four exhibitions

It was raining lightly this morning when I got up.  Looking at the electronic weather station I saw that we'd had 28.9mm of rain in the previous 24 hours (that's over an inch in old money, or more than 5% of our expected annual total).  I'd been thinking I might go up to London to see some art exhibitions, unless the rain moved through unexpectedly quickly, and while it had rained a good deal in the night, it didn't look as though I was going to get a dry day to get on with the gardening, and the garden was going to be sodden anyway, so I thought I'd stick to Plan A.

The big tabby had a partridge last night.  The Systems Administrator blocked the cat door so that he couldn't eat it in the hall, and when I went out to let the chickens into their run, I found that he'd eaten it on the doorstep.  He'd left the wings, both legs (so I know it was a red legged partridge and not the rarer grey one) and, rather bizarrely, the head, which was sitting upright outside the front door like the head of John the Baptist upon a platter.

The A12 was blocked by rainwater at Kelvedon.  I knew that from reading the news on the net before setting out, and the SA heard on the traffic report on R2.  The electronic traffic news sign on the Colchester inner ring road didn't see fit to warn drivers of the delay, or alternatively let them know that the road was now clear, instead exhorting us to plan ahead for our journey during the Olympics.  I have already planned ahead, my plan being that from mid July at the latest until after our holiday in September I don't intend to go anywhere near London.

The first leg of my art trip took me to Dulwich.  I love the Dulwich Picture Gallery, a little gem designed by Sir John Soane and Britain's first purpose built art gallery.  I like Dulwich, too, once I get there.  It is reassuringly bourgeois and leafy.  In general I don't like south of the river.  The actual south bank is OK, along the stretch from Blackfriars Bridge past the Tate and the Royal Festival Hall and up to Hungerford Bridge, but I get twitchy as soon as I can't see the Thames and the north bank.  Peckham makes me think of Alexei Sayle in a tight suit, and Damilola Taylor.  Today everybody was very respectable, though the ticket inspectors on the train were hunting in pairs.

The Dulwich Picture Gallery has a nice cafe.  When I went there on a sunny day not long after their Canaletto exhibition opened it was completely full, but today it wasn't, and I had a smoked salmon bagel and a pot of tea, then got on with the real business of the day, which was a show of Indian ragamala paintings, and a small assemblage of Van Dykes.  Ragamalas are miniatures, painted to illustrate pieces of music called ragas.  The pictures were tiny, detailed and jewel like in their colours and clarity, and we were encouraged to borrow one of the supply of magnifying glasses to examine them more closely.  I did, and marvelled at the faces, clothes and jewels of the little people, and the animals and plants.  I find Hindu mythology utterly baffling, when I have tried to read about it, so decided not to worry about why some gods were blue, and so on, and just enjoy the images.  It is not a big exhibition, with a couple of dozen pictures in it, which is about the right number.  My eyes and brain couldn't have coped with any more, and I was getting a stiff arm holding up the magnifying glass.  It's lucky it wasn't busier, as only one person at a time could really examine each picture.

Van Dyke in Sicily is not a large exhibition either, and going into it from the Indian pictures you rather confusingly start in room 3 of three, and are confronted with half a dozen Saint Rosalias casting their eyes up to heaven as they intercede on behalf of Palermo in time of plague.  Working my way back to the start, I found three splendid portraits, an early self-portrait, a merchant with magnificant curling moustaches, and Emanuel Philibert of Savoy in armour.  In a coup de theatre the gallery had managed to borrow the original armour shown in the portrait, though by now the gilding has largely rubbed off and it does not look so gorgeous as it did in 1624.  The room guide warned everyone coming in the front was that the armour was alarmed, but that you had to get very close to it to set it off, but coming in the back way via Saint Rosalia I escaped the warning.  The armour is tiny, and Emanuel Philibert must have been a little chap, but he looks every inch the nobleman and governor, which he was, until dying of the plague only a few months after Van Dyke painted him.  Then there are a couple of devotional portraits and a sketch and cut-down painting of a great woman artist in her old age, and the Rosalias.  She was extremely pious and lived in a cave, and her bones were thought to be a defence against plague, though it doesn't sound as though they worked.  I really like Van Dyke, and I liked this excursion into the Sicilian phase of his career, my only caveat being that there is an egregious misuse of the word 'decimated' in the introductory paragraph about the plague, and that the captions for some of the pictures are in a small font hung at hip level.

Both of these exhibitions are on until May 27th, so you have time to visit them, but not loads of time.  If you are going all the trouble of getting yourself to Dulwich it's worth having a look at the gallery's permanent collection while you're there, as they have a fine set of Old Masters, some good eighteenth century English portraits, and some Dutch landscapes.

Rolling back into London Bridge station I debated whether to head home, and get a train ahead of the peak time ban on cheap day returns, or go to Tate Modern.  I opted for the Tate, since I'm running out of time to see various things, and I thought I might as well get maximum value out of the train ticket.  The SA is out tonight anyway for a curry (which should have been preceded by a cricket match, but rain stopped play for the second time in a fortnight).  Tate Britain is showing the work of a Japanese artist I'd never heard of, until I heard about this exhibition, but is sounded interesting.  Her name is Yayoi Kusama.  She was born in 1929, worked in America in the 1960s, then returned to Japan, where after a few years she voluntarily admitted herself to a mental hospital, but continued to work.  The booklet (I love it that the Tate gives its supporters a booklet with their free exhibition entry) says that she is perhaps Japan's best-know living artist, which proves that I know nothing about Japanese contemporary art.  I found some of her work very interesting and beautiful, and some not, which wan't surprising.  Some of her early monochrome paintings have an eerie calm that I could look at for a long time, and some of her late ones have a joyous vibrancy that reminded me strangely of the banks of brightly coloured late Hockneys in his recent show at the RA.  My favourite thing was the Infinity Mirrored Room at the very end of the exhibition.  Walls and ceiling are covered with mirrors, and strings of small globes hang from the ceiling, with a pathway for visitors to move through the room.  Inside the globes are coloured lights, presumably LEDs, which change colour, interposed with brief periods of darkness.  They turn red, yellow, pink, green, blue and green, and are reflected in the walls and ceiling, as are the viewers, so that one moment you see a dozen of yourself among a cheerful infinity of glowing yellow lights, then the lights turn yellow and green, or all blue, or blue and red.  Mirrored installations, and indeed dots, are a recurring theme for Kasuma, who has experienced visual hallucinations since childhood, and the installation does indeed 'invite the viewer to suspend his or her sense of self and accompany Kusama on her ongoing journey of self-obliteration'.  It is also quite extraordinarily pretty.  You have until 5 June to catch this one, and it is worth seeing.

As I was there, and I couldn't get a train for another hour and a half, I wandered into Alighiero Boetti.  The first room included objects like a roll of cardboard, and I began to nurse hostile feelings towards Boetii, though I liked the two illuminated red and white signs either side of a doorway which came on alternately, one saying Ping and the other Pong, but two rooms on came to some bits I really liked.  Boetti was interested in maps, and politics, and came up with the idea of colouring in countries on a map with their national flag, but doing it a lot of times and on a grand scale.  As politics move on and national boundaries and symbols change, so do the maps.  Boetti drew up what he wanted, in terms of choosing which map projection to use and specifying the latest flags, then handed the whole project over to Afghan embroiderers, who made his ideas into huge embroideries.  The end results were sometimes unexpected, as in the time when one world map came back with pink seas.  Afghanistan is a land-locked country, the embroiderers had a lot of pink thread, and the idea of the sea didn't occur to them.  I've always liked textiles and maps, and thought that these were completely wonderful, though I gather the Italian avant-guard art establishment wasn't immediately convinced at the time.  In the next room a set of kilims were made using one hundred squares, arranged in a ten by ten grid, each square divided into one hundred smaller squares.  One of the hundred larger squares had one black small square and ninety-nine white, the next two black, and so on.  Boetti left it to the discretion of his kilim makers to choose their arrangements of large and small squares.  The results, arranged within colourful borders, were almost infinitely varied, rhythmic and subtle.  I really liked the kilims.  Then there's lots more stuff, some quite interesting, some not, but it's worth going just for the maps and the carpets.

I'd love to hear Grayson Perry's or David Hockney's views on Boetti's textile works.  Both of them believe that it is important for the artist to have physically made their work.  Boetti's textiles don't even use studio assistants working under his supervision, but crafts people in a different continent, and he gave them guiding principles, but a lot of discretion about how they interpreted them.  My hunch is that Perry and Hockney wouldn't mind, in Boetti's case.

I didn't go to see Damian Hirst, and I don't think I'll bother.  I know you shouldn't condemn something without seeing it (although actually we do that all the time.  Most right-minded liberals are against murder, torture, or cannibalism without having personally tried them first, and concluded that they are a Bad Idea).  I think Damian Hirst is a Bad Idea, and I am going to vote with my feet.