Why This Is Hell

I stumbled, by chance, onto there being a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition in Sheffield, as part of the Tate/National Galleries of Scotland Artists Room tour - of which Beuys at Bexhill was a part. Having got all excited about a Richard Dadd exhibition at Dulwich, only to find the thing was cancelled made me suspicious of a lack of mention of the event on the Graves Gallery website. Searching around the innards, there was a news story, but no other mention - and the Artists Room website, which now should be covering events into 2011, left a little to be desired. I used the contact-us form but heard nothing back from Sheffield, and somehow never found time to ring. Ah well, I thought, at least the Comedians exhibition will be of interest.

It might be that the good people of Sheffield - perhaps - took fright at a exhibition of a photograph who had taken a self-portrait with a whip handle stuck up his own (excuse me), and whose section in the Barbican sex exhibition was hedged with even more warnings than any of the, yanno, female nudes elsewhere. But surely such things would be checked out in advance?

Let's go to Sheffield, anyway.

( Let's see if I waste my time )

In the next two rooms are the Comedians, and in some ways you'd have expected keeping the two areas distinct. This is National Portrait Gallery stuff - and was so-so. It seems as if there were no female comedians prior to Victoria Wood - when you expect there would be images of the music hall stars and Gracie Fields and so forth. It's not as if there were no obscure figures - but I think they needed more early stuff.

But it also strikes me that I'm not that interested in portraiture - the Gay Icons exhibition at the NPG was okay, but could have been (and was) a book - but I'm not sure it adds anything to my knowledge of the world. There's no real information on who was taking the pictures - they were credite, but who were they - who were the artists? I don't think it quite ticks my boxes, and I take few portraits myself.