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jaeleslie at 06:45pm on 16/11/2002
jaeleslie at 06:45pm on 16/11/2002Another Friday study group, and this time I had just gotten my photos developed from my trip to Britain and put them all in an album in some kind of order! I just got back Monday, after one of those thirty-hour days that the time-change will do for you, and I am still waking up at improbably early hours and falling asleep awfully early. I went to quite a number of galleries and took photos and bought postcards and made notes of what I saw. (Well, okay, half my photos were of Warwick Castle, which is pronounced by the way Warrick (for those of you to whom this is not intuitively obvious), where I had a great time climbing four of the five towers and checking the peacock garden and the Capability Brown landscapes and the great views of autumn color.)
So my friends in our study group let me rant a bit about what I saw at (1) the New Art Gallery at Walsall, housing a collection now available to the local community from bequest of the sculptor Jacob Epstein and his family & friends; (2) the Tate Modern, which we had seen models of at Milwaukee -- a rehabbed power station on the south bank of the Thames in London, which was gutted to hold six floors of galleries and an enormous entry hall, which this year is housing a truly remarkably engineered sculpture* that is so large you can't see all of it from any point in the hall, not to mention all the other twentieth century art of which I saw only a single floor; (3) the Tate Britain (old Tate) where I saw work from the four nominees for the Turner Prize, to be announced in January, and another interesting show about artists using their own lives as the subject of their art since the sixties or so, both with very interesting catalogues; (4) the Courtauld Gallery, which I happened onto on a rainy day walking around in London, and found a new show of my favorite period of early Kandinskys and rooms more of the Fauves; and (5) the Victoria & Albert where I got to see a bit of the textile galleries this time and made another pass through the dress collection just for kicks. Oh yes and (6) the Great Court of the British Museum, which was right in the neighborhood near our hotel, and has always been under construction every other time I have tried to see it.
Every one of these items obviously requires further discussion in a hyptertextual footnoted way. Just put in another dime.
*I have scanned the photo I took of one end (about a third) of Anish Kapoor's sculpture Marsyas, 2002. It is made of red fabric, laced to big, er, rings, and the other two thirds of it also look kind of like horns too but different. I was standing on the second floor of the gallery section of the building. You can look inside it; there is an interesting inside/outside thing going on, and the sculptor's statement made much of the flesh-like color. The tiny figures walking under it are people entering the building. Now I just have to figure out how I can post it here.
So my friends in our study group let me rant a bit about what I saw at (1) the New Art Gallery at Walsall, housing a collection now available to the local community from bequest of the sculptor Jacob Epstein and his family & friends; (2) the Tate Modern, which we had seen models of at Milwaukee -- a rehabbed power station on the south bank of the Thames in London, which was gutted to hold six floors of galleries and an enormous entry hall, which this year is housing a truly remarkably engineered sculpture* that is so large you can't see all of it from any point in the hall, not to mention all the other twentieth century art of which I saw only a single floor; (3) the Tate Britain (old Tate) where I saw work from the four nominees for the Turner Prize, to be announced in January, and another interesting show about artists using their own lives as the subject of their art since the sixties or so, both with very interesting catalogues; (4) the Courtauld Gallery, which I happened onto on a rainy day walking around in London, and found a new show of my favorite period of early Kandinskys and rooms more of the Fauves; and (5) the Victoria & Albert where I got to see a bit of the textile galleries this time and made another pass through the dress collection just for kicks. Oh yes and (6) the Great Court of the British Museum, which was right in the neighborhood near our hotel, and has always been under construction every other time I have tried to see it.
Every one of these items obviously requires further discussion in a hyptertextual footnoted way. Just put in another dime.
*I have scanned the photo I took of one end (about a third) of Anish Kapoor's sculpture Marsyas, 2002. It is made of red fabric, laced to big, er, rings, and the other two thirds of it also look kind of like horns too but different. I was standing on the second floor of the gallery section of the building. You can look inside it; there is an interesting inside/outside thing going on, and the sculptor's statement made much of the flesh-like color. The tiny figures walking under it are people entering the building. Now I just have to figure out how I can post it here.