We went to catch Tate Modern's Red Star Over Russia today, before it closes this weekend. I'd mentioned it to the Systems Administrator before Christmas, as the SA is interested in Soviet history, and we'd agreed to visit in the new year, but then we both succumbed to colds, it snowed, and we never found a day to go. But the forecast for today was looking too miserable to do anything in the garden, wet and cold, and so we thought we might as well go and see the exhibition instead. What with one thing and another it was ages since we'd had a day out.
It was a very interesting exhibition, with the proviso that you might not think so if you were not at least vaguely interested in Russian history in the first half of the twentieth century, or the awful workings of totalitarian regimes. If you wanted your art to be nice and consoling it would be a bad choice, since most of it was fairly grim. Even the optimism and buoyancy of the early posters exhorting Soviet unity is rather undermined by the fact that we, unlike the Russians at the time, know what is going to come next.
Especially fascinating and poignant were the group photographs and montages with the faces of those who had by then fallen foul of the regime eradicated, scribbled over or physically cut out. It left me all the more keen to see Armando Ianucci's film The Death Of Stalin as soon as it is available on rental.
Originally we had thought we might wander down to the Imperial War Museum afterwards, since we were on the south bank, but it was so cold we wimped out of the walk, or the uncertain wait at a bus stop. Instead we wandered around the rest of the Tate to see what there was. We liked a lot of the photographs, ranging from silver gelatin prints of unfolding fern fronds to Martin Parr full technicolour, and failed to get most of the conceptual art. The Tate extension is great and we loved the Brutalist aesthetic, but it needs more lifts. The Modigliani exhibition looked very full and we passed on by, since the SA is not a great Modigliani fan. I was relieved to find Rothko's Seagram murals, after beginning to worry that they had vanished from display, but regret the absence of most of the Impressionists that I remember from teenage visits to The Tate when it was only at Millbank, long before Tate Modern was thought of.
The Turbine Hall's current installation is a sort of playground with swings and a thick stripey carpet, and a giant silver pendulum swinging overhead. It seems to have annoyed various art critics quite a lot. I have no idea if it counts as Art, or even what Art is in the twenty-first century, but it certainly made a difference to how people behaved. I have never seen so many of them gathered together in the Turbine Hall, playing on the swings, running about, laughing, and lying on their backs looking up at the swinging silver ball.
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