Blog: A Day Of Cultural Culture: We Saw Some ART

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Bank Holiday Monday found The Curator Of My Exhibits and I heading into London's fashionable London area of London to get ourselves some CULTURE. An Itineray had been prepared the night before by the aforesaid Date On My Ticket the night before while I had been watching the (Cor! Actually Quite Good!) FOOTBALL against Germany, and we were RARING to go.

Our first stop was Somerset House to see "Out There: Our Post-War Public Art". It took us a little while to find it as the SIGNAGE inside Somerset House is APPALLING. The signs that WERE there were either wrong or unclear (e.g. one sign pointing to two different doors) but mostly they were missing. It RILED me up no end - I nearly SAID something, that's how riled I was!

The exhibition itself was DEAD GOOD. It told a fascinating story that caused a RANGE of emotions - DELIGHT at the good intentions of the movement to install art in public after the war, SADNESS at the way it has been neglected/uncatalogued/often stolen, and ANGER at the way working class people were sometimes lumbered with bloody awful lumps of metal and/or concrete in the middle of their neighbourhood. Don't get me wrong, lots of the public art was BRILLIANT, but a lot of it also seemed to be an expression of ANGST, DESPAIR and ISOLATION which, to be honest, is not something you want looming over your home. As The Statue On My Plinth said, you don't tend to see that sort of public art in POSH neighbourhoods.

It was, as i say, a RANGE of emotions and THORTS, which I guess is what you WANT from an exhibition! We also LEARNT stuff (I never realised EVERY tube station has a Labyrinth tile all of its own), talked to a GRATE Old Lady (I think this may be what we DO on outings now) and thoroughly enjoyed a wall covered in Visitor Comments. It was GOOD!

We had planned to see THREE exhibitions at Somerset House but ended up seeing FOUR because the signage was so terrible that we ended up on another one by accident. This was an "imaginary" museum which was supposed to tell a story about two lives but, like most times when Fine Artists try to tell a story, it looked very nice but had no NARRATIVE. Art Criticism!

We ambled round the corner and found the exhibition we'd been looking for, "Venturing Beyond: Graffiti and the Everyday Utopias of the Street". It had one of those descriptions at the start in HUGE letters that (once more in the words of The Colon In My Art Exhibition's Title) you could read all the way through and still not have a clue what it was about. It reminded me of a GAG on Stewart Lee's show the week before, where he said something was a joke because it had the RHYTHM of a joke. This had the RHYTHM of an Art Gallery description and so WAS one, all strings of long words saying art "does a thing, does another thing, and then does ANOTHER slightly opposed thing which challenges, a synonym for challenges and the viewer and makes them reappraise, reasses and another word beginning with 're' whatever it is they were on about in the first place". As with email scammers, if Artists ever learn to speak Clear English we shall all be in trouble!

The last thing we EVENTUALLY saw (after a signage-free wander round a WING) at Somerset House was "Stables and Lucraft: Ulmus Londinium" (colons!) which was an installation about ELM TREES and had trees, beetles, chairs and various wooden things. It was one small area that looked FAB and didn't have a lengthy description. I liked it!

That done we strolled over to The National Gallery for even MORE culture. Well, a cup of tea first but THEN we went to see "Visions of Paradise: Botticini's Palmieri Altarpiece" which was AMAZING. They've taken ONE piece of art, the alterpiece of the title, and then shown it with other relevant things e.g. another altarpiece, a bust of the chap who commissioned it, some historical STUFF from the era - you get the general idea. It was TOTALLY ACE. There's a picture on Wikipedia where you can see that it is RAMMED with all sorts of characters looking in many cases DISTINCTLY non-serene and annoyed with each other. Even better was Fra Angelico Christ Glorified in the Court of Heaven which looked AMAZING, with almost PHOTOGRAPHIC portraits of saints and wotnot, all mixed together and GOLDEN. We liked it!

While we were there we WHIZZED through and did the traditional National Gallery Exit Strategy i.e. Let's Find A Famous Picture On The Way, accordingly ZOOMING past Venus In The Toilet (sic) and a couple of Turners. We then attempted to go to see EVEN MORE Art, but the two private galleries we wanted to look in were both closed so instead we went to Oxford Circus and closed our viewing schedule with a good look at Barbara Hepworth's Winged Figure on the side of John Lewis, as featured in the Public Art exhibition earlier. It was dead good!

We celebrated the end of our day of Cultural Culture with a pile of delicious grub at Tibits and also some BEER. We had, by this point, EARNT it!

posted 1/4/2016 by MJ Hibbett

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