Friday, November 09, 2007
Zaha Hadid Exhibition, Swarm Chandelier 2006
Having been let out of school early for good behaviour I headed for the Design Museum to meet up with a friend and wander round the Matthew Williamson fashion exhibition and, once we realised you bought tickets to enter the museum as a whole rather than to see a specific exhibition we decided to look at the Zaha Hadid exhibition too. I find that my feelings about Hadid's work fall neatly in to two camps, the stuff that primarily involves straight lines and sharp 'have your eye out' corners I don't like, the generally more recent stuff, using curves and sweeps, is much more to my taste. However, while she designs some lovely exteriors the interiors of Hadid buildings that were projected on one wall were pretty uniformly ghastly. They look like some kind of stylistic prison, designed to bludgeon one's senses into unconsciousness. I'm quite interested to visit such a place now, to see if it was just a trick of the projection but they all looked as though they were utterly impractical to live or work in.
I don't know whether it's just a quirk of Hadid and Williamson or whether the Design Museum generally has a policy of allowing photography. This wins them points in my book over the Tate's attitudes. They did ask for no flash photography, fair enough, but it's not like I'm going to try and pass this work off as my own, and it's daft that the Tate don't allow photography but anyone who's a decent artist can just go in and sketch whatever they like. Time to chase up that complaint I made earlier in the year that they never replied to.
I don't know whether it's just a quirk of Hadid and Williamson or whether the Design Museum generally has a policy of allowing photography. This wins them points in my book over the Tate's attitudes. They did ask for no flash photography, fair enough, but it's not like I'm going to try and pass this work off as my own, and it's daft that the Tate don't allow photography but anyone who's a decent artist can just go in and sketch whatever they like. Time to chase up that complaint I made earlier in the year that they never replied to.
Labels: "Design Museum", architecture, exhibitions, Flickr, Tate Modern/Britain
Friday, May 11, 2007
'State Britain' by Mark Wallinger at Tate Britain
Spent the morning on buses, from Southwark to Pimlico, then up to Camden. I can only really put up with London buses outside of rush hours and by giving myself plenty of time to travel small distances.
Popped in to Tate Britain in the middle and saw the State Britain exhibit by Mark Wallinger, which has been nominated for the Turner Prize. It's a recreation of the first anti-war protest of Brian Haw, still camped out down the road in Parliament Square.
I managed to take one photo before an official told me off. Normally I wouldn't dream of taking photographs in the Tate, I can't get sufficiently worked up for the whole 'holding art for the public' argument. However, it strikes me as intensely funny and an underappreciated part of the artwork that, copied as it was from items confiscated as they were from someone who was breaking no laws and exercising his legal right to protest, it is someone else's property and I'm not allowed to take photos of it with my crappy little camera.
The bus to Camden went around the back of Parliament Square where, at the front of which, the real deal keeps going strong. I wonder what his plans are for the post June the 27th era?
Labels: art, exhibitions, Flickr, Government, Iraq, London, SOCPA, Tate Modern/Britain, Tony Blair
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Monday, January 22, 2007
Well that was a fun weekend.
On Friday I finished the working week hearing that I'd been succesful at my interview and was being offered a post as an Assistant Library Manager somewhere else. Now I'll be officially empowered to be nasty to other members of staff rather than doing it on a pro. tem. basis.
Saturday I went in to town, headed down to Tate Modern for the first time in ages. The queues for the slides were all too long and boring so I had a nose around the David Smith exhibition. I knew nothing about Smith, hadn't even heard of him before I saw the exhibition, but I did like his work.
After that I was off to The George on Borough High Street to meet C and S. We had to sit outside but the freezingness was mitigated by some tall freestanding storage heaters, though the table of drunk misogynist city-bores did try to steal them all to stand round their table. One of them started screaming into his mobile at his 'C*nt' of an ex-girlfriend and they melted away into the night.
We had something to eat at a Wagamama's and then saw S off on the train home, then C and I struggled to get up to Kentish Town. From Blackfriars it shouldn't be that difficult but the Sutton-Bedford trains were playing silly buggers and a fifteen minute train journey became a fifty minute journey with a thirty minute wait on the Kings Cross Thameslink platform for a train that wasn't going fast out of London.
While I don't know the specifics of where I will be working yet it will involve some level of commuting, so I will get to sample the pleasures of delays, cancellations and random BR and Tube related maliciousness.
We eventually made it to The Oxford, which I hadn't visited since it had changed it's name from the Jorene Celeste. I was commended on my new job and my tremendous hair and then I settled down to the prospect of trying to find some beer that I liked to drink. I had to give up on that very quickly and make do with Kronenberg and Carlsberg, donkey-piss brands both. We were assembling to cheer the brief visit of a friend of ours that had moved to Singapore several years ago. Beer was drunk, cigarette health warnings were ignored and it was declared that Fidel Castro was guilty of many crimes but surely the worst was to allow the Manic Street Preachers to play in Havana.
I headed home at midnight while most other people decided to buy more wine and drink at someone's flat nearby. I got a call around lunchtime from C who had woken up to find herself in Mr Singapore's hotel room with no memory of how she got there. We reconvened in Islington where we had delicious and cheap vegetarian Indian food (at the Indian Vegetarian Bhel Poori House IIRC) then we headed towards Kings Cross. I popped in to the British Library to have a look at their London: A Life in Maps exhibition. It was interesting to see both the development of the town (Tottenham Court Road was still bordered by fields in the 1700s) in to the city but also the increasing detail in the maps as it becomes more of a necessity for people to find their way around rather than the well-off to know which estate is which. However, whoever lays out this exhibitions really needs to be poked with spoons. I don't know if there are permanant walls down in that space that cause problems but starting the exhibition right slap bang at the bottom of the stairs into the room means that as soon as you have people coming in they are all crammed together trying to read the notices and see the first exhibits, roman maps of what would one day be 'Londinium'. Then, within the exhibition space there are several times when the path splits and the visitor is given no guidanec as to which way to go. These are little niggles though, the old maps are beautifully preserved (I remember some of them from what I think was a similar exhibition at the British Museum a few years back) and there's nothing more fun than scouring old maps looking for the road you live on or places you visit today.
After that I rejoined C in the Pizza Express across the road where we sat across from Vanessa Feltz. After the glacially slow service we walked up to Euston and caught the train back to my den of iniquity where we whiled away the rest of the day watching MASH repeats and looking for Captain Jack vids on YouTube.
On Friday I finished the working week hearing that I'd been succesful at my interview and was being offered a post as an Assistant Library Manager somewhere else. Now I'll be officially empowered to be nasty to other members of staff rather than doing it on a pro. tem. basis.
Saturday I went in to town, headed down to Tate Modern for the first time in ages. The queues for the slides were all too long and boring so I had a nose around the David Smith exhibition. I knew nothing about Smith, hadn't even heard of him before I saw the exhibition, but I did like his work.
After that I was off to The George on Borough High Street to meet C and S. We had to sit outside but the freezingness was mitigated by some tall freestanding storage heaters, though the table of drunk misogynist city-bores did try to steal them all to stand round their table. One of them started screaming into his mobile at his 'C*nt' of an ex-girlfriend and they melted away into the night.
We had something to eat at a Wagamama's and then saw S off on the train home, then C and I struggled to get up to Kentish Town. From Blackfriars it shouldn't be that difficult but the Sutton-Bedford trains were playing silly buggers and a fifteen minute train journey became a fifty minute journey with a thirty minute wait on the Kings Cross Thameslink platform for a train that wasn't going fast out of London.
While I don't know the specifics of where I will be working yet it will involve some level of commuting, so I will get to sample the pleasures of delays, cancellations and random BR and Tube related maliciousness.
We eventually made it to The Oxford, which I hadn't visited since it had changed it's name from the Jorene Celeste. I was commended on my new job and my tremendous hair and then I settled down to the prospect of trying to find some beer that I liked to drink. I had to give up on that very quickly and make do with Kronenberg and Carlsberg, donkey-piss brands both. We were assembling to cheer the brief visit of a friend of ours that had moved to Singapore several years ago. Beer was drunk, cigarette health warnings were ignored and it was declared that Fidel Castro was guilty of many crimes but surely the worst was to allow the Manic Street Preachers to play in Havana.
I headed home at midnight while most other people decided to buy more wine and drink at someone's flat nearby. I got a call around lunchtime from C who had woken up to find herself in Mr Singapore's hotel room with no memory of how she got there. We reconvened in Islington where we had delicious and cheap vegetarian Indian food (at the Indian Vegetarian Bhel Poori House IIRC) then we headed towards Kings Cross. I popped in to the British Library to have a look at their London: A Life in Maps exhibition. It was interesting to see both the development of the town (Tottenham Court Road was still bordered by fields in the 1700s) in to the city but also the increasing detail in the maps as it becomes more of a necessity for people to find their way around rather than the well-off to know which estate is which. However, whoever lays out this exhibitions really needs to be poked with spoons. I don't know if there are permanant walls down in that space that cause problems but starting the exhibition right slap bang at the bottom of the stairs into the room means that as soon as you have people coming in they are all crammed together trying to read the notices and see the first exhibits, roman maps of what would one day be 'Londinium'. Then, within the exhibition space there are several times when the path splits and the visitor is given no guidanec as to which way to go. These are little niggles though, the old maps are beautifully preserved (I remember some of them from what I think was a similar exhibition at the British Museum a few years back) and there's nothing more fun than scouring old maps looking for the road you live on or places you visit today.
After that I rejoined C in the Pizza Express across the road where we sat across from Vanessa Feltz. After the glacially slow service we walked up to Euston and caught the train back to my den of iniquity where we whiled away the rest of the day watching MASH repeats and looking for Captain Jack vids on YouTube.
Labels: British Library, exhibitions, London, personal history, restaurants, sculpture, Tate Modern/Britain
