London calling
We spent Sunday in London. First to see Marsyas, Anish Kapoor’s giant red sculpture in the Tate Modern (this year’s Unilever Series installation). As Pete points out, it is very big, designed to look like it had to be positively rammed in to the Turbine Hall and almost didn’t fit. The title suggests that it is (part of) the flayed skin of a mythological figure, represented in Jack Kirby style as a titanic giant.
We only stayed a moment, because we were really there to see the Turner Prize exhibits at the Tate Britain. The place has been extensively remodelled since we last visited—even the route from the tube stop to the entrance was different—using similar white creamy stone to the British Museum refit. Jeremy and I liked the Turner Prize stuff.
I really liked Keith Tyson’s collection of poster-sized sketches of crazy ideas and images. (One of the complaints people were making in the comments room was that modern artists cannot draw. This is patently not the case Keith Tyson’s idea-posters.) His three-dimensional works start in poster form—in this case he had the diagram for The Thinker (After Rodin) and the sculpture itself in the same room. His Thinker is sort of the reverse of Rodin’s: instead of representing the appearance of a person thinking, it does something that represents the thinking itself: there is a computer system inside the column running a virtual world simulation. If you put your ear to the column you can hear its ‘thoughts’.
To round off the cultural evening we watched the low-budget British post-apocalyptic movie 28 Days Later. Afterwards as we walked home we passed some of the landmarks from the deserted London of the film...
[Written 2002-11-06]
Update (2003-03-08): Corrected the spelling of Anish Kapoor’s name and ‘Marsyas’