Archive for Enthusiasms

Nowadays, the Polish-British artist and illustrator Andrzej Krauze is well known across Europe for his drawings in the Guardian (London), Rzeczpospolita (Warsaw), Courrier International (Paris), Internazionale (Rome), and many other publications. None of this could necessarily be foreseen when he came to London in the early eighties, a time when he was largely known for drawings made in the service of the cultural opposition in Poland. I got to know him shortly after his arrival… An article prompted by the approach of a new exhibition entitled ‘A Serious Game’: 100 Drawings by Andrzej Krauze, 19 November 2007-15 February 2008, The Gallery, University College for the Creative Arts, Ashley Road, Epsom KT18 5BE.

On the opening of Zaha Hadid’s Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio. Published as ‘Look what I built’, the Guardian (G2), 2 July 2003, pp. 12-13.

In 1995, the Open Spaces Society announced that the first new common to be established in England during the twentieth century was being set up in the Norfolk village of Rushall. I went to have a look. First published in the Guardian, 2 September 1995.

In the summer of 1995, I was irritated by a dismissal of the UN made by Ann Applebaum in the Daily Telegraph. Against this tendency to see the UN only as a corrupt and incompetent bureaucracy, I wrote this article about the United Nations Association, a voluntary organisation and some of its elderly advocates. Published in the Guardian, 1 July 1995

The Hackney Empire is now splendidly refurbished, but in the early nineties, when the place was ‘managed’ by the heroically unorthodox Roland Muldoon, you could glimpse the sky through holes in the roof. It was encounters like this that persuaded me to give up on my accidental life as a ‘consultant’ to arts and voluntary organisations. Consultants may know the cost of roofs but they rarely see the sky at all. Thank you, Roland. . . Published in the Guardian, 27 February 1993.