Today Jeremy and I took the coach in
to London to
visit the Tate
Modern. We thought we had already missed the 2001 exhibit
Surrealism: Desire
Unbound, but no! we were in luck. Some four hours later we
tottered out, tired and £8·50 poorer but greatly edified. They
had one room which was basically gossip about the Surrealist
movement members, illustrated with the books of poetry or
collage or photographs that resulted. Considering how chaste
the period in question (1930s, 1940s) is usually represented in
modern fiction, it’s interesting how many permutations they
came up with: many in the Surrealism movement believed in what
was then called free love and nowadays sometimes called polyamory. The
sections on erotic
art and erotic
objects was good fun. Those crazy Czechs with their lewd
photomontages and unspellable names! Jeremy was
annoyed that work by female Surrealists got little
mention except in the
room about Surrealism’s depiction of women.
This despite the women’s work being often being more
interesting to the modern eye—the men’s talk of
muses and idealized lovers looking more dated today (it was more
radical in, say, 1930). Bought a floppy clock (the Tate is
taking the opportunity to sell more interesting merchandise) and
then tried to figure out from where one was supposed to view the Juan
Muñoz installation. First we looked down at it from the
highest gallery level, but eventually we worked out you are
supposed to look at it from below! By this time the gallery was
closing so we
staggered home feeling very culturally stimulated.
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’
