Sunday, October 16, 2005
I did go into town yesterday and, yes, replacement bus services do indeed suck giant robotic mega-goats balls. I waited half an hour for the promised Replacement Bus Service and, when that didn't arrive, got a regular bus to a overground station instead and did the journey by train.
Rachel Whiteread's new Embankment installation at Tate Modern was attracting a lot of attention but was underwhelming. Though what I know about art could be fitted into one of her boxes without touching the sides I would guess that the dimensions of the Turbine Hall make it difficult to exhibit in, so while previous exhibits have been as much about the empty space not filled with anything Whiteread has gone for the opposite approach, trying to fill it with thousands of white boxes. Only... these are not boxes. No, they are in fact the insides of boxes, cardboard boxes filled with plaster, left to dry, then the box has been peeled off, and the remains recast in 'translucent polyethylene'. The person who wrote the leaflets for the Tate thinks this leaves us with the ghosts of interior spaces or the 'positive impressions of negative spaces'. I tend to feel that, unlike the house, which I didn't see, or Room 101, which I did, her gimmick of casting the inside of something doesn't really work here, cast the inside of a cardboard box and all you really get is a slightly smaller box.
The more interesting exhibition to me was the almost-over collection of objects by the wonderfully named Jan De Cock, Denkmal 53, which I'm probably not going to get the chance to see properly before it's over at the end of the month. Maybe he can come back at some point in the future and design a large-scale Denkmal for the Turbine Hall.
Photos of both on my Flickr site BTW.
Rachel Whiteread's new Embankment installation at Tate Modern was attracting a lot of attention but was underwhelming. Though what I know about art could be fitted into one of her boxes without touching the sides I would guess that the dimensions of the Turbine Hall make it difficult to exhibit in, so while previous exhibits have been as much about the empty space not filled with anything Whiteread has gone for the opposite approach, trying to fill it with thousands of white boxes. Only... these are not boxes. No, they are in fact the insides of boxes, cardboard boxes filled with plaster, left to dry, then the box has been peeled off, and the remains recast in 'translucent polyethylene'. The person who wrote the leaflets for the Tate thinks this leaves us with the ghosts of interior spaces or the 'positive impressions of negative spaces'. I tend to feel that, unlike the house, which I didn't see, or Room 101, which I did, her gimmick of casting the inside of something doesn't really work here, cast the inside of a cardboard box and all you really get is a slightly smaller box.
The more interesting exhibition to me was the almost-over collection of objects by the wonderfully named Jan De Cock, Denkmal 53, which I'm probably not going to get the chance to see properly before it's over at the end of the month. Maybe he can come back at some point in the future and design a large-scale Denkmal for the Turbine Hall.
Photos of both on my Flickr site BTW.
