Play Lounge

So, here's a first (micro-)exhibition for you: Mr Clement at Play Lounge (in Beak Street, just south of Carnaby Street). It's small but perfectly formed, as indeed is Mr Clement, who currently lives in the spare room.

Bring extra money if you're easily tempted by posters and plastic tchotchkes, for you will surely want a bunny of your own. I covet the Time-Out-wielding figure in the window, myself.

So now I can explain my LJ photo. In exchange for being allowed to fill the flat with the smell of molten plastic, Mr Clement made a matching pair of figures, one of me and one of Him Indoors. That's mine. Good likeness, wouldn't you say?

Tate Sedate

From one of the smallest exhibitions in town to one of the biggest: I went down to Tate Britain last Saturday, shortly after all the bombing and shooting, to see what was on.

The current blockbuster is "A Picture of Britain", complete with TV tie-in, audioguide recorded by David Dimbleby, glossy coffee-table book, you name it. Bombs or no bombs, it was jammed to the doors. Mind you, the target audience for this exhibition are old enough to remember the war; I was one of the youngest people in the room. It's arranged, like the TV series, by region. Like the TV series, this Britain doesn't include London, even though the Tate's painting of the month is Constable's Opening of Waterloo Bridge, which would have fitted in perfectly. In fact, this Britain barely has any cities at all; there's a nod to Lowry, some glorification of the early Industrial Revolution, the odd satanic mill, and that's about it.

Well, it all seemed a bit incoherent to me. I was hoping for some kind of story of how art has affected the way the British view themselves. Anything of that sort was buried by the regional arrangement -- there's surely some nationalism-related link to be drawn between, say, Monarch of the Glen and Stubbs' picture of a horse startled by a lion, but you can't draw it if one picture is filed under Scotland and the other under Midlands. (Just because the rocks in the background are identifiable, that doesn't mean Stubbs is saying anything about the Midlands. Grr.) And the Second World War wasn't entirely a south-eastern subject, and the Industrial Revolution wasn't confined to Ironbridge and the north-west, and on and on. The TV series was fun enough, in a Sunday-evening-brains-out-look-at-the-pretty-pictures kind of way, but I'd give the exhibition a miss.

They also have an exhibition of Joshua Reynolds' portraits. Normally, I'd avoid portraiture - the NPG is fine, because of the sheer range of styles, but roomfuls of portraits all by the same artist isn't my idea of fun. Better than still lifes, or religious icons, but still not fun. But I was there anyway, so I went in, and two hours later I was still there. It was eye-opening. Firstly, I hadn't realised how many of these pictures I already knew. Do you have a mental image of Samuel Johnson? Laurence Sterne? Boswell? Mrs Siddons? Chances are, your mental image is Reynolds' portrait. The pictures are captivating. You see these portraits, and you immediately want to meet these people and talk to them. I'm so glad I went in. It was an effort of will not to buy the catalogue, but I managed to resist.

But the best part was none of these. I was wandering around the main galleries, and I found Marc Vaux' B/3L/73. It's a huge, chocolate-brown canvas, with a tiny block of three coloured squares off to the centre left. It's nothing special, nice enough in a sub-Ellsworth-Kelly way, but I suddenly realised that I knew this painting and hadn't seen it for over 25 years.

Way back in primary school, we came on a school trip to the Tate, and were told to pick out a painting and draw a copy. I liked this one, and I'm a lazy bugger, so that's the one I drew. Seeing it again took me back to my first introduction to modern art, courtesy of my primary school teacher, Mrs Hammick. In my memory, Mrs Hammick is a formidable, stout, tweed-encased battleship of a woman. She has curly grey hair, and she carries a vast leather handbag. She could easily be a Wodehousian Aunt. But it now occurs to me that, over the course of a term, she introduced a whole class of ten-year-olds to modern art. Kandinsky, Chagall, Matisse, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Bridget Riley: I remember writing two-paragraph essays about all of these people. Nobody ever mentioned any of the rest of art history; this wasn't part of any National Curriculum, she just taught us about it anyway. And then thirty excitable kids went up to the Tate on a coach, and sat on the floor in front of Matisse's Snail while a handsome, energetic young gallery assistant told us what it all meant.

It's odd to realise, all of a sudden, that this chunk of your personality was moulded by that person on that date. If I'd met different people, I could have spent Saturday at the National Gallery looking at the still lifes. Or maybe I'd have gone to watch a football match instead. Or maybe I'd have been blowing up a bus; who knows what influence other people can have, in the long term?

And so off to the West End, where people were self-consciously Behaving As Normal, if that isn't a contradiction in terms. Ping and I watched a film that we could equally have seen in our local cinema, and ate a Korean meal that our neighbourhood Korean restaurant would have prepared just as well, and went home on the bus, as you do.