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example22It's been a while, hasn't it? I was in the mood to post and tell you about this week's Time Out - the front cover has a line about solar-powered sex toys, which I thought lends a whole new meaning to sticking it where the sun doesn't shine, but it turns out they already did a very similar gag in the body of the article. So I was going to aim for something even filthier about Fanny by Gaslight, but couldn't be bothered to make it work.
Let's make a quick move to the cultural high ground instead, and talk about some exhibitions.
Tropicália is the Barbican's exhibition of Brazilian art. I can imagine it being great fun if you go with a bunch of friends, since lots of the works are interactive -- try on some clothes, taste some mysterious liquids, walk on a beach and poke around in some huts, and so on. By yourself, on a wet Friday afternoon, this isn't so great. And the (non-interactive) rest of the art is mostly not terribly inspired, unless you're really into sixties psychedelia. So, not really my kind of thing. But, then, you would be looking at me for a long time before you were reminded of a Brazilian. There was a little notice on the gallery wall informing us that the macaws were provided by Macaws Direct, and providing a phone number; this may well be one of the signs of the apocalypse. I didn't jot it down, so if you urgently need a macaw, you'll have to Google for it like everyone else.
Downstairs in the Barbican Curve is an exhibition of Polish art. Taken along with the Brazilians upstairs, this demonstrates some sort of conservation law for flamboyance: upstairs they have lots of colour and happiness, so naturally the Polish art downstairs is almost entirely grey and doom-laden. There are mysterious packing-cases, dusty schoolrooms, soul-destroying wooden contraptions, deaf people singing and photos of amputees. I was much happier down here, to be honest.
On to the Tate, for Albers & Moholy-Nagy: from the Bauhaus to the New World. I read a review -- must have been Time Out, the Guardian or the Observer, but I can't find it now -- that said Moholy-Nagy blew Albers out of the water in every single room. This is cobblers. Moholy-Nagy is fine, especially in the photograms, though the paintings tend towards either Malevich-lite or Kandinsky-lite. But Albers is the revelation here: the man had an astounding grasp of colour. There's a whole roomful of his Variations/Homages to the Square that bears comparison to the (newly rehung) Rothko room. Both men were driven out of Bauhaus-era Germany: Moholy-Nagy stopped off in London to do graphic design for Imperial Airways and London Underground ("Quickly Away, Thanks to Pneumatic Doors!"), before heading to Chicago and dying romantically early at 51. Albers headed straight for the US and was inspired afresh by pre-Colombian art; he taught at a college in North Carolina, and lived into his eighties.
Albers' Bauhaus-era belief in art's ethical dimension -- as the captions put it, a belief that a heightened sense of perception would result in a greater awareness of the world -- seems admirable to me. I've ducked the whole Danish cartoons/freedom-of-speech thing (didn't mean to; I wanted to post something but never quite got around to it), but that seems like a good place to argue from. Maybe later...
Let's make a quick move to the cultural high ground instead, and talk about some exhibitions.
Tropicália is the Barbican's exhibition of Brazilian art. I can imagine it being great fun if you go with a bunch of friends, since lots of the works are interactive -- try on some clothes, taste some mysterious liquids, walk on a beach and poke around in some huts, and so on. By yourself, on a wet Friday afternoon, this isn't so great. And the (non-interactive) rest of the art is mostly not terribly inspired, unless you're really into sixties psychedelia. So, not really my kind of thing. But, then, you would be looking at me for a long time before you were reminded of a Brazilian. There was a little notice on the gallery wall informing us that the macaws were provided by Macaws Direct, and providing a phone number; this may well be one of the signs of the apocalypse. I didn't jot it down, so if you urgently need a macaw, you'll have to Google for it like everyone else.
Downstairs in the Barbican Curve is an exhibition of Polish art. Taken along with the Brazilians upstairs, this demonstrates some sort of conservation law for flamboyance: upstairs they have lots of colour and happiness, so naturally the Polish art downstairs is almost entirely grey and doom-laden. There are mysterious packing-cases, dusty schoolrooms, soul-destroying wooden contraptions, deaf people singing and photos of amputees. I was much happier down here, to be honest.
On to the Tate, for Albers & Moholy-Nagy: from the Bauhaus to the New World. I read a review -- must have been Time Out, the Guardian or the Observer, but I can't find it now -- that said Moholy-Nagy blew Albers out of the water in every single room. This is cobblers. Moholy-Nagy is fine, especially in the photograms, though the paintings tend towards either Malevich-lite or Kandinsky-lite. But Albers is the revelation here: the man had an astounding grasp of colour. There's a whole roomful of his Variations/Homages to the Square that bears comparison to the (newly rehung) Rothko room. Both men were driven out of Bauhaus-era Germany: Moholy-Nagy stopped off in London to do graphic design for Imperial Airways and London Underground ("Quickly Away, Thanks to Pneumatic Doors!"), before heading to Chicago and dying romantically early at 51. Albers headed straight for the US and was inspired afresh by pre-Colombian art; he taught at a college in North Carolina, and lived into his eighties.
Albers' Bauhaus-era belief in art's ethical dimension -- as the captions put it, a belief that a heightened sense of perception would result in a greater awareness of the world -- seems admirable to me. I've ducked the whole Danish cartoons/freedom-of-speech thing (didn't mean to; I wanted to post something but never quite got around to it), but that seems like a good place to argue from. Maybe later...
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Date: 2006-03-11 10:54 am (UTC)A friend also waxed lyrical on the films, but that, my friends, is what DVD players are for.