The next museum my Modern Art in London module went to see was the Tate Britain. (AKA: the first museum I found on time without getting lost. That might be entirely due to the fact that I met up with Maggie and Kathinka, a girl from Norway, beforehand at the tube station by campus and just followed their lead. But hey, I made it.)
The professor, Kate was a middle-aged woman with her hair perpetually in an off-centered bun on top of her head and tomboyish clothes. She ran in slightly late and handed around sheets with different artists and works we were to look for before setting us loose.
The first room we entered had more traditional oil paintings, closer to impressionism than modernism. Each room after the first became more and more abstract. The next few rooms contained minimalist sculptures, with a few paintings on the wall ranging from white paint on a piece of wood with a circle cut out to sharply defined, modern portraits.
I walked up to a Barbara Hepworth sculpture and paused, trying to figure out what it was.
Nothing. Maybe a different angle would help. I shifted to the side.
Even more nothing.
When I was little I went through an obsession with marbles. My mom had this frosted glass cutting board that had a rough texture on the top and I used to roll my marbles across it and enjoy the jittery noise they made.
That was all I saw when I looked at this sculpture: marbles on a cutting board.
This was one of those rooms where having an art friend does you wonders. Maggie walked up, gasping her love for the beautiful, simplistic elegance and majesty of the thing, so I asked her to make it brilliant for me too. She paused, took a deep breath and unleashed a string of utter genius that went something like this:
“So modern art is about feelings and emotion, not so much about representing the physical world. When I look at this I feel sad for the isolated round piece. It’s separated from the pair and completely different. And look at the pair - the larger piece is standing over the shorter one, taking on a masculine, protective role to the weaker, feminine one. He seems suspicious of the round piece. It’s like the round wants desperately to be a part and belong but it can’t. It’s amazing!”
That certainly was amazing, and quite a bit more profound than my marbles on a cutting board explanation. I glued myself to her for the rest of the gallery.
A few rooms later we came to another piece that took her breath away. It was a sort of giant, curved mirror that made everything look upside down until you got really close and the world righted itself. It was really cool but all I kept thinking of was that scene in Zoolander when he looks in a spoon and sees his reflection upside down and thinks, “I am really, really, ridiculously good looking.”
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| Maggie, Me, Eliza (Germany), Kathinka |
I’m sure Maggie said something awesome but all I remember is a group of us being fascinated and playing with it for the next 20 minutes, staring really close until your eyes felt like they would pop out of your head, then looking back at the strange line painting in the other room because the effect made the lines move like crazy. Epic church music was booming from a small side room where an art video was on a loop, which made the Zoolander mirror even more fun.
The last artist we were supposed to see was Mike Nelson, a man who had an installation piece titled The Coral Reef in a series of small rooms across the hall. We entered the first room a little apprehensively, not knowing what to expect from installation art like this. It was small and plain, if not a little foreboding. A ripped couch stood against the wall and that was about it. We pushed through the next door and it felt like we had stepped into the secret headquarters for Al Qaeda. Signs in Arabic were on the wall, the lights were failing and the furniture was broken or old. In the Tate’s video on the piece, Nelson talks about how each room is supposed to represent a different belief system. I didn’t get that at all though because I stopped looking around after the first room and started trying to find the exit. The rooms were all so small it felt like you were just about to walk in on whoever lived in the space and, given the scary décor, they would probably not be happy to see you.
As we were speed walking through, there were loud bangs from further in the installation maze. A man passed us going the other way, making us jump. Finally we pushed through a door and found ourselves back in the first room. Breathing a sigh of relief, we shoved on through the door to the hallway - which wasn’t a door to the hallway after all. Instead we found ourselves in a large behind-the-scenes kind of room filled with bits of wood and other things that might be used to help set up art exhibitions.
A man on the side of the room spun around and looked at us as the door we had just come through swung heavily against its frame with loud bang that made us scream (with dignity) like little girls. Disoriented, we saw a door to the left and shoved it open, finally finding ourselves back in the original hallway.
Consensus: I don’t really like installation art. I rather like the ability to walk away from a piece when I want to. It was interesting in retrospect I guess.
Occupy London
Early in the next week, Felicia and I compared our list of to-see’s and picked one from each. Then, with packed PB and J sandwiches we started the familiar Tube journey to Trafalgar Square, coming up to the street to find ourselves on the outskirts of a huge crowd of people lazily moving past toward the Square. Police were milling around the sides and several police lines blocked off major streets leading toward Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament. The signs the protesters were carrying told us it was an Occupy London protest.
We slid into the middle of the crowd, marching with them for two blocks or so (we’re college students - we figured we have to protest at least once) before drifting out of the flow and down the street toward the Houses of Parliament. Off one of the side streets was my (nerdy) to-see: the street by Scotland Yard. It was used as the visitor’s entrance to the Ministry of Magic in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and then again in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part one when Harry, Ron and Hermione snuck into the Ministry.
In other words, we so stood above the Ministry of Magic.
We tried to recreate the scene where Ron looks around the corner in the seventh movie about twelve thousand times, much to the amusement of the construction workers, but we couldn’t quite capture it.
Another Harry Potter filming location: check.After a pleasant walk through the Charing Cross area to another Tube station we alighted across the river by the Millennium Bridge (another Harry Potter filming location!) near Felicia’s to-see: the Tate Modern. This is one of my favorite bridges in London. The Tate Modern is on one side and St. Paul’s Cathedral is on the other and it sways slightly. In fact, when it opened in June 2012, it moved so much that it was closed two days later for improvements. The architect got a little cross, saying that there was nothing wrong with his bridge - the problem was the way that Londoners walk.
We entered a huge, open concrete room on the bottom of the Tate and found ourselves standing on a thin metal bridge in the middle of the space. Below on one side was a large filmstrip screen standing alone in the dark. There was a strange but mesmerizing film projected on it and a few people seated below the bridge.
The next floor we stopped on had an exhibition of art that had to do with dreams. They ranged from sharply defined paintings to sculptures that took familiar objects and made them strange to abstract pieces that were little more than blotches of color. We continued up to a photo exhibition that I loved. There was one room where the walls were covered in photos from Eastern Europe. Each photo had a pop of red in it to signify the influence of the Soviet Union. Some of the photos were beautiful, others shockingly ugly but they were all amazing in their clear focus and sharp contrast. I enjoy art exhibitions but photographs like these remind me why I want to be a photographer.
We found the un-themed modern art exhibition on the next floor. One large space had a sheer, red staircase ascending from the middle of the room. The bottom step was above my head, so even if it wasn’t too flimsy to climb I wouldn’t have been able to reach it.
Another room, probably the strangest yet, had one piece where the artist had painted a white octagon on the off-white wall. (Difficult to see and even more difficult to understand. I’m pretty sure I made something like that in second grade.)
There was a room with a large pile of Ai Wei Wei's sunflower seeds. It was small in comparison with the exhibition from a few months before where the floor of a huge room had been covered in several inches of the hand made porcelain seeds, but the concept was still clear.
Other Photos
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| Epic Bunny in the entryway at Tate Britain. |
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| Lucian Freud paintings that I'm not a huge fan of. |
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| My favorite photographer at the Occupy London march. |
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| You can't go to London and not take a photo in one of the pee-scented phone booths. |
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| Trafalgar Square |
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| Hungerford Bridge |
Felicia and I stopped at Starbucks before the Tate Modern where the topic of profiles came up. Oddly enough, neither of us like our profiles, so we took photos to compare. Next odd photo test: what-do-we-look-like-with-our-eyes-closed.
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| St. Paul's Cathedral |
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| The Globe Theatre |
RLO - Rollie Cigarettes
I think the last person I saw roll a cigarette pre-London was in a movie. Then I went to the UK and it seems the whole college age demographic that smokes rolls their own cigarettes. I rolled one for my flatmate and it was rather fun to make. The tobacco smells like dried fruit before it’s burned.
Joe got really into rolling cigarettes not long after the semester started, leaving his packs of rizzlers (the paper), sleeves of filters and packets of tobacco everywhere in the kitchen. He always rolled one end too thick though so it burned too fast. The filters were fun to fiddle with when we were sitting at the kitchen table.
London-isms
Butty - a sandwich
Squash - non-alcoholic concentrated syrup used to make juice. i.e. orange squash would be a drink.
Thingy - used when you can’t think of a word or name (i.e. instead of “what’s-her-name said…” some people will say “Thingy said…”)
Miffed - annoyed
Muck about - to mess around or pass the time rather idly (i.e. “I’m just going to muck about Oxford St. today.”)
Bin liner - trash bag
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