Couple of art exhibitions.

[cdave]

I saw this quite distinctive photo of a fallen angel caught in telephone cables in the paper last week over a week ago. Given that it's in central London, and open to 7pm for one week only I thought I'd pop down after work.

It's not difficult to find the Holy Trinity Marylebone. It's the church opposite Great Portland Street station. And the words "Let there be light" are fixed to the outside in foot high white neon lights. It's clearly not a working church anymore, as there's a brass plaque on the outside proclaiming it to be an entertainment venue.

Exhibits shown here.

The first thing you come to is a blackout cloth, which leads you into room containing Aurora and Revelation. Aurora is essentially a large plasma ball. Revelation is a noisy lightning generator built out of: scintillator plates, photomultipliers, and the like. Both quite mad sciencey, but somehow they fell a bit flat. I feel that they should scream their status as twisted mockeries of science, but were really both quite simple in appearance.

Then was the the main room. Containing: a large wooden rocket with strobe lighting inside, a pair of giant tuning forks with subwoofers in their bases, and the fallen angel in telegraph wire.

The first thing I did upon seeing the giant tuning fork and noticing the noise was to get down and stick my head inside the resonance chamber. Clearly not actually real working tuning forks. Not sure about the point of them.

The rocket ship was a great bit of crafting. The joinery on it was really good, but again, I'm not sure what is trying to say.

Morning star on the hand was fantastic. His facial features resembled a Buffy vampire. When you got up close, you could see that he's not just thin, but really gaunt. The scale was odd, as Lucifer is about a half life size figure, which I hadn't been able to tell from the photos.

Upstairs there was a bunch of 3 foot wooden things, that resembled elaborate oversized Jedi training orbs. Again there was a scale issue, as I'd thought they were about 30cm across from the photos. Some of them had the tiny grids made up of mosaics of wooden tiles, some had lines of wood, with the horizontal lines scored on, and others were just sheets of wood, with horizontal and vertical scores. An artistic statement, or an craftsman finding a shortcut?

Despite the sign saying "no touching" I was pleased to see at least three of them were spinning (from people prodding them) at any given moment.

There was a follow up with the remaining pieces in another gallery somewhere, but the only bit I really like was the Morning Star, so I don't think I'll bother.


And then I went to the Tate Modern for lunch today a couple of a few days ago to see the new turbine hall exhibition.

The accompanying literature explains that the piece represents London in 2058. Where it has been raining for months continuously. This has had two impacts. Firstly people have moved into the Tate to get out of the rain. Secondly sculptures have started to grow bigger.

The giant sculpture bit is described as "quotations" of other previous artists. Since I'm not really a big arts fan, I only recognised the apple core and the spider. And they were large to begin with, so there wasn't a sense of things being oversized.

The post apocalypse is shown by giant screen showing clips from various sci-fi movies, and the racks of steel bunk beds. These painted bright yellow or blue. They have books on them, which suit the theme.

I've seen it described elsewhere as two different exhibits, jammed unceremoniously together. Which is a bit harsh on it, I think. It's clearly supposed to be several contrasting things (e.g. bright colours / cold mattress-free bunks). Unlike most attempts at anything post apocalyptic it didn't feel bleak. And unlike most attempts to combine contradictory things it didn't feel jarring.

I think that's the problem. It's worth a look at, but it doesn't really do anything for me. I probably won't make an effort to head back there to see it again.

If I'm passing by though, I might still stick my head in. I love the scar left by last year's exhibition.
{edit: so many typos}

Comments

[theengineer.livejournal.com]

When I was in London in the spring, I dropped by the Tate Modern to take one of their free tours. Waiting for it to start up on the 3rd floor, I was looking out the windows overlooking the Turbine Hall, and saw the giant crack in the floor. I was pretty sure it wasn't anything to worry about, but being an engineer I checked with my guide about it anyway. It was pretty neat.

[cdave]

I think that's the way it was meant to be seen really. A slightly disconcerting thing. I wish I hadn't known about it before I saw it. It would have been given away by the way the visitors always interacted with it though. People don't tend to cluster around real cracks in buildings.

I love the whole mystery of it. I still haven't got a clue how the did it.