Today was the final concert in the LSO St Luke's Schubert chamber music series, and the last London concert I had booked. They're doing romantic Russian piano music next, which I'm not so keen on, and anyway, London concerts are more of a winter thing. This lunchtime was the turn of the Signum Quartet, plus additional cellist, playing the string quintet in C major.
It must be a stalwart of Radio 3 and Classic FM, since I recognised several of the key themes straight away. I enjoyed it very much, other than that I found I had sat next to somebody who began to fidget as soon as the music began. He had looked quite harmless when I obligingly budged up to make room for a couple so that they could sit together, but after the first five minutes he rearranged the turquoise anorak on his lap. In the final (quiet) moments of the first movement he did it again. In the second movement he discovered that a cord on the anorak was stuck to a velcro tab, and started trying to unpick it, before thankfully losing interest in his coat. After that he limited himself to flapping his programme about, and shuffling in his seat. Next season I must try and choose an end seat, then I'll only have one neighbour instead of two. Maybe if I mutter to myself as the rest of the audience files in, and look vaguely unhinged, I might manage to deter anyone from sitting next to me at all.
Since I was in London I thought I might as well get maximum value out of the rail fare, and went on down to Tate Britain. The buzz around the redevelopment seems to have dissipated, and there were no people looking at the new spiral staircase. The two exhibitions I went to were pretty quiet as well, though one has been panned by the critics.
They are staging a career retrospective of Richard Deacon, who was born in 1949, and as the saying goes is not dead yet. I found it one of those exhibitions where I knew what I thought as soon as I walked around it. There were a few things I liked, and rather more things that I didn't like, and that didn't grow on me as I looked at them. He is, according to the free leaflet (I love the way that Tate hands out free leaflets to its members just as if they had bought tickets. The RA doesn't) best known for his lyrical open forms and interest in materials and their manipulation.
That is a fair description, and I liked a couple of his sinuous wooden constructions. My favourite was in the last room, a giant loop of timber that corkscrewed in places like barley twist poker work, with wriggling bands of curved planks like giant shavings from a lathe running across it, or curling down to the floor and back. I enjoyed that, and I liked watching how other people watched it, as they paced around it, and played the game of spotting where the other end of each strip of planks ended up. I quite liked the two intersecting huge loops of laminated plywood, each standing on edge, dead straight, and forming a huge narrow X. I didn't like that as much as final work, partly because Deacon had allowed the glue to bulge out between the layers of lamination. Am I supposed to judge sculpture according to the intrinsic beauty of the material, as well as the design? Or is that to treat it as purely decorative?
The open wooden construct shaped like a giant slice of melon, tilted over and resting within two circles, I could take or leave, while the enormous lattice work loop like a deformed doughnut reminded me too much of a piece of children's play equipment. It was mathematically interesting that all the curved sections were of the same radius, but apart from that it didn't do it for me, and I was baffled by the steel trellis running up the centre of the work. The booklet said that the opposing qualities of the taut line of the woven steel strap and the liveliness of the undulating wooden form touched on fundamental issues of presence and absence. Which didn't help, and might in fact be pretentious codswallop.
The metal sculptures mostly reminded me of visits to factories making ducting for air conditioning, and the bronze thing like a light bulb holder with a green lampshade on the end, the horn shaped thing made out of 1960s lino, and the pink netting tube were simply taking the piss, whatever the booklet said.
I did not enter Ruin Lust with an innocent eye, having recently read Brian Sewell's excoriating review. His major beef was that most of the art in it was not very good, and not even the best examples of the respective artists in the Tate's collection. His other complaint was that the curation was disjointed and did not develop a coherent theory about the role and treatment of ruins in art. He was right on the latter score, though I can live happily with randomly curated exhibitions as long as I find enough things that are individually beautiful or thought-provoking, but Ruin Lust was pretty low on knock-out exhibits. I quite liked some of the photos, but didn't leave with any new insight into why I liked looking at ruins. And I do like looking at ruins. The trouble is, if the role of art is to make you think and feel things you did not otherwise think and feel, this exhibition didn't. I thought and felt much more when I actually went myself and stood among the stones of Fountains Abbey, or the military debris of Orford Ness, or the decaying railway arches and canal banks of pre-gentrified London or Birmingham, than I did at any point going round Ruin Lust.
Never mind. It's not as though I had to pay to get in, being a Tate member. The new cafe in the basement is nice.
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