Tate

2010-11-21T23:37:43Z

I wanted to go and see the Eadweard Muybridge exhibition, and the Turner Prize shortlist, if only to see the Otolith Group entry. Tate Britain offered a number of different exhibition combinations, but not Muybridge and Turner Prize, so I was forced to see the Rachel Whiteread drawings.

Let's dispense with her - here's her drawing of a floor, and of wall paper ... okay, more interesting are designs for sculptures, such as House and the Fourth Plinth, and various found objects, but whilst it's sort of fascinating to see someone drawing a keyhole rather than a lock, I find the other people in the exhibition more interesting than the exhibition itself.

Muybridge, though... First, let me warn you there is NUDITY, yes, NUDITY. Not rope stuck up the jacksie nudity of Mapplethorpe, but among the action photographs Muybridge took are athletes in the altogether. And this includes self portraits at 56. Given each of these pictures is about 2cm by 3cm I cannot help think that this is over reaction. One hopes all the nudes in Tate Britain are similarly warned about.

Muybridge is most famous for the invention of bullet time a century or more before The Matrix - images of horses, dogs, elephants, athletes and such like in action, with some of these then animated zoopraxiscope style. I see there is more of these in the Kingston museum, which demands a visit early next year. He also did action photographs of throwing buckets of water - capturing movement in stillness.

But that's the second half of his career. He also travelled extensively in the Western US, taking landscapes and stereoscopic photographs of Yosemite, Alaska, San Francisco and so forth, including native Americans (of the Tlingit variety, among others). His waterfalls an lighthouses are very striking, as is his anthropological stuff. The discovery that he had a business on Montgomery Street triggers a vague memory of PKD's address at some point, and his association with Leland Stanford triggers something about androids. There's also stupendous panoramas of San Francisco c. 1878. Astonishing.

The four artists on the the shortlist for the Turner Prize are Susan Philipsz, Angela de la Cruz, Dexter Dalwood and the Otolith Group. Philipsz offers soundscapes - folk songs sung through three speakers in an otherwise empty room. I could take or leave; I'm guessing you need to spend an hour listening. I couldn't be bothered. de la Cruz offers single colour canvases, which are then crunched up. Clever clever but not clever. Cute. Although they look vaguely kinky. Dalwood offers traditional canvases, and is my favourite, although probably he won't win. He's inspired by various novels and novelists, and there's a nice political edge. The Otolith Group are Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun (he of the book More Brilliant than the Sun on Sun Ra etc) and offers sf - they've dressed up as aliens before. Here we have a dozen screens showing episodes of a Chris Marker documentary on Greek culture and philosophy (each is 26 mins - you can't see them all) and a film which public service announcement starts on the hour and is about 50 mins. The film is based upon the conceit of filming an unrealised Sanjit Ray script The Alien, and is a mixture of found footage, clips from Ray and new stuff, mostly trying to cast the various parts, which include Arthur C. Clarke. When you hear the words "Its a not an easy thing to meet one's maker" an "I want more life, father", you wonder if Ridley Scott is reaching for his lawyer. I suspect it's half an hour too long - but then I tend to find that I get the point of video art long before it finishes.

In the meantime, I found a copy of a book secondhand which is the first step in a little artistic project of my own. Only another dozen copies to find.

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Moore and Nash

2010-02-28T00:35:41Z

I tried a new walking route to Tate Britain – via a coffee bar to email some marks back to HQ, and the Oxfam – but whilst it cuts most of Horseferry Road off, it doesn’t feel wicker. It does feel quicker than going by tube to St James’s Park or Pimlico. I was there to see the new Henry Moore, as part one of a two pronged art day.

I suspect he had got bit mixed up in my head with Barbara Hepworth, as I guess his signature style is the melted reclining figure. It helped that I had seen the Picasso at the National Gallery and the Epstein/Gill etc at the RAA, because it gave it a certain amount of context. For a start there’s the interest in so-called primitive arts and African masks – it would have been neat to see some of the artifacts from the British Museum which had influenced Moore, but I think it was clear enough. Already you are clearly in a realm of ugly beauty, and this is confirmed by a room of mother and child sculptures and preparatory drawings. These are very different from the Gill Madonna and childs, which tended to the cuboid, whereas these are more … organic, flowing, curved. A note suggests that Moore enjoyed the challenge of big object/little object, but sometimes the mother is reduced to a breast. Other times the figures merge into each other.

This leads obviously into his modernist 1930s, where some of the shapes are mere sensuous form – and very beautiful, even when made from concrete. One reclining figure has broken – was always already broken – into four pieces. The bigger modernism room features standing figures – many of which have designs scratched into them, more abstracted reclining figures, some large and made from stone or plaster, some smaller and made from lead or bronze. One standing stone has the rippled pattern of a beach on its reverse. In one corner are a series of stringed sculptures – carving connected by a network of wires – which again are astounding, but I’m not clear whether these were preparatory maquettes or finished items.

It’s the next room which is the deal maker – Moore’s war work. In part it is drawings of people sheltering from the blitz in the underground, in part it is coal miners at his father’s pit. These are visions into hell, with a terrible beauty – people asleep, people bathing, people working. Particularly striking is the drawing – with chalk – of hundred of people on the underground lines themselves.

The war and its consequences are in the penultimate room, which features statues of wounded warriors, a couple of which are extremely moving. There are more reclining figures – here the material is usually plaster – and warrior’s helmets. There is a strange bronze mushroom, which points to the atom bomb, although I’m not yet clear which point it is trying to make.

After this the final room is a bit of an anticlimax – more reclining figures, carved out of elm. I guess here the niceties of the gallery work against the work – not only do these feel like they need an outdoor space, but one longs to touch and caress.

But all in all a fantastic collection of items, and I must read the catalogue.

I walked to St James’s to catch a tube to London Bridge and thence to Dulwich. In future I will stick to the train from Victoria.

I knew little about Paul Nash, aside from seeing a plaque at Rye, but he was a British surrealist and war artist. I’d planned to see this exhibition, but I’d misread the calendar and assumed it closed in March rather than May.

The Dulwich Picture Gallery special exhibition space is a long narrow one, with larger rooms at each end. I believe I’ve been there at least twice – a fantasy one and something I forget now (annoying! something Pre-Raph? Byrne-Jones?). The fantasy one was crowded with prams – which reminds me, a bemused toddler was being pushed around the Moore and was probably being scarred for life.

Many of Nash’s paintings are double exposures – a room and a seascape, the pyramids out at sea, a pile of crashed German planes and the sea. A landscape of Ypres becomes something sullen and brooding. Dymchurch is repeated transformed and altered, and filled with viewpoints to infinity. I guess one of his most famous paintings is of a bird looking into a mirror at the seaside. Disturbing.

He’s not a great painter, and his photos shown here don’t make him a great photographer, but it’s fascinating to see the abstract changes he wreaks upon St Pancras Station or a Gloucestershire landscape. Whereas his friend and contemporary Ben Nicholson fuses landscape and still life in minimalism, Nash fuses the two in surrealism. I need a further look.

I took the long way out of the gallery and to the other station, but I need the exercise. In retrospect I should have gone to Bromley South and caught a train home, I went back to London in hope of getting food – the train ran late and I got lost in Victoria Station, not being used to those platforms and unable to get my bearings. As it was I grabbed a sandwich and nearly missed the train as the cashier didn’t know how to work the till.

But a great day over all, and I even have an idea for a paper for the comics, surrealism and sf conference next year.

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