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London part 2c: Saturday's nearly over...
Big black boxes
After the water taxi ride, I was feeling like I might forgive London for it's earlier failures; suddenly everything felt a lot more positive. The sun was starting to sneak out, the place was buzzing
with (non-child-toting) people, and I was delighted by the sight of stuff I'd forgotten even existed, like the gorgeous arching foot bridge and the replica Globe. According to my itinerary, I wasn't supposed to visit the Tate Modern until the following day. But after the day's multiple let-downs I felt I needed something good and memorable and inspiring to take away with me, or at the very least a decent cup of tea. (I do have this bad habit of turning into Arthur Dent when I'm allowed out on my own.) Besides, it would have been rude not to go in after they'd laid on a whole boat ride for me.
The main exhibit I was there to see was How it is, also known as 'the big black box'. (Well, by me at least, as I kept forgetting the proper title). Created by Miroslaw Balka, it is effectively a huge steel packing crate the size of a large room, lined with dense black velvet, and located right at the back of the gallery's Turbine Hall so as little light as possible gets in. It plays with sensory depravition, our lack of experience of true darkness, being in close proximity with unseen people, and it definitely sounded like one of those things that has to be experienced first hand... which is one of the reasons why i had wanted so desperately to get down to London before it finished. I wasn't really sure what to expect, so just wandered in to see where it took me. As it turned out, it took me to the Discworld.
In the Discworld books, Death is a seven-foot skeleton with a scythe WHO TALKS LIKE THIS. But death is something different. Often it's a desert, with black sand underfoot and black sky overhead and somewhere at the end of it, a destination. And most people who end up there find themselves completely alone. (Well, alone apart from Death, who usually has something pithy - or at least final - to say at this point.) But sometimes, after a while, they start to see then faint shapes of other people, all crossing the desert, all crossing it alone. Moving onwards in darkness, surrounded by unseen travelling companions a fingertip away... Balka had captured that desert in a box.
Of course, the effect was spoiled slightly by people taking flash photos on their mobiles every few minutes, but even that didn't illuminate the darkness much, so I just pretending they were falling stars.
A big black box as a metaphor for death is pretty straightforward, but I'd also read elsewhere that Balka's recent work has focused on the Holocaust (as 'a scar on collective memory') and that How it is was no exception. I could see technically how that would work: But the atmosphere felt all wrong for that - while the darkness was unnerving, overall it inspired a sense of intrgue rather than one of fear. I couldn't imagine it evoking the Holocaust in any emotional sense, or on any kind of gut level. So when it did, it caught me by surprise.
When I was 19, I went on a trip with Uni to Berlin. In amongst the trams, cheap wine, missed buses, endless forests under purple skies, towering cranes over bottomless pits and many other adventures, on one unusually solemn day we left the city to visit a concentration camp. (I can't remember where, but google talls me it may well have been Sachsenhausen.) I remember the somber mood on the bus on the way there, and how unimpressive the camp itself was on first sight - just a collection of prefab huts in square of scrubby grass, looking for all the world like the spillover classrooms at my old high school. All the way round, other people were pulling pained faces and claiming to feel all kinds of bad vibes and evil echoes emanating from the very walls: 'you can tell that something terrible happened here, this was an evil place'. But I didn't pick up anything like that - it was a bunch of tin huts in a field. And that in its way was far more terrifying. Horror lives in creeping underground caverns and dread citadels, not tin huts in a field; evil comes from monsters, not men. This is the fairytale we tell ourselves, and the everyday banality of those huts exposed the lie.
How this relates: Back in the Tate, in the crate, in the darkness, space and time seemed to dilate: your body moved at a super slow shuffle, your senses raced as they strained to avoid every surely-imminent collision. When you finally stumbled your way to the end (and maybe reached out to touch the velvet walls to prove to yourself that there was an end, and not an endless void) you felt drained, you'd swear you'd been walking for miles, forever. Only to turn round and see that the brightly lit entrance maybe 30 yards away and, clearly silhouetted against the light, just a bunch of perfectly normal people. The cathedral of darkness snapped back to being an oversized packing crate in the back end of a gallery with a hell of a bump. And in that instant, that memory of huts in a field hit me hard, with all those banailty-of-evil associations behind it. I don't honestly think that's what the artist had in mind, or that I would have made the connection at all if I hadn't read the articles connecting it to the Holocaust. But I hadn't expected to feel any connection at all, and it shook me. So much so that I had to turn back into the darkness until the desert came back, friendly and comforting.
Feeling strange, but energised, and excited by the idea of Art with capital A (those often go hand in hand) I set out to explore the rest of the Tate Modern. I found a lot of old friends there - in fact, it was reassuring that I could still recognise a lot of paintings, or work out that an unfamiliar piece was by a particular artist. Not that that's a particularly impressive feat, but it that means that not all the knowledge I stuffed in my head when I was younger has managed to escape yet, and this pleases me. It was also good seeing old familiar art in a new setting - while I liked the ancient-to-modern story of art that the old Tate told, I always new exactly what was coming next. Seeing paintings hung in a new location, in new groupings, definitely gave a fresh perspective on them. I particularly liked a room that contained nothing but Bacons and Picassos: suddenly Picasso's 'distorted' people appeared soft and quite human by comparison, and in turn exposed the formal cubist structure beneath Bacon's body horror.
I left the museum with lots left unseen, but feeling sated, and slightly footsore. I made it to my Aunt and Uncle's house just as the rest of the family started to arrive. The gathering wasn't in aid of anything in particular (beyond the fact I was in London), but getting all my London cousins AND their respective partners together in one place at one time is an unusual occurrence, and was celebrated with mountains of chinese food, wine and champagne. Definitely need to make sure I keep getting down to visit, and maybe try to tempt some of them to venture beyond the M25 and up to the frozen North for visit...
(Sunday and Monday still to come, but they should be shorter as I've started to forget stuff...)
Big black boxes
After the water taxi ride, I was feeling like I might forgive London for it's earlier failures; suddenly everything felt a lot more positive. The sun was starting to sneak out, the place was buzzing
with (non-child-toting) people, and I was delighted by the sight of stuff I'd forgotten even existed, like the gorgeous arching foot bridge and the replica Globe. According to my itinerary, I wasn't supposed to visit the Tate Modern until the following day. But after the day's multiple let-downs I felt I needed something good and memorable and inspiring to take away with me, or at the very least a decent cup of tea. (I do have this bad habit of turning into Arthur Dent when I'm allowed out on my own.) Besides, it would have been rude not to go in after they'd laid on a whole boat ride for me.
The main exhibit I was there to see was How it is, also known as 'the big black box'. (Well, by me at least, as I kept forgetting the proper title). Created by Miroslaw Balka, it is effectively a huge steel packing crate the size of a large room, lined with dense black velvet, and located right at the back of the gallery's Turbine Hall so as little light as possible gets in. It plays with sensory depravition, our lack of experience of true darkness, being in close proximity with unseen people, and it definitely sounded like one of those things that has to be experienced first hand... which is one of the reasons why i had wanted so desperately to get down to London before it finished. I wasn't really sure what to expect, so just wandered in to see where it took me. As it turned out, it took me to the Discworld.
In the Discworld books, Death is a seven-foot skeleton with a scythe WHO TALKS LIKE THIS. But death is something different. Often it's a desert, with black sand underfoot and black sky overhead and somewhere at the end of it, a destination. And most people who end up there find themselves completely alone. (Well, alone apart from Death, who usually has something pithy - or at least final - to say at this point.) But sometimes, after a while, they start to see then faint shapes of other people, all crossing the desert, all crossing it alone. Moving onwards in darkness, surrounded by unseen travelling companions a fingertip away... Balka had captured that desert in a box.
Of course, the effect was spoiled slightly by people taking flash photos on their mobiles every few minutes, but even that didn't illuminate the darkness much, so I just pretending they were falling stars.
A big black box as a metaphor for death is pretty straightforward, but I'd also read elsewhere that Balka's recent work has focused on the Holocaust (as 'a scar on collective memory') and that How it is was no exception. I could see technically how that would work: But the atmosphere felt all wrong for that - while the darkness was unnerving, overall it inspired a sense of intrgue rather than one of fear. I couldn't imagine it evoking the Holocaust in any emotional sense, or on any kind of gut level. So when it did, it caught me by surprise.
When I was 19, I went on a trip with Uni to Berlin. In amongst the trams, cheap wine, missed buses, endless forests under purple skies, towering cranes over bottomless pits and many other adventures, on one unusually solemn day we left the city to visit a concentration camp. (I can't remember where, but google talls me it may well have been Sachsenhausen.) I remember the somber mood on the bus on the way there, and how unimpressive the camp itself was on first sight - just a collection of prefab huts in square of scrubby grass, looking for all the world like the spillover classrooms at my old high school. All the way round, other people were pulling pained faces and claiming to feel all kinds of bad vibes and evil echoes emanating from the very walls: 'you can tell that something terrible happened here, this was an evil place'. But I didn't pick up anything like that - it was a bunch of tin huts in a field. And that in its way was far more terrifying. Horror lives in creeping underground caverns and dread citadels, not tin huts in a field; evil comes from monsters, not men. This is the fairytale we tell ourselves, and the everyday banality of those huts exposed the lie.
How this relates: Back in the Tate, in the crate, in the darkness, space and time seemed to dilate: your body moved at a super slow shuffle, your senses raced as they strained to avoid every surely-imminent collision. When you finally stumbled your way to the end (and maybe reached out to touch the velvet walls to prove to yourself that there was an end, and not an endless void) you felt drained, you'd swear you'd been walking for miles, forever. Only to turn round and see that the brightly lit entrance maybe 30 yards away and, clearly silhouetted against the light, just a bunch of perfectly normal people. The cathedral of darkness snapped back to being an oversized packing crate in the back end of a gallery with a hell of a bump. And in that instant, that memory of huts in a field hit me hard, with all those banailty-of-evil associations behind it. I don't honestly think that's what the artist had in mind, or that I would have made the connection at all if I hadn't read the articles connecting it to the Holocaust. But I hadn't expected to feel any connection at all, and it shook me. So much so that I had to turn back into the darkness until the desert came back, friendly and comforting.
Feeling strange, but energised, and excited by the idea of Art with capital A (those often go hand in hand) I set out to explore the rest of the Tate Modern. I found a lot of old friends there - in fact, it was reassuring that I could still recognise a lot of paintings, or work out that an unfamiliar piece was by a particular artist. Not that that's a particularly impressive feat, but it that means that not all the knowledge I stuffed in my head when I was younger has managed to escape yet, and this pleases me. It was also good seeing old familiar art in a new setting - while I liked the ancient-to-modern story of art that the old Tate told, I always new exactly what was coming next. Seeing paintings hung in a new location, in new groupings, definitely gave a fresh perspective on them. I particularly liked a room that contained nothing but Bacons and Picassos: suddenly Picasso's 'distorted' people appeared soft and quite human by comparison, and in turn exposed the formal cubist structure beneath Bacon's body horror.
I left the museum with lots left unseen, but feeling sated, and slightly footsore. I made it to my Aunt and Uncle's house just as the rest of the family started to arrive. The gathering wasn't in aid of anything in particular (beyond the fact I was in London), but getting all my London cousins AND their respective partners together in one place at one time is an unusual occurrence, and was celebrated with mountains of chinese food, wine and champagne. Definitely need to make sure I keep getting down to visit, and maybe try to tempt some of them to venture beyond the M25 and up to the frozen North for visit...
(Sunday and Monday still to come, but they should be shorter as I've started to forget stuff...)
no subject
Interesting point about the tin sheds. But then wasn't it Lewis Carrol who once wrote something about the greatest evil in the world coming from smartly dressed men in carpeted offices? Screwtape Letters, ISTR.
no subject
(It was called 'Shibboleth' apparently, although I've never heard anyone call it that, just 'the Crack'...)
no subject
Lots of love
Patrick
XXXX
no subject
no subject
Lots of love
Patrick
XXXX
no subject
no subject
Other cities include Bilbao, Prague, Talin, the Scandinavian capitals and Edinburgh.
Lots of love
Patrick
xxxx