In keeping with a dreary fashion for scientific/academic nomenclature within the arts, Bilateria opened last thursday at Five Hundred Dollars on Vyner Street. A group show of up and coming (they are always either up and coming or emerging) artists the name is taken from Bilateria Triploblastic. Me neither. I wikipedia’d it. It’s a highly scientific denomination for organisms arising from three primary germ layered ova that possess bilateral symmetry – having a front and back and an upside and a downside. The press release simplifies this definition as “possessing both a mouth and an anus.”

So why not call it Mouth and Anus? Or call it digestion? Perhaps that wouldn’t provide the snobbery and pseudo scientific resonance of using latin/scientific terminology. Its not like Bilateria is in the common vernacular is it?

Who were they expecting? Virgil? Juvenal? Pliny the Elder? Or perhaps a group of biologists specialising in embryonic development of the digestive tract in vertebrae?

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Zach Walsh: Ares, God of War. (photo courtesy Vinny Moran)

Its summer, and its holiday times. Eagle eyed readers will have noticed my hiatus from these pages, for extended boozy jollies round these most British of isles. My latest excursion takes me to Brighton, or London-lite as I kept calling it to annoy the locals.

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