Today I went to London. I'd been eyeing up the forecast, and thinking that Wednesday could be a day for an arty excursion, if it turned out wet as expected. Rain all day is useless for gardening, unless I happen to have something to do in the greenhouse, and I hadn't, and while driving rain and cold can be miserable walking around London, light steady rain is not too bad. In fact, it is quite atmospheric.
I hadn't decided even when I got on the train whether I was going to the British Museum or the V&A. That's one beauty of solo travel, with nobody to meet and no timetable to keep. By Chelmsford I'd decided that ancient Colombia and Japanese erotic art won out over pearls, Chinese painting and 1980s club fashion. This was not so much a cultural judgement as because the V&A is more of a faff to get to from Essex. And because I was running slightly late and wondered whether I'd get to Kensington in time to fit three exhibitions in comfortably, and when I checked the V&A website last night there were only limited slots available for the pearls, so it might be a good idea to book that before trekking all the way over.
Beyond Eldorado:Power and Gold in Ancient Colombia is the sort of thing that the British Museum does well. It contains a lot of gold, or rather, mostly gold alloyed with copper. Also a lot of pottery. A map at the beginning makes sure you know where Colombia is. You learn that the ancient Colombians valued gold for its beauty and lustre, for catching and evoking the sun, and symbolising the sacred, rather than using it as a method of exchange or store of purely financial value. It was a shamanistic society. Dancing, music and mind altering plants were used to bring about altered states of consciousness, along with the glitter of the gold, in what sounded rather like a fifteenth century rainforest equivalent of the 1990s rave scene. There were gold body ornaments, gold musical instruments, gold pots for storing drugs, and little gold figures, whose function is not honestly known nowadays. Sitting on a chair was a sign of status, and was held to confer extra spiritual powers.
The objects were beautiful, and not as strange as they might have been, because I had a feeling that the aesthetic had already been mined by Europeans, from early twentieth century sculpture to Alessi designs. I liked my brief introduction to ancient Colombia. It isn't a part of the world I know much about, and it doesn't grab my imagination as much the Himalayas, but I was quite happy wandering around the exhibition.
Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art is quite explicit. And also rather innocent. Men and women, and some men and men, and two women, are shown having sex. Plenty of female genitalia are on display, as are lots of erect male members, all portrayed relatively oversized. You can see why it is not recommended for unsupervised under-sixteens. And yet it is all portrayed as pleasurable good fun. Jokey comments run round the edges of the pictures, though as they are in Japanese script, Western visitors have to rely on the summaries on the labels. There is no violence, except for one picture in the whole show, and the women are enjoying themselves, the scripts say so. Everybody has pubic hair. As well as the straightforward erotic art, here are jokes, parodies, rude piss-takes of classical Japanese culture, and political satires. It is all about as far from the conventions of modern pornography as the Ancient Columbian's shamanic rituals. The print room of the British Museum does not provide a particularly sympathetic viewing environemtn, and to get the full benefit of shunga, you probably want to enjoy it at home, with somebody you are quite intimate with (or hoping to become so).
After that I weighed up whether I had the stamina for a third exhibition, but it seemed a waste of a day in town and a train fare to go home when it was still only early afternoon. It had stopped raining, so I walked down to the National Portrait Gallery for Elizabeth and her people. Queen Elizabeth I was one of my first pin-ups as a child, and the intervening years have not lessened my enthusiasm. And I know that British portraiture of the age was wooden compared to the glories of Renaissance Europe, but that's not the point. This exhibition brings together several portraits of the queen herself, along with other notables of her reign, and a few lesser people you aren't expected to have heard of, and a smattering of books and costumes. I love the clothes (indeed, I'm sure one of the paintings, on loan from the Royal collection, featured in the last show I went to at the Queen's Gallery. I know I've seen it somewhere recently). Some of the mini-biographies hint at mini-series begging to be made. The queen's lady of honour, a beautiful, wary young woman brushing her red-brown hair and dressed in an amazing floral gown, fell pregnant, married her noble suitor without Royal consent, and was briefly imprisoned for her disobedience. Lord Cecil rode around his garden on a mule for relaxation.
The new varifocals made gallery viewing much easier, although the frames hurt my ear. This always happens with new glasses. I'm afraid one ear is higher than the other.
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