And it doesn't even mention that goal...
Foot pain retreated enough this morning to allow me to walk to West station and the 8.07 to London Bridge - truly London will be fab when they've finished building it - and a walk to Tate Modern. I'd done the Alighiero Boetti and Yayoi Kusama last Sunday, finding them both very rich and fecund artists, the Kusama beng the more interesting of the two, and I was a little arted out after Picasso and photographs to do Damien Hirst. Plus there was a queue. It looked heaving.
I got to the gallery just before it opened, and as a member I got to go straight in. I believe I have a potential for a private view, but I think I've had my money's worth. He's actually a rather old fashioned artist - his themes are mutability and preservation, most obviously in the cow, sharks and sheep in preserving fluid, sliced in half or whole. These have a melancholy beauty, as much due to the refraction caused by the tanks as anything else. Then there are the flies - buzzing around a decaying cow's head in a piece I've seen at least once before, in the RAA British Sculpture show, or stuck to the wall in a circle. - and the butterflies - flying around one round like Kew has been transplanted - or stuck to the wall. Then the endless cigarette butts and pills (not a show to inhale at). Perhaps the best piece is a autopsied angel, but I fear it all feel a little obvious in its juxtapositions.
In the Turbine Hall there is the diamond encrusted skull in a small blacked out room - you wait a few minutes to be admitted, walked through a dark tunnel, then into the room with the skull. It has a certain beauty, but it's flashy and vulgar.
I didn't feel the need to buy the catalogue.
Then north to St Paul's and a busy Central Line, via a coffee shop to a meeting in the Crown and Sceptre, a pub whose staff have gone from adequate to hopeless - this one didn't know what stout was, didn't recognise the name of one of their beers and was confused by notions of coffee or tea. Half the menu was off, too.
Then a walk with someone from the meeting in search of a coffee shop off Oxford Street - via a colour coded stationery shop which clearly either sells nothing which is yellow or has sold everything it had which was yellow - and to Selfridges. I didn't quite stand on the spot of the cover to Solar Flares, so next time.
Back to Charing Cross via CeX and Fopp and a sinking feeling that I'd dropped the fiver in my back pocket. A productive day.
I got to the gallery just before it opened, and as a member I got to go straight in. I believe I have a potential for a private view, but I think I've had my money's worth. He's actually a rather old fashioned artist - his themes are mutability and preservation, most obviously in the cow, sharks and sheep in preserving fluid, sliced in half or whole. These have a melancholy beauty, as much due to the refraction caused by the tanks as anything else. Then there are the flies - buzzing around a decaying cow's head in a piece I've seen at least once before, in the RAA British Sculpture show, or stuck to the wall in a circle. - and the butterflies - flying around one round like Kew has been transplanted - or stuck to the wall. Then the endless cigarette butts and pills (not a show to inhale at). Perhaps the best piece is a autopsied angel, but I fear it all feel a little obvious in its juxtapositions.
In the Turbine Hall there is the diamond encrusted skull in a small blacked out room - you wait a few minutes to be admitted, walked through a dark tunnel, then into the room with the skull. It has a certain beauty, but it's flashy and vulgar.
I didn't feel the need to buy the catalogue.
Then north to St Paul's and a busy Central Line, via a coffee shop to a meeting in the Crown and Sceptre, a pub whose staff have gone from adequate to hopeless - this one didn't know what stout was, didn't recognise the name of one of their beers and was confused by notions of coffee or tea. Half the menu was off, too.
Then a walk with someone from the meeting in search of a coffee shop off Oxford Street - via a colour coded stationery shop which clearly either sells nothing which is yellow or has sold everything it had which was yellow - and to Selfridges. I didn't quite stand on the spot of the cover to Solar Flares, so next time.
Back to Charing Cross via CeX and Fopp and a sinking feeling that I'd dropped the fiver in my back pocket. A productive day.