Ana Mendieta and Dayanita Singh: Hayward delivers double dose of inspiration

It's a bit like a homecoming, entering the Hayward Gallery, once you've got past all the 21st century detritus plastered everywhere outside. Inside the cool concrete caverns of London's first post-WWII purpose-built gallery for modern art, you're immediately given a sense that art is to be taken seriously - in fact that it is the only important thing inside these walls.

This was  where, in 1968 or so I was taken by my sister to see the Henri Cartier Bresson exhibition, which to me was like  mainlining a highly addictive drug - 35mm black-and-white photography.

I became and instant addict and started saving for my first 35mm camera - it was a poor-man's Leica, the Soviet Zorki 4, bought from the USSR state import agency Technical and Optical Equipment on New Oxford Street, as I remember.

This must have been one of the Hayward's first big exhibitions, though I can find no record of it. I can still remember going through room after room of beautifully mounted prints, running back sometimes to check something I'd seen, then staring out of the long windows of the upper gallery across the river towards Charing Cross. Soon after I went to another exhibition of Soviet  art, and fell in love with the replica of Tatlin's Tower built on the Hayward's roof, a bright red steel lattice spiral of a   tower of Babel soaring upwards. You really got a feeling of how inspirational such a tower might have been to the Russians had it ever been built.

For much of my life this was the number one location for exhibitions of modern and contemporary art in London - right up until the opening of Tate Modern in 1999. Then the Hayward - already way out of fashion in the age of tacky post-modernism - fell into some sort of doldrum. There were still some great exhibitions, but sometimes you had the feeling the organisers were having to apologise for the spaces they were showing in.

I don't know why but I have always loved the place, and entering it again last week was  happy to that great concret ramp still cuts across the huge ground-floor gallery, and chart there's still that strange arrangement of different levels.

In fact, the bare concrete floors and walls now have a patina, they have aged beautifully.

It was certainly the perfect gallery for the main expo, the Cuban artist Ana Mendieta. She's described as a feminist conceptualist, an artist who was aligned with all those movements of  the 1970s/80s/90s

avant grade, landscape art,  performance art, video art,  etc.

But what's so clear here (as surely with any other artist truly worth the subsidised entrance fee) is that Mendieta was a one-off, a complete original, who just happened to use and exploit all the means that were surrounding her as a young and beautiful art student from the "alien" culture of communist Cuba in the 1970s USA.

She is certainly one of the great users of the materials closest to hand - i.e. her own body, usually naked, or covered with grass or rocks or earth or her own blood or feathers.  The "feminist" tag is strongest in her earliest stuff - the series on  rape victims, where basically she recreates the crime scene, turning herself into the victim, and then invites male audiences to experience these horrific tableaux.

But after these, it seems it's more to do with her own Cuban roots - so much of this work is about ancient ritual, she goes back to Cuba, she re-interprets and re-enacts rituals from Mexican and even Maltese societies, she lies in her own grace, sets fire to her own image, she floats like a drowned bird on th edge of the ocean - maybe a bird that was trying to get back to its homeland, across the water.

She died so young, we have no clear idea where all this was leading - but what is now very clear is that she could be regarded as the spiritual godmother for the "selfie" generation of internet-obsessed art students.  Go on any of the arty blog sites such as tumblr and flickr and you'll find there are hundreds of people trying to turn their bodies into art, using paint, blood, felt-tip pens, ash, flour, razor blades….you name it.

Part of it is the adolescent thing - "look at me, I am hideous, fat, I am killing myself, I am slicing my arms, I am starving myself to death, I am a ninja, I am a whore, I am a monster, I am hermaphrodite.." etc. But what's so different between these often disturbing, often repulsive, sometimes worryingly attractive pieces of online imagery and what Ana Mendieta did back then?

Well, thing is, in almost every case, she did it first, and did it better. And if she didn't, then you can be sure Cindy Sherman did. Or maybe, Albrecht Durer, who must stand as the god-dad of the narcissistic selfie.

They hayward imperfect for this show. Its wall and floors and numerous alcoves and hidden spaces under steps and  ramps make for a totally unobtrusive background for work ranging form small framed photos and notebooks through to huge wall pieces, floor-mounted art, sculptures, slide-shows, film and video pieces.

Even better, you reach a certain point and are then directed to the upper gallery, where a very different artist has her own exhibition which is a strangely perfect complement to Mendieta's.

Dayanita Singh is a young and prolific photographer who seems to have set herself the task of documenting - almost archiving - the people and cities and professions and religion and industries and artists, and the dispossessed of her own country, the massive country, the sub-continet.

Many of the photos are displayed as small "museums" or archives,  using old wood, glass and brass hinged shelving and filing systems from some Raj-era library of imperial bureaucracy. She likes to create albums and books, and again her exhibition follows this path. There are very few, if any photos of the artist herself here - and if there are she's not telling.

But in a way it's another slanted take on the online world of near-infinite archiving you can enjoy with flickr and Google and dropbox and so on. But the virtual clouds just will not do when we can have what she shows here - great installations of images, treasure troves of beautiful photographic prints, folding leaves, books!

Fun, fear and loathing at London's first arts theme-park

Prelude: A beautiful bright crisp dry Tuesday morning. Bad time for the psyche, no work, fuck the esteem or the steam, I want simply to remember how to live properly.

The sun is there - an amazing enough thing in London at this date and time – and I have energy enough to cycle to the the river, and then along it, past the sad glass snake of Waterloo's now redundant Eurostar platforms and on towards the Festival Hall, the South Bank Centre - which looks more and more like a jolly old theme park, given all the retro 1951 Festival of Britain stuff of recent years.

The back door route to the South Bank Centre has some advantages over the recommended scenic route over Hungerford Bridge. The riverside entrances are now rather tacky with just too much cheery community arts stuff, graffiti, lights, flags, banners and so. As though writing big meaningful words and phrases in bright colours on the lovely dirty rough cast concrete walls of the QEH and Hayward, or spraying identikit "street art" all over the  same - or painting those chunky staircases bright yellow -  actually does any good.

It is so easy to tell "official" sanctioned, paid-for-by-the-Arts-Council street art from real street art. For a start, real stuff is not likely to be tastefully positioned on the largest external walls of one of London's major art galleries, bang next to Waterloo Bridge, in plain sight of hundreds of police cameras. And it is always a bit neater, a bit better finished. To be harsh, it is fake, it might as well be in some art-world Disneyland.

And then there are all those weird excresences on the buildings - that nautical thing on the QEH, for example - which almost disguise the brutal beauty of the original buildings - which I guess was one the aims anyway.

It's all ephemeral, and the sooner it's all gone the better - I mean, they do try, but sometimes too hard I think. Whereas they didn't have to try at all to get the crazy skatepark underneath the QE Hall, it just grew there like fungus, but now - ironically - it is to be swept away.

Even worse right now are the mock-Germanic Christmas market booths along the riverside railings. At least yesterday they had enough sense of the ridiculous to play Bob Dylan's croaky versions of the old  yuletide songs.

But - but - a massive but - underneath this increasingly tacky surface,  the Southbank Centre is still pure gold, a wonderful, priceless place. The Festival Hall is still at the heart of the place, and when - as I was suing - you enter it by the side entrance you get a beautiful sense of the qualities of this strange building.

I was in fact aiming for the Hayward Gallery - but as it's there near the bike racks and so inviting I enter the Festival Hall itself by the ground-level side entrance.

First I find a loo - a rare enough event in central London - a free, clean, empty loo - and then, on the way out, I pass a full-length wall mirror and realise that across the floor in front of me several very beautiful young people are practising what look like very slow break-dance moves.

Across this beautiful polished parquet floor, and through a window past the cloakroom I see schoolgirls playing on a range of Balinese gamelan instruments. A small sign points down a few steps to a lower level still - the "Strength & Vulnerability Bunker".

Three rooms of art by inmates of HM Prisons and Young Offender institutions - some of it funny, frightening, frightened, sad, cheeky, brilliant, clever, stupid. The exhibition is curated by the rapper Speech Debelle, and its only on til the end of November - and I would never of seen it had I not wandered in by the side entrance.

Upstairs, there's a there's the 2013 World Press Photo exhibition, containing some of the most gruesome and stomach churning images I've seen for years - out of Palestine, out of Syria, out of India and Pakistan and Afghanistan.

You look at these images of suffering - a man, apparently someone who paid informers, is having his bare feet whipped by a member of the Free Syrian Army in Aleppo, as two others hold him down. A boy of about ten is being beaten on the hands by his teacher in a religious school in Afghanistan. Four freshly-slaughtered children lie in a makeshift morgue, their faces bloodied and burned by Israeli missile attack.

The hardest images are at the back of the exhibition, and as you go round you almost feel like warning others of what they are about to look at.

And then you make a quick shift across the next level, past the expansive dance-floor beneath the main hall, past the bars and into the gift shop where you can buy charming Christmas presents.

The people who run the SBC really need all the congratulation  available for the way they've kept true the spirit of the RFH - it  does truly seem to be an all-day arts centre for everyone of any age and inclination.

Picking up some of the copious printed material on the way pout (how can they afford to produce such lovely monthly programmes and brochures and give them away to all?) - I find one is called  "Help us make it happen - the Southbank Centre's New Festival Wing.

"More arts for more people" is the rallying cry, and as you read the plans , step by step, you just think well, this is all very laudable. But you senesce there's going to be a catch.  The new ideas - the "Glass Box" rehearsal space on top of the Purcell Rooms and Hayward - looks distinctly uncomfortable. It is exactly that in the drawing - a nice piece of rather bland 21st Century design sitting atop the craggy ramparts of the older art-fortress.

Then there's going to be Arts Education Studios, a Youth Village., a Children's House, a History House, a Word Space - and then of course the  "World-Food cafés" which are supposed to pay for all this. Nosing around the RFH yesterday I was amazed to see how many school kids and students were taking part in so many activities all over the building. You cannot but welcome the idea of more space for this sort of thing - but does it all have to be concentrated here? And do those cafés really have to take the space currently occupied by SBC's one and only true bit of organically grown community activity, the skate park?

Just how much food and drink do people need in order to get active in the arts?

Hey, Jude! Don't make us sad...

What a strange weekend in London. So many contrasts - beautiful warm sunshine on Saturday, icy wind from the east and overall cloud on Sunday. So many contrasts, and so many confrontations, as always in this curious patch of Thames-side mud. Huge dirty city-settlement, big rats abound. Little rats come out to play and are splattered, all over the streets.

We - us, me and you, the gutter-rats of this joke-metropolis – we call on some other, higher power (maybe who, or maybe what, the world president himself, Fela Kuti? Is he really dead? Bob Dylan? Yes, the old bastard really does need to come down and do some work at the grass roots.)

 But probably the other Big Bob would be more likely to act in defence of these beautiful nether parts of a once hated building. It was his music, along with that of Big Youth and Prince Far-I, blasting out of a sound system, that attracted me and hundreds of others to this unnatural, perfect amphitheatre beneath the South Bank Centre.

So, one of the Bobs, please tell Jude Kelly that it's not a good idea to turn the undercroft of the Queen Elizabeth Hall (part of the South Bank Centre, which also includes Festival Hall, Hayward Gallery, BFI etc) into more coffee shops and restaurants.

Thank Bob that there's a really tough group of campaigners fighting to save this space for the people who appropriated and cultivated it, in the best traditions of the English squatting movement. Long Live Southbank are taking the great, good, publicly funded arts organisation to the courts - it's a bitter and really very sad battle, but i support them.

This whole area has played a huge part in the lives of millions of people, not just Londoners, and in any other circumstances I would be shouting at anyone trying to attack Jude Kelly and the organisation she heads. But this time,  I just can't believe  what is happening. There's no plainer example of a direct clash between the two definitions of culture - popular versus elite or corporate.

Skateboarding doens't appeal to me at all - when my son was hooked onto it, all I did was worry about the fractures. But the way they've transformed this space is something quite rare, at least in our proft and marketing-driven culture. Its more in the spirit of the Watts towers.  Yes, it is on this level -  a very fine example of a rare species - a real cultural space that has grown entirely out of the work of an almost invisible community. 20 years back this was an ignored space beneath a building that was loathed by architectural critics, neglected by its owners, and unnoticed or even feared by most of the public walking past.

Now it is the sort of spiritual home of the UK skater community, one of many loved places for this worldwide subculture.

But, largely because of its strategic position, across the Thames from  Parliament, the Savoy etc, on the site of the 1950s Festival of Britain, they that run this world are always wanting to prettify this prime plot of north Lambeth. Luckily they usually fail to agree on a plan, or they run out of money. It almost seems that this weird amalgam of 1950s optimism and 1960s concrete brutalism has a last come into its own and won some place in the affection of the arts-spending segment of the tourist population.

So, they want to change it all again.

Jude Kelly, we've never until now heard anything bad said about you. You are a modern-day artsworld Jeanne D'Arc! You fought and fought for good theatre for the people of Yorkshire, good everything for the people of south London and all London and all the arts-loving world, you deserve your OBE, etc.

The Southbank Centre works so hard, it is almost painful to criticise an organisation that has so enriched lives - well, certainly my life, what with all those Robert Wyatt and Lee Scratch Perry curated Meltdowns, etc, ecc.

My god, I was 16 when the Hayward Gallery had an exhibition of Henry Cartier Bresson photos - this chnaged me and my life.

But - that article in the Evening Standard,  7 June 2013? You say these skateboarders should  what?
Should "budge up"?

Into some space under Hungerford Bridge? Well, nothing against this Bridge, but - please excuse me - wouldn't it be more in keeping with rules of civility, etc, to build the new education and children's centres in this space "under Hungerford bridge"? After all, these kids will not remember a dearly-loved space 200m to the East.

Forget all my words, just think - if some great and revered artist, Leonardo say, or Banksy, had set up in the undercroft and painted these frescoes and a shrine had developed - would you butcher it in this way?

If the need to raise tons of money is really, really so great, why not lease out one of your concert halls to Tesco or Asda? There's not a decent supermarket within 10 minutes walk of this ghastly cultural desert!

Remember too that most of the biggest recent tourist attractions in this venal city on the Thames' mudbanks emerged from conflict and appropriation - old Covent Garden market, saved by campaigning hippies in the early 1970s. Camden Market, created by hippies in the 1960s, saved by fashion and music and art in the 1980s, now almost completely appropriated by commerce which may or may not have roots in those earlier, idealistic days. Punk rock, created by ex-hippie-capitalism in the 1970s, folded on on itself.  Virgin Airways!

Steady on, I am now arguing against myself. As usual.

 And then I look at Brick Lane!  I look at Broadway Market. I look at Brixton Market. I look at Portobello Market. I look at the sponsorship of almost everything we used to regard as anti-capitalist, by capitalists!

Jude, I understand this dilemma.

It is horrible.

But please, whatever happens to that QE Hall undercroft, don't allow Costa Coffee to have a branch there. Please!