Guggi takes Manhattan but avoids Trump in his Tower
‘Every child is an artist,” Picasso once said. “The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” Well, I’ve always thought that Guggi — with his long hair and his long school coat — looks like a big kid, don’t you think?
He unveiled his latest exhibition last Friday night in New York. His third exhibition no less in the Big Apple. Well, I suppose if he can make it there he can make it anywhere. The great and the good of the city were expected at the Yoshii Gallery on Madison Avenue for the Irish artist’s latest opus entitled This Is Not a Hotel.
I was going to jet over for the opening night but then your man got elected and I decided to go for a pint in the local instead. I asked Guggi if he was going to use his time in Manhattan productively and visit the Presidentelect in his Tower on Fifth Avenue.
“He is not on my Christmas card list, let’s just say,” he replied on the phone.
The exhibition’s title was inspired by what Guggi’s late father Robert used to say to him at the dinner table at home on North Dublin’s Cedarwood Road.
“I would put too much butter on the bread at tea time and he would give me a clip around the ear and say ‘This is not a hotel!’”
“So it was one of my dad’s old phrases,” Guggi told me, adding that Jim Sheridan wrote the foreword to the booklet for the exhibition.
Guggi added that New York holds a special place in his maverick heart.
“I have felt like it was a second home for me ever since I played there for the first time with the Virgin Prunes in 1982.
“We played the Danceteria and I heard — though I didn’t see him with my own eyes — a rumour that JeanMichel Basquiat was in the audience that night,” Guggi says referring to the legendary artist who died before his time in 1988.
There was a rumour that half of Dublin’s more exalted characters were expected to pitch up at the Yoshii Gallery last Friday.
I’d tell you now but Guggi would probably give me a clip around the ear like his da used to give him.
You’ll have to wait until next week’s column.