I went to the British Museum with my sister because, having been on a Nile cruise recently, she’s keen on all things Egyptological. It turns out that the process of preparing a body for mummification is a lot like making dry-cured bacon.
Tag: museums and galleries
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Rousseau at the Tate
Back to Rousseau. The painter, not Jean-Jacques. I’m afraid the exhibition, Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris is nearly over, so this won’t be much use to anyone who was trying to decide whether to see it.
Rousseau was a bit of an oddity. He was self-taught and, according to the exhibition blurb, he aspired to joining the academic, classical tradition. Instead, his work was very much admired by a younger generation of artists, like Picasso, whose work Rousseau apparently didn’t like much. Which makes it hard to know what to make of him. If he was literally trying to produce paintings that looked like academic works, then he failed. On the other hand, his similarity to the Modernists is striking – his work has a limited sense of depth, a strong sense of colour and design, and is highly stylised.
But of course, these things are also characteristic of folk art; they seem, in fact, to be typical of self-taught artists generally. This is a self-portrait by Rousseau:
this is an anonymous panel from the American Folk Art Museum:
So was Rousseau absorbed into the canon, rather than relegated to folk art status, just because he happened to be in the right place at the right time? Well, there may be an element of that, but he does have some distinctive things in his favour. His compositions and use of colour are gorgeous, for a start. The most famous thing about him is the choice of subject matter, of course, in the jungle paintings. There was a lot of good contextual stuff in the exhibition, much of which you can see on that website, to show that the jungle paintings weren’t quite as random as you might think. There were World’s Fairs held in Paris in 1878, 1889 and 1900, and sensational portrayals of Africa were in the air in the French equivalents of Rider Haggard. There’s a startlingly dodgy statue in the exhibition (not by Rousseau) of a nubile woman being abducted by a gorilla, for example. For that matter, the Cubist interest in African art is an only slightly more enlightened version of the same thing.
Kowing where he got his ideas from doesn’t make the paintings any less peculiar, of course. In The Hungry Lion Throws itself on the Antelope, it isn’t the central struggle that is most remarkable, it’s all the other animals lurking in the jungle – an eagle, an owly thing, a leopard and a weird gorilla-bear creature, several of them with strips of bloody flesh hanging from their mouths.
Anyway. It’s a big subject and I’m not about to do it justice here. Interesting though. I’d recommend the exhibition if you’re in London in the next 11 days.
I went to see the Rousseau exhibition at Tate Modern today (on which possibly more later) and finally saw one of the resident peregrine falcons. Woohoo! It’s the world’s fastest-falling bird, you know.
Ever since I read Mutants, I’ve been mulling over the idea of writing a group of poems around the idea of mutants and mutation.
The human (and indeed animal) stories – poor old Charles Byrne, freak-shows, the Elephant Man, court dwarves, superheroes and so on – are interesting source material; the science is somewhat interesting and provides extra source material by its connection to natural selection, ontogeny, Chernobyl, teratogens; the general idea of mutation has all sorts of metaphorical possibilties; and the word is attention-grabbing.
One possibility would be a set of ‘mutant sonnets’. The baseline of an established form would allow the formal mutation of the poems to be made apparent. Alternatively, the language could be ‘mutated’ in other ways. And the theme doesn’t have to extend to formal/linguistic considerations at all.
Something to consider. Perhaps a trip to the Hunterian is in order.
The Royal Academy’s own website doesn’t seem to be working at the moment (Tibetan hackers?), but Goldman Sachs, the corporate sponsor of the show, have a Flash slideshow you can see here which gives an idea of what it’s like.
I found it a bit dull. The exhibition is huge and the quality of the items is obvious, but it seems a bit same-y; and (because it’s all court art?), it’s all rather formal and grand. I also found it surprisingly un-surprising, somehow. I don’t know much about C18th China (anything, really) so I would have expected it to be more interesting just out of novelty value, but somehow it all seemed rather familiar. Perhaps I just haven’t got the enough knowledge to see the subtleties, or perhaps it actually is all a bit repetitive. It might have been a good idea to get the audioguide. These very big exhibitions are always a bit off-putting anyway; if it was a quarter the size, it might have focussed my mind a bit.
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Art gallery blurbs
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.