Tag: museums and galleries

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Culture

Rachel Whiteread at Tate Modern

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']

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']

[pic of Rachel Whiteread's 'Embankment']

[pic of Rachel Whiteread's 'Embankment']

[pic of Rachel Whiteread's 'Embankment']

It’s probably most visually striking looking down on it from the third floor:

[pic of Rachel Whiteread's 'Embankment']

[pic of Rachel Whiteread's 'Embankment']

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']

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.

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Culture Other

Stubbs and Quinn

I went to see the ‘Stubbs and the horse‘ exhibition at the National. But first things first; the Alison Lapper statue works much better in the flesh then I expected.

For those of you who don’t know, at the corners of Trafalgar Square are four plinths to hold large statues. Three of them are occupied (by George IV, General Charles Napier and Major General Sir Henry Havelock). But the fourth plinth remained empty from when it was built in 1841 until 1999, when campaigners from the Fourth Plinth project managed to persuade everyone involved to use it as a site for temporary artworks. Its position in front of the National Gallery gives it a natural connection to the world of art, but it’s also in an automatic dialogue with all the other statues in the Square – including Nelson, of course. The new occupant is a marble statue by Marc Quinn of disabled artist Alison Lapper pregnant. I haven’t got a photo of the actual statue in situ, but this is a model from the commissioning process:

picture of 'Alison Lapper Pregnant' by Marc Quinn

What you don’t appreciate from that is the scale – 3.55m tall, apparently. That immediately ties it in with the other statues in the Square. It feels like a piece of official public art; it has something of that heavy blandness to it. But because of the unusual subject matter, that depersonalisation actually works in its favour; it makes it seem natural to have a huge marble statue of a pregnant naked woman with no arms.

The Stubbs on the other hand was less interesting. Horses, horses and more horses. What I liked most about them – a kind of stillness, a posed, statuesque simplicity – was, I suspect, due to Stubbs’s technical limitations rather than an aesthetic choice, because late in his career he did some action pictures of horses being attacked by lions, and they’re terrible.

There was something quite democratic about the paintings, though; it doesn’t matter if you’re the Duke of Portland or a stablehand, you’re still going to play second fiddle to the horse.

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Culture

Mask of the Week

From the Duke of York Islands (via Australia’s Cultural Gifts Program)

mask from the Duke of York Islands

Categories
Culture Other

‘Forgotten Empire: the world of ancient Persia’

Forgotten Empire is an exhibition at the British Museum of artefacts from ancient Persia. They’ve got together with the National Museum of Iran, the Persepolis Museum and the Louvre, so it’s a rare opportunity to see a lot of the objects. The title and a lot of the hype emphasise how little most of us know about the Persians compared to their contemporaries in Greece; and by implication the exhibition is supposed to act as a corrective. The period covered is about 500-300 BC; i.e. about between the golden age of Athens and the conquest of Persia by Alexander.

I was certainly persuaded that the Persian empire was impressively rich and powerful. The palace at Persepolis had columns 20m tall, apparently. That’s about the height of a seven-storey building. But the stuff in the exhibition was all relentlessly about power and wealth. It was all decorated in macho emblems – bulls, lions, sphinxes, war chariots. All the palaces seem to have been covered in endless friezes of people bringing tributes to the Persian king; everything was ostentatious, in your face. Not an easy culture to warm to, even if individual objects were attractive.

The implied comparison with Greece didn’t really work in the Persian’s favour. I wouldn’t want to buy whole-heartedly into the Greeks’ assessment that they were civilised and the Persians were barbarians; even I know enough about Greek history to know they were capable of being aggressive, ruthless, power-hungry and greedy themselves. But I look at the Greek civilisation and my idea of it is tinted by Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Sappho and Sophocles. No doubt there were great ancient Persian poets and thinkers, but I don’t know about them, and without that knowledge all I can see is the physical evidence of a megalomaniac culture. And in fact, aesthetically the classical stuff is more pleasing. The Persian figures are all very stylised and stiff, repetitive in the way Egyptian or Assyrian figures are, and wandering from the exhibition to the Parthenon sculptures, I was struck anew by how much more naturalistic and varied and fluid they are. Classical sculpture has become a bit of a visual cliché over the past two thousand years, but it looks pretty remarkable compared to a lot of the earlier traditions.

I wouldn’t want to suggest that my lack of enthusiasm is purely based on an idea of the Persians as imperialist megalomaniacs compared to the (somewhat) democratic Greeks. I’ve been very impressed by work from other cultures which seem equally megalomaniac, like the Egyptians and the Aztecs. The Persians just seem to lack visual pizazz, somehow.