a day at the British Museum

I went to London today.  A bit like the last time I went to London, I felt so coldy I probably wouldn't have gone if I hadn't already got something arranged, but I had tickets for a couple of exhibitions at the British Museum.  It seemed a pity to waste them, and as one of the shows closes fairly soon it was a case of probably not seeing it if I didn't go this week.  And it seemed better than rattling around the house on my own, aware of the absence of the cat and the unworkable, frozen, still snow covered garden.  (The Systems Administrator has disappeared off on a mission to explain spreadsheets to a former colleague and old friend who has recently become the treasurer of his local cricket club.  Then they were going to go to the racing at Ludlow.  The snow has scuppered that, but by then they'd booked a hotel so thought they might as well go to Ludlow anyway.  It has a very interesting castle.  Prince Arthur died there, thus leaving his younger brother Henry to marry Arthur's widow Catherine.  You could call it the birthplace of the Reformation).

The first exhibition I went to was the Grayson Perry curated The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman.  This has been extended until 26 February so there is still time to go and see it.  I enjoyed it very much.  The convenient shorthand often used to describe Grayson Perry is 'the transvestite potter', which I suppose he is, much as A.E. Houseman was a suppressed homosexual versifier or Vita Sackville-West a bisexual essayist and gardener.  Some angry critics have described him as a charlatan.  I don't know about that.  He's come across as an entertaining and thought-provoking man in interviews with him I've read, and that was my reaction to his exhibition.  Grayson Perry has got the measure of his audience, since the first object inside the exhibition is a pot decorated with museum visitors with speech bubbles coming from their heads.  I try to keep up with what's going on in the arts.  It is an almost spiritual experience.  The Times website says it is a must-see *****.  It is the kind of thing people like me go and see.  Ouch, Grayson Perry has got my measure, and that of the nay-sayers who regard him as a joke or a fraud, judging by the less adulatory speech bubbles.  I don't think he's too fussed.

The format of the show is that objects chosen by Perry from the BM's collection are displayed alongside new works by him, so an Asante helmet, decorated with small horns and feathers, sits alongside a Grayson Perry Early English motorcycle helmet in dull aluminium.  The ramshorn ear defenders look quite ancient, the motorcycle crest on the top less so.  A medieval lead alloy pilgrim badge is displayed above a set of twentieth century ones, including a couple celebrating 15 years of the twinning of Havering with Ludwigshafen.  He is interested in the themes of pilgrimage, shrines, maps, the power we invest in objects,the way that one culture plays on another, and representations of sexuality and danger in art.  These are all big, serious themes, and I can't see that an academic curator would necessarily have come up with a better list, though they might have omitted the teddy bear fixation.  Perry plays with the idea of a museum as a modern shrine to self-improvement, or as a tomb, given that so many of the things in it were taken from tombs.  He likes maps especially when they are maps of ideas and the imagination, rather than a literal exercise in how to get from A to B.  He coins some good phrases.  Everything in the British Museum was contemporary once.

I found myself looking with a keener eye at many of the museum artifacts than I think I would have done if I'd encountered them along with dozens of similar items from their own culture in a strict and purist anthropological setting.  There is a strange Boli figure from Mali, made out of mud and hair, shaped liked a huge guinea pig or coypu (which are not even African animals but that's what it looked like) next to an elaborate Congolese power figure decorated with rags and feathers, plus a Grayson Perry skull drawing on the aesthetics of Goth horror (not generally my favourite) and covered, when you look closely, with images of the English heritage industry, buses, Tudor ruffs, and heraldic lions.  There are several more Grayson Perry pots, him being a potter, one examining his ideas of Africa, entitled I have never been to Africa, and a couple poking irreverent fun at the UK buzzwords of early 2011, and the ideas behind the British Museum.

The show finishes with a homage to craftsmanship, the long and sympathetic hands-on relationship with materials.  A relaxed, humble, ever-curious love of stuff is central to my idea of being an artist, says Grayson Perry.  Funny, David Hockney has just said something rather similar.  It looks like a manifesto is brewing.  The centre-piece of the final part of the show is a ship that seems to owe much to the aesthetics of Pirates of the Caribbean, called The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, its central cargo a quarter of a million year old flint hand axe.  Grayson Perry certainly knows how to do astonishingly kitsch.  The pots, on the other hand, are not kitsch.  Elegant, funny, thought-provoking, but not kitsch.  I left with my brain buzzing with ideas, which was presumably the idea.  Getting off the train at Colchester a stranger, seeing my British Museum shop bag, asked enthusiastically whether I'd been to the Grayson Perry.  Turned out she went last week, and loved it.  I should say that was evidence of a good show.

My thoughts on Hajj, which I saw next, will have to wait until another time, as will the buzzing thoughts, since it is now late, and I'm tired and want my supper (left-over cold sausage) and the chest cold is pressing in with a vengeance.  It was worth going to London to see that, but possibly not sensible.

a day at the museum

I took a day off from the gardening, and went with a friend to see the Afghanistan exhibition at The British Museum.  It is really good, and for once I wasn't rushing to catch something in its final week.  This one runs until 3 July, so there's still plenty of time to go and see it.  I find it a fascinating part of the world anyway, from the pages of Eric Newby, Colin Thubron, Peter Hopkirk and Frances Wood, and the plant collectors who worked in that region, so I was keen to go.The exhibition isn't large, but thoughtfully put together with some beautiful and fascinating objects.  One aim is to get visitors to think about Afghanistan as a place of history and culture, and not just the site of an endless series of wars, and it certainly does that. 

We watched the short introductory film, which sets the scene in terms of where the objects came from and when they were found, and the mixture of influences that worked on the region, crossed by trade routes and bordered by the Persian empire on one side, the Indian subcontinent the other, and the Steppes, and invaded at one time by Alexander the Great.  Tribute is paid to the bravery and foresight of Afghan museum staff who hid and so preserved their collections as the Taliban approached.  Then there are four rooms, each covering a different archeological site, with some useful explanatory maps and text plus the objects themselves.  These are made of gold, stone, glass, ivory, plaster and ceramic, and include drinking vessels, bits of masonry and furniture, statues and jewellery.  The gold crown that features on the front of the exhibition literature was recovered from a nomad grave, and can be disassembled into sections for ease of transport.  It is decorated with many dangling discs of gold, and although protected inside a glass case is mounted in such a way that it vibrates in response to the visitors' footfall, so you see the little discs dance as they might have when it was worn, which is a very nice touch.

Although I never saw a flat-pack crown before, I'm afraid there is little new under the sun.  The skull of the nomad princess in whose tomb the crown was found was slightly deformed, said to be the result of tight binding of the skull, common among high-ranking people at that time.  Wouldn't she have had a constant headache?  The ability of people throughout the ages to make themselves deliberately uncomfortable is quite depressing.  There was also a pair of gold shoe soles, the leather shoes to which they were stitched having long since rotted away.  Rubbish for walking but good for display sitting down.  Shoe designer Christian Louboutin, who is currently sueing Yves Saint Laurent over breach of copyright for his trademark red soles, says that no-one before him has ever used a coloured sole to define a brand's identity.  The first century AD Afghan nomads may not have called it a brand, but they knew the impact of a brightly coloured sole.

My friend introduced me to not one but two new (to me) eateries.  We had coffee in the mezzanine layer of the cafe which has mysteriously appeared inside the Royal Exchange building in the eleven years since the City ceased to be my normal stamping ground.  The architecture is grand, and the coffee and bun were very nice too.  I think we might have been the only people there not talking shop.  Almost everyone else had a laptop and folders, and I'm sure there were quite a few soundings-out about jobs going on.  After looking at the Afghans, which gave us time to work off the buns, we had a curry at masala zone in Covent Garden, which is one of a small London chain.  I had a vegetarian thali, and liked the indian puppets that hang all over the ceiling.  I don't know if all their restaurants have puppets, but the food is jolly good, the atmosphere cheerful, and the late lunch crowd seemed to merge seamlessly with the pre-theatre crowd so we didn't feel silly ordering lunch at 3pm and sitting there chatting until after five.  My friend, who has been there several times, says the food is always good, and it is very reasonable value for central London, so I'd recommend it highly.  If you like curry.  And do try the masala chai.  It's delicious.  The restrictions on cheap tickets on homewards trains were lifted for the school holidays, so we had the luxury of not having to plan the afternoon against the clock.

After that things took a turn for the worse, as the train back to Colchester was an hour late getting in (actually, I hope it was a full hour and not only 58 minutes, then I can put in a delay repay claim for half of my ticket price instead of only a quarter).  As I sat down at the kitchen table to compose my considered thoughts on my grand day out, I heard creaking noises from the upstairs floorboards.  As the Systems Administrator is out with former colleagues eating steak, this meant either burglars or a cat locked in the bedroom.  I counted the cats and was sans Our Ginger, so ventured upstairs without taking the poker.  He has eaten some more of the bedroom carpet just inside the door, and done something horrible in the middle of the duvet.  Hey ho.  If my syntax is more mangled and my spelling more erratic than usual, it's been a long day, and I still have to sort out the bedclothes.