the gallery itself and are not “forever”, because they will be painted over at the end of the show. The works are on the gallery also in a more abstract sense, because they celebrate the spaces of the building.

South London Gallery is at the same time an intimate and a public space: it is a big building, but not bigger than many of the London town mansions. The Outset Artists’ Flat on the second floor –where artists in residence will be hosted from October 2010 – highlights the house-like character of the gallery (on this occasion the flat is open to the public). On a similar note, one of the gallery’s café rooms has a single long rectangular table with 14 seats around it. It looks like the place where a typical Victorian family would have dined. The café is embellished by Paul Morrison’s work Asplenium (2010), a wall-paint in gold foil of beautiful botanical motifs in dialogue with the outside garden.



A more traditional exhibition space is to be found in the large downstairs room with various works focussed on language by acclaimed American conceptual artists Robert Barry and Lawrence Weiner and British artists Fiona Banner and Mark Tichtner. Barry’s work is the landmark Telepathic Piece (1969-2010: it was originally conceived for an exhibition in San Paolo, but was never shown or printed out in the exhibition catalogue), referring to a series of possible objects of telepathic transmission: desires, volitions, feelings, emotions, concerns. It sounds like a semi-ironic user’s manual for the enjoyment of the exhibition space. Tichtner’s is a slogan painted over a colourful pattern borrowed from the Victorian decoration of the gallery’s floor. The slogan itself is the result of a twofold borrowing, from the words of 19th century inventor Nikola Tesla (‘Let the future tell the truth’) and the World Social Forum (‘Another world is possible’): a cross-fertilization much in the spirit of the gallery’s values. In the Clore Studio – a space to be dedicated to participatory activities – Lily van der Strokker, Dan Perjovschi and David Shrigley further address political themes, with works full of wit and a fresh graphic.



On the stairs to the upper floors Gary Woodley has traced a black line playfully twisting around the steps, the walls and the ceiling (Impingement No. 56, 2010). Invited to follow it, I felt like I was chasing a cat playing with a ball of thread. With a simple move the work succeeds in re-defining a space that is often left aside by the logic of exhibitions. The same applies to the bathroom in the Artists’ Flat, where there is a comic about the Paris Commune painted on the wall, A Brief and Idealistic Account of The Paris Commune of 1871 (Sam Dargan, 2010). It is definitely a more effective reminder of our relatively recent political history than a book on a shelf by the WC. Again, the very public and the very private merge with originality and wit. In a sort of game of displacement, a work concerned with plumbing and body waste is placed on the chimney breast of the apartment’s front room (Sam Porritt, Me & You Then Everyone Else, 2010). This is clearly a work about the building, since it represents what happens deep inside it, but also the binomial public/private finds here one more way of expression, as it can be deduced from the title. Moreover, the work’s representational content is linked to the exhibition’s motto: ‘nothing is forever’.



Milly Thompson has a line-drawing of a dinner party (The Dinner Party; left-field aspirational, 2010) inspired by Woody Allen’s movie Interiors (1978). There are six people sitting around a table, looking quite uncomfortable. Allen’s movie is indebted to Bergman and Antonioni for its pitiless depiction of human relationships and I guess Thompson is trying to make a similar point. One feels more at ease in other rooms, where human presence is assumed but not displayed. For example, in the first floor rooms where Ernst Caramelle has painted his intersecting colourful rectangles on the walls and around the fireplaces (Untitled, 2010). This is a work that goes beyond the canons of painting and decoration, merging traditional elements of abstract pictorial art with the architecture of the room itself, to an immersive effect.

Another smart idea for exalting the spaces of a public art gallery with a human size. The exhibition continues until 25 September. www.southlondongallery.org