two exhibitions

It was drizzling this morning when I got up, and the forecast was for rain, so I went up to London to look at some art.  I'd managed to miss the exhibition I wanted to see at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, as I haven't been up for weeks, so I chose today's entertainments on the basis of picking the two things on the list of shows I'd like to see that ended soonest.  It was raining properly by the time I got to Liverpool Street, but not windy, and I like London in the rain as long as it isn't driving horizontally, so I yomped down to Tate Modern, taking a short detour into St Pauls churchyard to look at a large magnolia that was just coming into bloom, and over the bouncy bridge.  The Thames was on the flood, looking ominous and full of strange back eddies as the natural flow of the river ran against the tide.

Gabriel Orozco is a Mexican artist.  I'd never heard of him until the Tate retrospective came along, but it's good to try new things, and the papers I'd read about him had sounded quite enthusiastic.  The exhibition was a mixed bag.  There were some good bits, and then there were some other bits.  Actually quite a lot of other bits.  My favourite room, which really was good, was the one that dealt with death.  The artist had got hold of an entire human skull somehow, which he had painstakingly painted with a strictly geometric checkerboard pattern of black and white, carrying it over the different planes and angles which distorted the checkerboard to harlequin diamonds.  It looked unexpectedly jaunty, and I presumed it referenced the Mexican day of the dead, as well as being a very elegantly executed feat of draughtsmanship.  The skull was good.  The best bit was the headlines from New York Times that lined the walls, stripped of the names of their subjects.  These read like something by Evelyn Waugh, dozens of lives compressed into five or six words that managed to be both touching and ludicrous.

I didn't find the rest of the show so much fun.  There were some pictures based on circles, that looked like the bastard offspring of a Mandelbrot fractal and the BBC i-player animated doodle.  There was an extra sized chessboard with nothing but knights on it, which was quite amusing, but not very.  There was a large room full of photographs of yellow scooters, generated by hiring a common make of scooter and driving around looking for other identical (stationary) scooters, then parking next to each scooter and photographing the two scooters together.  Look, after I got a Skoda Fabia I began to notice how many other Skoda Fabias there were on the road, but I didn't call that art.  Likewise, squeezing a lump of a malleable substance with your legs and elbows so as to leave the imprint of your body on the lump doesn't make it art, or if it does then on that basis the flan case I made the other weekend was art.  Then there was the room full of bits of shredded tyres, collected by the artist from the side of the road in Mexico and arranged by him in a special way.  They were tyres.  They blew.  Please explain why putting them in rows in a converted power station next to the Thames makes them art (I am beginning to feel like Francis Bacon dismissing parterres with the observation that you may see as good in tarts).  There was a Citroen DS cut down the middle and very neatly reassembled with its central third missing, which was clever, but seemed like a waste of a rather nice classic car, and I'm not sure what message it was supposed to give me.  And the white cardboard box placed casually on the floor, which echoed the shape of the gallery room.  Seriously, that's what the blurb on the wall said.  I've had a shoebox on the floor next to my desk for weeks, because I am too disorganised to put it away.  It is being promoted to art forthwith.  Then there was the room with lines strung across it, from which hung bits of grey fabric that from a distance looked like dishcloths hung up to dry.  They turned out to be fluff from Mexican laundromats, which the artist had collected.  They are supposed to make you think about the transitory nature of life.  Or something.  And the ceiling fan with loo paper stuck to it.  I don't know how you negotiate to earn a living sticking loo paper to ceiling fans and hanging up gunk out of washing machines, instead of lifting several times your own body weight in compost in a day, in between trying to be unfailingly helpful and polite to people a sizeable minority of whom appear to be either deaf, terminally indecisive, or moderately dotty, but I should say that Gabriel Orozco is a sharp operator.  Whether he will be remembered in four hundred years as fondly as we remember Rembrandt van Rijn is another question.  I don't think so (but what do I know.  They laughed at the Impressionists at the time).

I walked on to the Royal Academy.  The south bank had a wistful out of season air, with few people, and the book stalls under the bridge by the national film theatre all shut up.  I bought a Big Issue from a vendor on the Hungerford Bridge, not so much because I wanted a wet magazine as because nobody else was stopping.  He spoke in the accents of Eastern Europe.  Lettuce picking and mushroom farming can't have worked out for him.  Somebody else then stopped, and asked the vendor if he had change before giving him a bank note and assuring him that it was a Scottish note but it was legal tender.

The first room of the Modern British Sculpture exhibition at the RA was really promising.  There was a full scale model of the Cenotaph.  I've only seen it from a distance in the middle of the road, and on the TV, and even with Charlie Gilmour swinging from it for scale I hadn't realised how big it was.  And there were some photos of plaster models Epstein did for the BMA.  The second room had sculptures from different civilisations in prehistoric times interposed with modern works, and was great fun.  I loved the forepart of a running leopard from 350BC and the Eric Gill relief of nude girl with hair, and torso of a very flighty girl with more hair, and several other things, and began to feel warm and happy and that this was more like it.  Room 3 had a monumental Epstein Adam (with enormous genitalia) and a small sly Henry Moore serpent, and something I've never seen before, which was a sign on the wall about the hessian covered bench, which was a copy of a bench at some earlier exhibition and we were invited to sit on it.  In the next room we took a leap back to the nineteenth century, with queen Victoria sitting in a vast and rumpled dress under a crown-cum-canopy, looking not at all amused, and three other figures which I think I was supposed to compare and contrast.  One was Lord Frederic Leighton's 1877 take on a muscular nude athlete wrestling with a python, the next a twentieth century muscular, nude and very shiny Adam, with tiny genitalia and no phallic python, who might as well have been from 1877, and the third was Genghis Khan, represented as a purple plastic teepee with bat wings.  That was bit odd but I could cope.  Then there were some very beautiful Chinese plain celadon and cream ceramics from between 600 and 1100, unbelievably thin and delicate and strangely modern (which I had seen before in the excellent new ceramics room at the British Museum, but they are so beautiful I could look at them any number of times).  On the other side of the room were some twentieth century British pots, chunkier but some good strong plain shapes, though I'm not sure I could tell the difference between them and the pots everybody seemed to have in their houses in my village in east Devon in the 1960s (it was quite an arty village).  And there was Barbara Hepworth's Pelagos, which I love.  I first saw it when the Tate was only at Millbank, then it was briefly in Tate Modern and I saw it there, before moving to Tate St Ives, which is fair enough, and I saw it there, so I was very pleased it had come to London, as it's a long way to St Ives.  In the next room was a large Barbara Hepworth abstract scupture, a bronze wedge with a hole near the top, which was perfect. The surface was pitted and mottled in a thousand shades of green and grey and the shape was subtle and absolutely right, the thickness of the piece varying across it like the fin of a submarine or the head of a whale, and the hole in exactly the right place.  Its companion in the room was a Henry Moore reclining figure, and we were meant to contrast the abstract and figurative approaches to sculpture, but what would have been more illuminating would have been to get half a dozen of the lifeless abstract Hepworth rip-offs that get marketed as garden ornaments, and explain why the real thing was so much better.

Then it began to go downhill.  There was an Anthony Caro exploration of horizontals and verticals, which was made of flat bits of metal and long bits of metal welded together and painted, which looked vaguely like the half assembled beginning of some bizarre machine tool, but it was red and very shiny.  If you accidentally stepped over the demarcation line around it the attendant leapt at you anxiously.  There were coloured perspex rectangles strung together, which you were allowed to walk among without a guard warning you off, and I did wonder what the conceptual difference was between them and the Mexican laundromat fluff, apart from the fact that the perpex was coloured and more interactive.  Then there was the Damien Hirst abandoned barbecue and white plastic furniture in a perspex box, full of live flies.  Look, I know that food goes off and that flies will breed in it given half a chance.  I have a fridge and a vegetable peelings bin.  There was half an apple and half a pear, stuck together and suspended from the ceiling.  I've lost count of the number of times I've had to explain to people that no, their pear tree will not pollinate their apple, and no, nor will their plum tree, yes, they do need two apples.  Two different apples.  I'm not sure what the artist's point was there, but I think I'm ahead of him.  And there was the line of white chalk stones.  I think this was meant to make us think about landscapes, or remind us they exist.  And the pile of bricks stacked up (inside a white line, naturally) and the row of painted metal bars lined up.  I've got a pile of left-over engineering bricks stacked outside the shed, and a pile of planks waiting to be used in the decking.  They Are Not Art.  When I got to the perspex coffee table with 2000 maltesers in plastic bags on top and a skateboard-like construction underneath I lost all patience, if not the will to live, so I probably didn't give the last room the attention it deserved.  This had a lot of page 3 models stuck up on one wall, and a lot of newspaper clippings about sculpture on the opposite wall, but I couldn't be bothered to work out what the point was, apart from the fact that art might be very subjective.

If you want to go and see these for yourself these are the details.
Gabriel Orozco at Tate Modern
Modern British Sculpture at the RA

I've got a season ticket to both galleries, and it was too wet to garden anyway, and each exhibition had a few beautiful or thought-provoking things in it, so I wouldn't say I grudged the day out, but I did have to wade through a lot of what I rather suspect was pretentious guff.