I’m feeling a bit pot/kettle for having been rude to Lynne Truss for whinging about things, because this, for the third post in a row, is going to be a whinge.
This time: those blurbs in art galleries. Specifically the ones that tell you what to think, and how you should be reacting. I don’t mind this kind of thing:
Although the inspiration for Embankment came from the single box she found in her mother’s house, Whiteread selected a number of differently-shaped boxes to construct the installation for the Turbine Hall. She filled them with plaster, peeled away the exteriors and was left with perfect casts, each recording and preserving all the bumps and indentations on the inside. They are ghosts of interior spaces or, if you like, positive impressions of negatives spaces. Yet Whiteread wanted to retain their quality as containers, so she had them refabricated in a translucent polymer which reveals a sense of an interior. And rather than make precious objects of them, she constructed thousands.
[some stuff about the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark which I can’t be bothered to type] Whiteread has spoken of wanting to make the Turbine Hall into a kind of warehouse, and this is an intriguing response to a space which was once industrial but is now a museum. For what is a museum, after all, but a storage depot for art?
There’s a certain amount of editorialising there, but it’s mainly concerned with the thought processes and techniques of the artist, which is quite interesting information which the audience can take or leave. But this, from later in the same leaflet, is the kind of thing that really bugs me:
Dwarfed by these towering structures as we wind our way through them, we become acutely aware of our own physical presence. But there is also a spirit of absence here, a ghostly echo of all the abandoned empty spaces that surrounds us day after day.
Thanks, Mr Tate-Curator, but I can decide for myself how aware I am of my own physical presence.
One particular problem with this kind of blurbing is that it invites the audience to disagree. This is from the leaflet for the Universal Experiences exhibition at the Hayward:
This 28-metre-long light table displays hundreds of colour transparencies of tourist destinations visited and photographed by the artists. The pictures evoke fantasies of escapism and are reminiscent of the illustrations in tourist brochures and travel magazines. Combined in this sculptural travelogue these images allude to the increase in global tourism at the end of the 20th century and re-invest their endlessly photographed subjects with a sense of the extraordinary.
To which my reaction is – no they don’t. Re-invest with a sense of the extraordinary, that is. If anything, they banalify the places shown by lumping together such a large number of generic-looking photos. Now the curators at the Hayward might argue that it’s a good thing that I’m being drawn into engaging with the work. Except that I find myself constantly put into a hostile, confrontational frame of mind; and I don’t believe that irritated and argumentative is the best spirit to get the most out of a work of art.
Perhaps all I’m doing is revealing my own character flaws again.
Rachel Whiteread is the latest person to do a big installation in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Embankment consists of lots of translucent white plastic casts of the internal space of cardboard boxes, piled in a mixture of regular and irregular stacks.
These pictures are taken with my credit card sized digital camera, which is really just a toy. So they’re not great quality.
A longish view to give you an idea of what it’s like:
![[pic of Rachel Whiteread's 'Embankment']](https://heracliteanfire.net/images/whiteread1.jpg)
Some shots to show what it’s like to wander through it. It creates lots of different vistas and such as you walk round.
![[pic of Rachel Whiteread's 'Embankment']](https://heracliteanfire.net/images/whiteread2.jpg)
![[pic of Rachel Whiteread's 'Embankment']](https://heracliteanfire.net/images/whiteread5.jpg)
![[pic of Rachel Whiteread's 'Embankment']](https://heracliteanfire.net/images/whitereadnarrow.jpg)
![[pic of Rachel Whiteread's 'Embankment']](https://heracliteanfire.net/images/whitereadmound.jpg)
It’s probably most visually striking looking down on it from the third floor:
![[pic of Rachel Whiteread's 'Embankment']](https://heracliteanfire.net/images/whiteread_high1.jpg)
![[pic of Rachel Whiteread's 'Embankment']](https://heracliteanfire.net/images/whiteread_high2.jpg)
I thought on balance it was a bit of a lost opportunity. All these Turbine Hall installations are necessarily big, and they tend to be impressive through sheer bigness. The best manage to do something a bit more. For that matter, the size of this work isn’t as impressive as it might be simply because it’s made up of lots of smaller objects. A big stack of cardboard boxes is less surprising and less dramatic than, for example, one enormous cardboard box the size of a house.
Also, Whiteread has made a career out of revealing the surprising forms created by the negative spaces of mundane objects – tables, bathtubs, bookshelves and so on. But the negative space inside a cardboard box just looks like a cardboard box. If you stack a lot of them on top of each other, so the details stand out less, the distinction is even less clear it just looks like lots of models of boxes. Not very exciting. I can understand why she was reluctant to do something too much like a repeat of House, which would have been the obvious thing to do in such a big space:
![[pic of Whiteread's 'House']](https://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/T/turner_2003/images/i93_whiteread_house_l.jpg)
but boxes really seem like a boring choice of subject.
Generally speaking, the whole project of commissioning works for that space is an excellent one – it makes a big public event of contemporary art and attracts comment in the papers on a regular basis. The fourth plinth project in Trafalgar Square is very effective for the same reason.
Well, I’ve managed to de-purple it and worked it up a bit. I think the result has a bit more three-dimensionality to it, but I’m not sure it’s any better, exactly. I think it looks even less like me, for a start – apart from the non-purple skin, obviously. Still, it’s all a learning process.
![[self portrait - not purple any more, but a bit of a mess anyway]](https://www.heracliteanfire.net/images/self-not-purple.png)
Well, I’ve made my first attempt at a self-portrait in Gimp. It was kind of fun – it’s been years since I tried doing any drawing/painting, computer or otherwise. The first thing you’ll notice about it is that it’s purple. That wasn’t what I started out intending to do – I was just playing around and wanted a midtone background so I could use both light and dark colours on it. Something like this:
![[self-portait in purple, beige and black]](https://www.heracliteanfire.net/images/self-one.png)
Anyway, I started adding colours for the hair and so on, and found I’d made it very difficult for myself to change the skin colour without fucking the whole thing up. There’s probably a cunning techy way of doing it involving replacing colours, but I didn’t find it. There’s also a brute force way of doing it – painting over the purple with another colour – but I couldn’t face it, today at least. I may use this as a starting point and try to rescue it later, but I think I’ll probably start again on a new version. I’m quite tempted to try a Rembrandt-esque approach – start with a very dark ground and build up the picture with lighter colours. Just to see what it’s like.
![[self portrait with mauve skin]](https://www.heracliteanfire.net/images/self-two.png)
I know there’s not much more boring than people going on about how much computers have changed. But having just bought a new computer, I’m in the mood to do it anyway. The very first computer we had in the house was my brother’s ZX81:
![[picture of ZX81]](https://www1.hansenet.de/~duering/zx81-2.jpg)
The ZX81 came with 1Kb of RAM. As a comparison, my current computer has 512Mb, so that’s approximately 500000 times more powerful. However, help was at hand if you needed to do more demanding tasks – we had a memory expansion pack for the ZX81 that boosted it to a heady 8Kb of memory. No hard disk, obviously – it used audio cassettes to store software.
Despite 3D Monster Maze, which seemed genuinely scary at the time (yeah, I know, it seems a bit pathetic now, but I was only about 8, and computers were still a brave new world for all of us) the appeal of the ZX81 was basically the idea of having a computer at home and learning how to do simple programming. The next computer, a Spectrum, actually had some quite good games. Relatively speaking. But then it did have a mighty 48K of memory, and a colour display. There’s a review from 1982 which you can read here that draws attention to its “powerful colour and sound commands”. As you can see, we were easily impressed in those days:
Anyway, my brother and I did eventually (1988, probably) buy a proper computer – an Apple Macintosh IIcx. We shelled out a bit extra to get 8Mb of RAM and the ability to display 256 colours; I can’t remember exactly what it came to, but it would have been three or four thousand pounds, so my new computer has 64 times as much memory for less than a third of the cost. Not even allowing for inflation. Those were the days when I was pretty excited by the very idea that you could store samples of sound on a computer, and we used to have all these little two or three second snatches of dialogue from Monty Python and 2001 and suchlike. The idea that one day you’d be able to store your entire music collection on your computer’s hard disk, let alone on a little thing like an iPod, would have astounded me. Or at least, even then it was pretty clear that things were moving quickly, so perhaps I wouldn’t have been astounded. Impressed, though. Still, even if I wasn’t able to edit movies on it, it was up to the job of running Freehand and Word and so on – all of which I naturally pirated from my school’s computing or design departments. In fact, I imagine we got a Mac in the first place because the schools we went to used them. Those were the days when Macs were much much nicer than PCs (which were referred to as ‘IBM compatible’ at the time, before Microsoft took over the world), because PCs still made you do everything through the command line.
Anyway. About the only relic I’ve got from that time is this self-portrait from 1989 (when I was 14), which I did on a piece of software called Digital Darkroom. I didn’t actually use DD for photo-editing; apart from anything else, I didn’t have a scanner and digital cameras hadn’t been invented. I just used it as a painting program. The picture is in black and white, not because of any aesthetic choice on my part but because with only 256 colours to play with, it was bloody difficult to work in colour. It seems to be slightly posterised – I’m sure it originally had more shades of grey – but I can no longer open the original file and this version is the only one I’ve got:
![[self-portrait]](https://www.heracliteanfire.net/images/self.jpg)
I may try to do a new self-portrait in Gimp; it would be a good way of getting a feel for the software. I’m not sure I’ve still got the knack of drawing with a mouse, but computers are so much more forgiving than, for example, paints.
One final thought – I appreciate that computers have come a long way since then, and I’m very much enjoying my lovely fast new machine, but is it really necessary that the built-in calculator is using 15Mb of memory? 15Mb? I used to run Word and Freehand together on a machine which only had a total of 8Mb.