We thought the best way to attack a one afternoon visit to the Tate was in relating it to Dante’s Divine Comedy (even the title seems appropriate in retrospect) so we started at the top, with the noble plan of descending the seven levels of hell, sorry – artsville. We couldn’t cope with the dark anymore and didn’t want to waste what short amount of time we had left turning blue from a combination of UV deprivation and carbon dioxide inhalation. Amongst the happy-clappy art-world, new-age hippies running up to this Glastonbury festival installation, raising their arms and chanting art bollocks mantras to an artifice of sun in a very dull day coloured brick warehouse. Despite the fact it took six centuries to complete and has the kind of presence that can only be related to, in an aesthetically atheistic fashion, as some great, Armageddon inspired, smoke blackened, extra-terrestrial landing – unless of course it was on a modern art tourist map – perhaps the Germans should rebrand it…Īnyway, at the Tate we met our friends. These very same punters would likely walk right past the Gothic leviathan that is Cologne Cathedral because it was a ‘church’. Needless to say there’s no shortage of punters oohing and aahing (the atmospheric wonder of breathing difficulties in cold ice for asthmatics), rattling on about the sense of ‘the spiritual’ in this work, the ‘monumental scale’ of the work. I think we’re convinced of its implicit greatness through its explicit BIGNESS (there’s a job here for a mathematician to establish the exact quantitative relationship between artistic seriousness and BIGNESS – a zippy little equation shouldn’t take too long to whip up). In a big yellow sun in a hotel basement garage kind of fashion. Expectantly we descend the entrance ramp and behold the current media hyped spectacle, Olafur Eliasson’s ‘Weather Project’. So after a pleasant tube ride (again never a common experience), some great tube station modern architecture and a short walk we get to Tate Modern. Did we fancy meeting up? At the Tate Modern perhaps? What started out as a good day just kept getting better! We enjoyed an untroubled drive up the motorway (which has never happened before), dropped off the work at the gallery, took a lazy amble up the road to the nearest tube, and waited for our train into town.īefore we can get on the train we’re interrupted by another phone call – this time it’s Joe Mangrum, another artist we met at Florence he’s on his way to home to San Francisco via London where he’ll be this afternoon. The following day we set off early – everything was moving along fine. Another chance to catch one of my favourite paintings in the country – Franz Kline’s ‘Meryon’ in its new gallery setting. Would we like to meet up? In all the time this alleged powerhouse of high culture has been open my partner and I had never actually had time to check it out – so indeed this seemed quite fortuitous. They were on their way home via London and were planning on visiting the Tate Modern. A planned day of work unexpectedly turned into a day of time with old friends, but rapidly descended into the rabid pit of art world inspired lunacy.Ī recent trip to a London gallery to deliver some work for exhibition was preceded, quite unexpectedly, by a phone call from Mexican artist Luis Ituarte and his film maker partner Dr Gerda Govine-Ituarte, who I’d struck up a friendship with a month earlier in Florence.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |