I was able to see tons of museums
and exhibitions while traveling around London, and since London has such a wide
scope of great museums I was never bored. I can’t wait to move back to London
someday and visit all of the ones I missed.
Victoria and Albert
Museum: Postmodernism exhibit
The Postmodernism exhibit left me with mixed feelings. A
majority of the pieces, like the 80’s music video costumes and architectural
models, were pretty far outside of my interest group. I did enjoy the works of
some of the artists further into the exhibit though.
Cindy Sherman, a photographer who shoots herself in mock movie-stills, had several pieces in the exhibit. Her photos are strange and layered and completely staged but
still beautiful. I definitely prefer street photographers and more
natural photographs, but I like her pieces nonetheless. Ai Weiwei, a controversial Chinese
artist, also had a piece in the exhibit. It was a Ming vase that
he had painted Coca-Cola on in bright red paint. The piece was shocking, but,
oddly enough, the value of the vase went up after Weiwei took a paintbrush to
it. That definitely calls into question the nature of value.
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| We weren't supposed to take photos, so here is a poor-quality photo of the vase taken illegally with my phone. |
Another piece I liked was a large photograph of a billboard that
Jenny Holzer had rented in Times Square. On the billboard she had printed the
words “Protect me from What I Want.” The temporary nature of the work itself so
fit the message that the piece was made even more powerful, as if her wants
were as temporary as billboards and as harmful as advertising. It's also such a non-traditional medium for art that it was kind of cool just for that.
Tate Modern: Gerhard
Richter Exhibit
When our Modern Art in London professor said we were going
to see the Gerhard Richter exhibition at the Tate Modern, Maggie got really
excited while I got out my phone and pulled up Google. What I gathered from
Maggie and my quick search was that Richter is an artist who, among other
things, paints on top of photographs.
It sounded dumb.
On the tube ride to the Tate the next week, Maggie told me a
little bit more about him and assured me that paintings on pictures aren’t as
stupid as they sound. Still, I was a little skeptical as I purchased my $15
pound ticket to the exhibition and stepped onto the escalator.
When I walked up to the first painting though, I realized
the power of combining two different mediums of art and, by the same token,
combining the very different ways that we look at those two mediums. The first
painting I walked up to was of planes in World War II dropping bombs. You can
see nearly 100 bombs falling from the planes in the picture.
Usually, while looking at a photograph, one can distance
oneself from harsh images by remembering that whatever is happening in them
happened in the past. With paintings, one can distance oneself by recognizing
that whatever appears to be on the canvas is just strokes of paint. I started
to distance myself while looking at the painting/picture of the bombs by
viewing it as a painting only and looking at each bomb as the single stroke of paint
that it was. Then I remembered it wasn't just a painting and the bombs aren't just paint,
because the paint is covering up an actual photograph; meaning that those 100
or so bombs I was looking at had actually fallen and exploded. The photograph part of the work made it real and the paint
somehow made it current. I ended up feeling more from this fusion of art
than if it had been a photo or a painting exclusively.
Another good example of this effect was a room of
picture-paintings of young members of the Baader-Meinhof Group (or Red Army Faction,
RAF) that had been killed. The paint blurred the images of their dead bodies
enough that it wasn’t too terrible to view. At the same time the paint almost
made it worse because enough was visible through the blurred paint to be able to
imagine an image that was probably far worse than what was actually there.
Another way that the photo-paint pieces worked strangely
well together is how we (or at least I) perceive the value of each. Photos to
me are cheap. They’re easy to produce, especially now with digital photography.
You can take 100 in a minute and then print them all for about 10 dollars.
While it can be hard to get a lasting or a good photograph, as far as art
mediums go this is a fairly cheap, easy one. You just point and click. Paintings however (and maybe this is
because I’ve only ever painted in watercolor as a five-year-old) seem like much
more of a task. The supplies are expensive and constantly need to be
renewed, there is definitely a huge element of skill, and the time required
can be ridiculous. Perhaps it is this huge contrast that made a few of
Richter’s painting/pictures so strange to me.
Take for example the piece where he painted on travel pamphlet photographs. If photos, in my mind, are already relatively cheap, then pamphlet
photos are the cheapest. They’re all stock photos that can be purchased for
next to nothing and then used, often incorrectly, ad nauseum. Add a layer of paint and it brings out
the beauty in these photos that has been lost from overuse.
(Side story related to stock photos and stock footage: I was
watching an episode of Baggage Battles where they went to Glasgow, and
throughout the entire opening montage they had shots of Edinburgh. Having been
to both, it is impossible to mistake one for the other since they are both so distinct, so as they
were showing stock shots of Edinburgh castle and the Royal Mile, they were
talking about the booming music and cultural life in Glasgow. Since they were there in Glasgow anyway, why didn’t they shoot generic, B-role
footage of iconic Glasgow themselves so they wouldn’t have to be embarrassed
now?)
The paintings moved more into more abstract, modern art the
further into the rooms we walked. In one of the last rooms there were some pretty,
vivid paintings done on materials that are less commonly used. One was oil paint on aluminum, which gave the piece a cool, luminescent quality. Some of the others were on boards or more traditional materials but had
shockingly bright combinations of color. My favorite was a mix of turquoise and orange. I began to understand more that modern, abstract art is often about the
feelings it evokes and the simplicity of enjoying the colors and paint than
about what it actually depicts.
British Museum
Felicia and I decided to visit the British museum one lazy
day in London to pay homage to the Rosetta Stone, the Elgin Marbles and the other
treasures displayed there. Since I was helping to navigate, we got a little
lost trying to find it, but we made it eventually.
The streets surrounding the columned, multi-building museum had a charming mix of coffee shops, small stores and row houses.
After threading our way through the main gate and past school groups, we found
ourselves looking at the façade of another more modern building inside the main
building with a glass ceiling taking the place of the sky outside. That was the reading room, and the many branches of the exhibit surrounded it on several floors. |
| Rosetta Stone |
In one of the first rooms on the ground floor was a large case with a jagged
stone that had several different scripts on it. The rows of writing were so
neat that they looked as if they had been printed by a computer in the 21st
century rather than chiseled by hand in 196 BC.
My favorite section was the room housing the Elgin
Marbles, or the “stolen” statues and friezes from the Parthenon and other
buildings on the Acropolis.
Background: The Parthenon was largely intact until 1687 when it
was used as a large powder keg and was (of course) accidentally blown up. Most of the statues on it fell and were
massively damaged. A British man, Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of
Elgin, removed the marbles in the early 1800s, including the front statues and
other sculpted pieces from the buildings on the Acropolis, with permission from
the Ottoman authorities who were in power at the time. They were eventually placed in the British Museum. Greece now wants them back and accuses Bruce of looting their
treasures, even though his act and the following restorative measures probably
saved them since the pollution in Athens would have significantly worn the
pieces down.
The marbles, despite being damaged, were beautifully
crafted, especially the ones that fit into the triangular east and west
pediment on the Parthenon. The scene depicted Athena being born from Zeus’
head, and was incredibly detailed. Even the backs of the statues, which would have been intended to be out of sight forever, were completely sculpted and polished. Being able to see the pieces up close after having studied them in several classes at Mizzou was amazing.
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| The back of one of the statues. |
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| The Greek Temple. |
The British museum is one of those museums that is so full
of amazing, old things that you could literally spend months in it without
adequately appreciating everything inside. Thus, after the marbles, we moved on to find the Sutton Hoo section and began skimming the cases and statues that we passed. Felicia had been born near Sutton Hoo when her dad was stationed in England with the Air force, and she was thus interested in the history. On our way we stopped to appreciate a Roman temple that had been picked up and transported stone by stone to London, then a statue of a happy
hellhound and a few Egyptian hieroglyphics. We
passed through a room that had cases filled with old jewelry, around a hallway
with Jade figurines and stones, and through many more exhibits before reaching the old English history.
Finally we came to a room with photos of earthen mounds in
the English countryside. Of course that was also the room that had nothing but
empty cases since everything had been removed for restoration. We made up for missing the pieces in the exhibit by visiting the area later in the semester (blog post to come).
Hayward Gallery -
Pipilotti Rist and George Condo
Like most modern art, and most installation art in
particular, this exhibition left me with mixed feelings. Rist had the
downstairs area of the space and had created installation pieces, while Condo’s
work, mainly paintings, was upstairs.
Something Maggie said leaving the exhibition summed up my
feelings pretty well:
“I could have gone my entire life without seeing another
woman’s period blood and been just fine.”
Yes, you read that correctly.
In a room filled
with oddly shaped, hand stitched pillows were three huge screens showing
footage Rist had filmed. (Side note: While I like more artistic
films, I slightly reject small films of random crap as actual art.) The movie
progressed from pigs rolling in the mud, to naked women rolling in the mud, to
a woman in the ocean on her period turning the water red.
…next room please.
I will admit, even though Rist’s work was largely not to my
taste, there were some cool pieces. For instance, the huge, high-ceilinged first room had a lot
of pieces in miniature. There was a small house with a yard and lights that
went on and off as the imaginary people inside turned on the television or
switched rooms. Being around such realistic miniatures with fewer anchors to
the scale of real things made me feel like an intrusive giant. On the other side of the room though was a giant underpants chandelier. It felt a little like falling down the rabbit hole.
Upstairs, almost all of Condo’s paintings had some subtly
disturbing element to them. Several looked like normal portraits of people or
creatures, but upon drawing closer, a frightening look or some distortion of
the features became clear and made the piece strange.
There was one really innovative piece that stands out in my
mind. In a rectangular room there were 46 paintings arranged on one wall with
even spacing between them. At first I took them as separate pieces, but then I
saw that the painting on the bottom right-hand corner was an elaborate
signature. The idea of his paintings being one work instead of separate ones by the same
artist was so different; it
presented a whole new way of viewing the paintings and their relationship to
each other. All of a sudden they had a lot more in common than their creator. They interacted with each other more like dynamic people who have relationships with each other than separate, static portraits.
Other Photos
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| St Paul's Cathedral in London. We passed it while walking from the Tube station to the Tate Modern, which is right across the Thames. |
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| Looking across the Thames down the Millennium Bridge at the Tate. |
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| The Globe, just down the river from the Tate |
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| Millennium Bridge with St Paul's in the distance |
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| You can't turn down a good photo op (with Felicia on the way to the British Museum)
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| A print of The Great Wave Off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai on display at The British Museum. |
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| ouch... |
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| Helen and I made "shtew"so many times... |
RLO
One of my favorite things about going on walks in the
greater London area was the foxes. Small, orange fuzzy foxes followed Palak,
Shruti and I whenever we went on walks in Feltham, just trotting peacefully
along the other side of the street. Plus, since watching the Fox and
the Hound over and over as a child, I’ve always harbored a repressed love of
foxes.
I don’t care what Palak said about them being cunning and
evil - they’re adorable and I like them. Now if only there had been a hound dog
named Copper following the fox, it would have been even better.
Londonisms
Barmy - crazy
Potty - Also crazy
Bender - so this isn’t exclusively British, but I heard it
so much more in the UK. It basically means a heavy drinking session, lasting anywhere
from a single night to days.
Fish - A name that is insulting or jokingly endearing, sort
of like weirdo or dork. It’s meaning depends a lot on context. Palak and a lot
of other people I met used it basically every other word when talking about
people.
Blimey - exclamation of surprise
Bogey - Booger
Budge up - move over. i.e. “Budge up a bit so I can sit next
to you.”
Nick - to steal. Again not exclusively British, but used
more across the pond.
Pinch - also to steal.
Prat - Basically the same as brat
Get the sack - get fired
