Artsy

The Tate Modern has a new installation in the Turbine hall, which (for those of you who have never seen it) is a massive, open concrete space in the former power building.

Previously, it's been home to thousands of white boxes as well as slides. Based on those two alone, you can imagine why I get the urge to go back whenever they have something new.

So this is what they've done this time... they've cracked the floor. Or more precisely, some artist has. It's supposed to represent something about racism and divided society, but I just think it's cool.


As did the hundreds of visitors there. People were generally using it as one big photo prop, taking shots of themselves straddling it, lying down next to it, or jumping over it. Kids treated it like a toy, dancing around it and sticking their feet in the wider bits.


There's a warning sign near the ticket desk, warning people to watch where they step. Art than can hurt you (or, at least your ankles) -- now that's good times.

In other artastic news, Shannon and I went to go see the Turner Prize Retrospective at Tate Britain. The actual Turner Prize is temporarily in Liverpool this year, so they've gathered up a bunch of pieces from the last 23 years and crammed it in a few rooms.

As a show, it's not great. Some pieces seem to have no explanation whatsoever. And, generally, I'm not all that happy with Turner stuff. But there was a pair of Chris Ofili paintings, which are awesome, and the Damien Hirst cows in formaldehyde, which was cool to see, if a bit gross. I really liked this one video, too, by Gillian Wearing of police arranged in a group portrait and then filmed for an hour while they just stand there. Really cool and surprisingly enjoyable to watch.

Post-Tate, Shannon and I went in search of Starbucks -- mmm... gingerbread latte, I love you -- and happened past Trafalgar Square, where there's a new statue up on the fourth plinth. It doesn't have a permanent statue, so they rotate a new one in every 18 months. The last one was a gorgeous statue of a pregnant woman with no arms or legs... I wasn't sure about it at first, but it def grew on me.

Now, there's this:

It's called Model for a Hotel. It looks a bit like cheap shelving from Ikea, but it certainly is bright and colourful, and London can always use a bit of colour. But it does look rather out of place among all the military statues.

Public Art

Free museums are by far one of the best aspects of London. All the art and history and whatever sitting in the National Gallery, the Tates, the British Museum, the V&A, the Natural History Museum -- and all for free.

The National Gallery decided to take it one step further, and put paintings -- reproductions, anyway -- out on the street. They've hung 45 clever copies -- not just the art work, but mocked up frames, too -- in various side streets of Soho and the West End.

So there you are, innocently meandering along St Martins Lane, and you think, hey, I'm gonna go look in shop windows around Seven Dials. You turn up Shelton, and this catches your eye:

Rather stunning. Such a brilliant idea. Whoever thought of it deserves kudos and a pay-raise and even a pony, should they want one.

The "art" has been stuck on London's walls for a week at least now, but none of the pieces we saw was graffitied. One looked like it'd been rubbed by a van, and others were showing the effects of the weather, but only one was missing, likely stolen by drunken thieves, I would guess. Tho maybe it was tourists, claiming one hell of a souvenir...

Aside from the aforementioned Whistlejacket, I also really wanted to see the street version of Monet's Water Lily Bridge. I found it on the map and wandered up Neal Street. I found one painting, but couldn't find the Monet. I looked at the map again and was clearly in the right place, but the painting was missing. It's a popular one, so maybe it had been stolen. But no -- some dude selling Bansky knockoffs (ironic?) had put up his stall directly in front of the Monet-fake, completely blocking the view. On purpose? Surely.

More street art here. I haven't found all 45, but I'm getting there...

Alte Meister angels

Dresden's Alte Meister museum is like a mini-Louvre – although it would seem small only by comparison to something as ridiculously huge as that.

Located in Dresden’s own palace, amusingly called the Zwinger -- complete with fountain-filled courtyard, a la the Louvre – the museum has a solid collection, featuring Reubens, Rembrandts and of course, it’s most famous courtesy Raphael, the Sixtine Madonna:



I’ve previously thought it a bit of a shame that a detail, a tiny piece of such a large work, could be so popular that the rest of the painting is overlooked – there are tons of tourist tat featuring the engels in the gift shop, but just a poster and a card of the entire image.

But after walking through room after poorly air conditioned room of relgious altars and Dutch landscapes, it’s easy to see why the masses find Raphael’s “saucy” – as they call them here – angels so appealing. Their cuteness is simply refreshing.

And so I sat there, on an oval leather bench, as tour groups and seniors streamed in and out of the room, looking at these two little angels and wondering what they were thinking. They’re at the feet of Mary and Jesus (I forget who the other two figures are, and don’t care) in heaven. The parapet they rest on and the curtains to the side are meant to show the divide between our world and heaven, according to a handy sign.

So you’ve got these angels, right? And they’re in heaven, at the foot of Jesus. And yet they look like they’re daydreaming, looking out over our world. If all your existence has been in heaven, is it still heaven for you? Or do angels daydream and wonder what our lives are like? Would they envy us? And how much would that suck?

So yeah. Their image may have been commercialized (along with the Louvre’s Mona Lisa) into a tourist draw and a gift shop top-seller, but I don’t doubt that hundreds of years ago, when it hung in some church, that those figures won the admiration and the thoughts of people then, too. Some things are popular for a good reason.

Aside from artists beginning with the letter R, there’s also a full room of Canelletos, two large scenes to each long wall, with smaller ones next to each door on the shorter walls. Now a room of perfectly painted Venetian canals is no poor entertainment, but I admit I was even more amused by the plaque under the paintings. If I read it correctly, this museum is contending that Canelleto’s name was Antonio Canal – so really, he was Mr Canal. Did he get that name after painting the canals so much, or did he paint the canals so much because of his name? I’m sure I could solve this little mystery by wiki-ing it, but sometimes a bit of vagueness is preferable...

Oxford

In part two of the surely-to-be-multipart Distracting Day-trip Diversions series, Emily and I went to Oxford.

Emily went there for university -- which is surprising if you meet her, as she's very indie and not pompous at all -- so she gave me the guided tour. There're lots of old buildings, cool museums and students in scarves.

It's a strange place. Kind of has an air of entitlement and "ooh, aren't I special" about it, but maybe I'm just a bitter, angry person, made more so after a day surrounded by young, successful, rich and/or smart people who got to go to a real school, not the lame-ass U of Calgary.

JRR Tolkein used to sit out here
and think of hobbits... how dirty...

Anyway, we saw where Emily went to school -- her college, Merton, is a lovely set of old buildings with courtyards and gardens and all that britishness. It's also where JRR Tolkein studied and taught. It's also where Kris Kristofferson and TS Eliot studied. Ahh, such history.

I had great fun comparing Merton to the good ol' U of C. Emily noted -- unpretentiously, I assure you -- that the school dates from the 1200s. I noted that the U of C dates from the 1960s. Her college, including grad students, is made up of about 130 students. I've had classes with three times that number. She pointed out the grand old exams building, and the amazing hall they graduate in, and the beautiful courtyard where they got their gowns prior to the ceremony. Me, I pointed out where all these things happened while at the U of C: the gym, another gym, and the running track around the oval.

And okay, I admit: pretty architechture and ridiculous tradition are not the cornerstones of a good education. But then, neither is cramming students into lecture halls the size of movie theatres and hoping against all hope that they maybe learn something, as long as it's cheap. /end rant

Even dead ponies are cute.

Then we went to a museum of natural history (full of hella awesome Victorian-era dead-and-stuffed things) and an art museum. Good times had in both. Then we got drunk and openly mocked 18-year-old girls for wearing heels they couldn't walk in. Then we felt old, so we went home.

This is so Tim Burton. The Victorians
were so awesomely crazy.

While waiting at the station for the train to speed us (ha! it took three times as long as the train that took us out there!) back to London, a man walked by wearing no trousers -- he was dressed normally on top, but just sheerish brown underwear on the bottom.

He walked right past us, spoke to a station attendent like nothing was weird, and then (thankfully) got on a train going the other direction.



It's especially strange because I kept thinking: That man has no pants. It's like the no-pants dance floor. But here in Bizarro World, pants=underwear, so in fact he was wearing pants, just not much else. So a no-pants dance floor here would be a scary, scary thing indeed. Just a warning should anyone (looks -- um, virtually -- in Kris' direction) decide to shout out "No Pants Dance Floor!" in a London club. Just saying.

Wow, that last paragraph probably makes so little sense to anyone who isn't me. Well. Sucks to be you, then.

More pictures here.

Whee!

So the Tate Modern has this big massive hall -- the Turbine Hall, as the building used to be a power station -- which they fill with random pieces of art.



It's all random and exciting and crazy and makes me like modern art. They've now filled that room with SLIDES. Slides that go from the fifth floor! Slides! Slides you can slide on! For free! Bloody hell that's cool.

According to their website:

"For Carsten Höller [the artist], the experience of sliding is best summed up in a phrase by the French writer Roger Caillois as a ‘voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind’. The slides are impressive sculptures in their own right, and you don’t have to hurtle down them to appreciate this artwork. What interests Höller, however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the ‘inner spectacle’ experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend."

We only made it down the two smaller slides, as we were on lunch breaks and you have to get tickets -- free, but with a line up -- for the higher up ones.

And yes, I will be going back. One must keep up with art...

Very exciting. On the downside, all the tour groups and school groups are ignoring the rest of the museum and just hanging out at the slides.

So cool. I really want to go on this last one... how fast do you think that drop would get you going??

Horniman Museum

With a day off and no plans, I decided to go to a south London museum that had caught my eye, and not just because there's a lot of ads for it on the rear of buses, which I tend to get stuck behind while cycling.

No, it has a damn funny name. Horniman! Okay, I'm immature. But childishness is good for this museum.


That's not a comment on the exhibits -- they were, for the most part, pretty high quality. No, the whole place was full of moms (and grandparents) with toddlers and noisy preteen school groups. So immaturity fits right in. As does running around. And screaming. And throwing temper tantrums.

Despite the attendees, the Horniman is a decent museum. The new aquarium is amazing. The music room is really cool, especially this one interactive feature, which lets you listen to hundreds of different instruments.

The natural history bit is a bit weak, especially compared to the Natural History Museum (which is so hella cool, nature pales in comparison). The Horniman's exhibit had some old-school stuff things -- including dogs, yes, domestic ones -- but their growning glory is a full-sized walrus. Compare that to the NHM, which aside from a moving t-rex, has a real stuffed blue whale... a wee bit more impressive than a walrus.



More pictures here.

Front Page

I had a few hours to kill on Friday before heading back to Dan's -- as I don't have a key yet -- so I wandered over to the British Library to see an exhibition on newspapers.

I've previously gone to the Library (and yes, it deserves a capital letter) to do research. It has every possible book you could imagine and then some. Previously located in the British Museum, the collection needed more space and was moved to this new building a few years ago. And keep in mind how massive the BM building is... so yeah, the collection is ridiculous.


It's the kind of library where you look up your selection, write it on a card and then hand it to staff, who will fetch it for you while you wait at a numbered desk. Rifle thru the shelves yourself? Ha, don't be silly! Take the book home with you? Don't be absurd.

So much fun. When I die, if there is indeed a heaven, and I'm somehow allowed in it, I would not be disappointed if it looked something like this library.

Anyway, that's a major digression. I had time to kill, and the Library had a cool and free exhibition called Front Page, which chronicles the past hundred-plus years of British newspapers.


Well-curated, the pages are not done chronologically, but by subject area, so you can compare how a paper in 1895 and 1914 and 1962 and 1989 and 2003 dealt with disasters, politics, sports and -- of course -- royalty. It's all very well explained, and it's cool -- for a news geek, anyhow -- to see classic covers and ones from major events. And, intriguing to see all the different design and layout looks from over the years.

Moreover, it's a celebration of how totally awesome the newspaper is. As the British Library people write in their program -- wonderfully produced in newspaper format in newsprint -- for the price of less than a cup of coffee, you get comment, opinion, fact and entertainment which will make you think. Can't argue with that.


Also in that publication is a note on subeditors, and how they are often derided (by editors and writers alike) at work and ignored/unknown by everyone else. In honor of subs, the exhibition picked a headline they think sums up how creative the best subs are... A Scot on a sports desk wrote this gem after Inverness Caledonian trounced Glasgow Celtic: "Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious". Worthy of a pulitzer, that is.

The Louvre, on wheels

After my sister's unfortunate tripping incident, her mobility was somewhat limited. Given Paris is meant for walking, this presented some difficulty. We left her and her painkillers alone in the hotel for day, but managed to get her to the Louvre in the rental car.

Despite the problems getting to the Louvre, the biggest obstacle was yet to be overcome: the museum is several blocks long, and on multiple levels.

Thankfully, they have free access to wheelchairs, so she had a seat and I had a ball rolling her around that massive maze.

That place is not set up for disabled people tho; I think it's a French thing, but that's based on very little actual knowledge or evidence. While easy enough to access, say, the Mona Lisa, there were some spots that were either impossible to get into or very, very difficult to get out of. Thankfully, the security guards are wicked-cool, and sympathetic, too. With the help of their security clearance and rings o' keys, we got to take some secret short cuts.

Aside: If you're going to Paris and are under 26 (I think), you get into the Louvre free after 6pm on Fridays -- we arrived at 530pm, and didn't find out about this freebie until we'd paid... because there are no signs, it is in none of the billions of guidebooks I read, and no one told us. It is printed, however, in tiny, tiny, tiny print on the back of the museum map leaflets. Go figure.