art in the east end

I went yesterday to the Whitechapel Art Gallery, in yet another case of catching something I wanted to see which was going to end soon.  If I made New Year’s resolutions then my one for 2012 ought to have been to get more organised.  I’d promised my uncle that I’d go to my aunt’s lunchtime recital, so I went to Whitechapel via Wesley’s chapel.  The concert started with a piece for cello and piano by a contemporary of Brahms called Albert Dietrich, who used to be famous in his day but has sunk almost without trace.  Unfortunately the concert organiser had omitted to copy the copious notes my uncle had prepared, so the audience left no wiser about Dietrich than they were at the beginning, apart from having heard his Sonata in C major.  Then there was some Faure.  My aunt did not think the Dietrich went so well as it had at the run-through, and my uncle was preoccupied because my aunt was unhappy, and cross that his programme notes had got lost, so the effort I'd made to travel up to town went largely unappreciated by my relations.

I knew that bits of the East End were now very trendy, with prices to match (a far cry from the days when my grandfather grew up there), but I hadn’t seen it for myself, until cutting through from Wesley’s chapel to Whitechapel High Street via the Commercial Road.  Blimey, there are some posh shops and eateries round the back of Spitalfields.  The trendy bits seem to pop up among the unreconstructed areas like currants in a bun, so one minute I was walking past uber-cool clothes shops and delis, and the next minute back in the Tower Hamlets that is the most derived borough in the country.

The Whitechapel Gallery is a lovely art gallery.  I’ve said so before.  It is a very nice, quiet, soothing space.  I feel good just being in the building.  It has the best art gallery café I know.  Lemon polenta cake yesterday, yummy (I love the slight grittiness).  The main draw for me was the third selection of works from the Government Art Collection (I missed part two), this time chosen by Simon Schama.  The Government has managed to acquire an eclectic set of art, and the current offering has everything from a neon installation to a portrait of Admiral Nelson after his victory at the battle of the Nile.  My favourite thing in the room was probably Grayson Perry’s Map of an Englishman.  Drawn in the style of a Tudor map, from a distance it looks just like the real thing, showing an island with estuaries, mountains, and trees.  There are pictures of little buildings and towns, and the whole thing looks very English, until you read the captions and find that the regions are called Normal, Myth, Posh and Guru, the seas off the coast called Paranoia, Anorexia Nervosa, and Schizophrenia, and the names of the buildings and towns are all states of mind or human behaviours.  It was funny and clever and I’d have liked to buy the poster, but there weren’t any.  Goodness knows if it’s Art, but who cares?

The Government Art Collection exhibition (which only takes up one room, it’s not big) comes with a chunky free booklet, telling you something about Simon Schama’s thought-processes in making his selection, and a bit about each individual work, including where each one is normally hung, a detail that gives an extra layer of interest to the show.  In the Cabinet Office they go in for modern, conceptual pieces (though they do also have Lord Nelson).  A Howard Hodgkin oil painting titled Mud on the Nile normally lives in our ambassador’s residence in Cairo, while the Government Office for the East of England in Cambridge has to make do with a giant colour photograph of allotments in Ely.  It’s great fun. You have until 26 February to see it, then twelve works from number 10 Downing Street, selected by number 10 staff, go on show from 9 March.

The other thing I particularly wanted to catch was a meta-exhibition, a show about a show the Whitechapel did in 1961 of Rothko’s work.  I went to the Rothko exhibition at the Tate a while back and loved it.  I went twice, and if only I’d still been working in the City I’d have gone every week.  Nothing much seems to be happening in those huge canvases, and yet everything is happening.  I could look at them for hours.  There is just one smallish Rothko at the current Whitechapel show, a red and black one, plus photographs of visitors to the original 1961 exhibition, looking grave and absorbed and wearing amazing 1960s hairstyles and spectacles.  There are letters between Rothko and various UK artists and gallery directors discussing the arrangements for that show, a visit Rothko made to the UK, the Tate’s first purchase of a Rothko, and his subsequent gift to them of the Seagram murals.  Rothko was very particular about how his paintings should be hung, at what height from the floor, against what shade of white paint, and how they should be lit, suffuse moderately bright ambient light please and definitely no spot lights.  He rejected the claim by one friend and admirer that his great canvases were like great calm windows in a cathedral, saying that on the contrary they were full of rage and turmoil.  Three months after making his gift to the Tate he killed himself.

There were some other things on as well, but by then I was very tired and not in the mood, so I gave up.  I was able to go straight home instead of hanging around London for another hour and three quarters, because the new railway company on the Colchester line is so far following the example of their predecessor, and lifting the evening restrictions on cheap day travel for half term week.  A friend discovered this wrinkle in the ticketing system a couple of years ago, and it makes a huge difference.  My train home was not full when it left Liverpool Street, and while I see that season ticket holders who have to make the journey every day should get priority for seats during the rush hour, I wish the train company would take a less sweeping view of when the rush hour is.  Normally I can’t get any train home between 4.15pm and 6.44pm.  A quarter past four is too early.  It really limits how much the day-tripper can fit into their trip to town, and most office workers don’t leave their desks for at least another three quarters of an hour after that.  The alternative of hanging around London until quarter to seven can be utterly dismal.  Fine on a sunny summer’s day, when you can sit outside with a book, OK if you are with somebody, miserable on a chilly day in February when you are tired and at the tail end of a cold.

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.