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The use of photographs on book covers and author photos.
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time-lapse film of Picasso painting. via Metafilter.
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London sports day
A free idea for the people at London 2012 to engage with the public and generate positive vibes: a London sports day, held somewhere like Hyde Park. Invite people from all London’s community groups (schools, churches, mosques, clubs and societies; as broad a range as possible) to take part in a big day-long jamboree of sport. The idea would be to try and create an atmosphere somewhere between a school sports day and a country fair, with candy-floss and ice-cream and toffee apples. In fact, if you could get people from London’s many ethnic communities to organise all kinds of different street food, so much the better.
There should be some proper events, but also lots of events like egg-and-spoon, three-legged races, sack races, wheelbarrow races, throwing the cricket ball, wellie wanging, keepy-uppy, a greasy pole, standing long jump, London skittles, tug-of-war, barrel-rolling and so on. Have lots of events going on at the same time so people can wander from one to another. And you should get exactly the same kind of medal for winning the silly events as the serious ones. Or you could have serious events but keep it informal; have an all-comers 100m competition, where anyone who turns up on the day and puts their name down (or as many as they have time for) can compete. If you processed them quickly enough – say heats at five minute intervals, with only the outright winner going through to the next round – you could get through a lot of entrants in a day*. It would be important to have events for both adults and children, but not silly events for children and proper ones for adults; we want to see Seb Coe doing a sack race.
It might also be fun to have Olympians doing demonstration events like archery and judo, but the focus should be on participation by ordinary Londoners. The point would be to celebrate sport for the sheer fun of it and its potential as an inclusive community event. Not too much hard sell about why the Olympics is going to be a good thing; just try to make sure everyone has a great time and that the London 2012 logo is visible on all the leaflets and stands.
*actually, doing the maths suggests this might not be practical. hey-ho. You might be able to do something like an all-comers discus; everyone can queue up to get one throw, the longest over the course of the day wins.
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Rodin at the RA
I went to the big Rodin exhibition at the Royal Academy today. It offered one of the simplest of art pleasures – looking at striking objects. His work has real presence, and not just because it’s made out of big lumps of bronze or marble. Their status as representational work seemed less important than the sheer physicality of them.
That’s not entirely true, of course – you can’t separate it out in that way and pretend that they’d somehow be just as effective if they were abstracts. I’m not sure the claim would even mean anything. So what do I mean? I guess there’s a kind of impersonality to them. Whereas a painting is to some extent experienced as a window onto another reality, this work never had that kind of illusionistic quality; they are experienced much more directly as art-objects. Some of that is the medium, some of it is his style.
Much of the work in the show was fairly familiar — a lot of the exhibition is built around The Burghers of Calais, The Kiss, The Thinker and The Gates Of Hell. I didn’t realise he’s done quite so many sculptures of nekkid girls embracing each other, though. They all had different titles — The Earth and Moon, or whatever — but it was hard to avoid the conclusion that he just got a bit of a kick out of doing them. There were also various erotic drawings he’d done that featured girls prominently displaying their lady-bits, so I don’t think I’m jumping to any outrageous conclusions.
It made me think how few famous sculptors there are, especially since some of the most famous artists of the Renaissance (Bernini, Michelangelo) were sculptors. Between the Renaissance and abstraction, Rodin is almost the only really big-name sculptor I can think of, compared to the dozens of painters I could come up with at a moments notice. I guess the great ages of sculpture tend to be when it’s much in demand for architectural dressing; Greek temples and medieval and Renaissance churches seem to have been thick with the stuff. But still, that’s not really an adequate explanation. Even with sculpture relatively out of fashion, there were many thousands of statues, monuments, tombs and so on put up in the C17th – C19th, but somehow none of the sculptors managed to carve out a place in the public consciousness. Which I guess makes Rodin all the more exceptional.
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Bessie Smith
I promise not to spend too much time posting stuff from YouTube, but I thought this was amazing:
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Tall-tale postcards. via Metafilter.