What a lively city London is to visit, with many out-going people in attendance at the free and interesting galleries, museums, and with a a lively street life. It deserved more than the day's stopover we had to taste its flavours. Here's a link to a four-day London trip with lots crowded into it.
London Stop-over
Our introduction to London was on an overcast day in mid September. We had only a day given it was an airline stop en route to Europe for an extended stay. The point of an extended trip is to take time to look around, see, listen, and learn. So I didn't want to rush, even for this one day, but waned to fit in all that I could manage. And, because this was the start of a sojourn I'd be writing about for an artists' publication, I decided to make art the focus of it.
Fighting jet lag, the first thing I did was to ask the young attendant at my visiting-academics' residence in London where to see the work of emergent, rather than established, artists. She suggested the Tate Modern, a great museum treasure, but too established for my pursuits that day. She kindly telephoned someone she termed a "more cultured" friend, who directed me to the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), the Royal College of Art, and the White Cube Gallery -- all new to me.Â
The Institute of Contemporary Art
I'm sorry to have missed the Royal College, but headed for the ICA. In a classical-facade building that belies its name, ICA is a multi-disciplinary art institute that includes 2D, 3D, cinema, poetry, dance and performance art. Located in a swank district (SW1), its mandate is to "support radical art." Titles of works previously shown, like DIckhead and Are You Man Enough To Be a Woman give some of idea of the directions '"radical" takes.
At the moment, I was not so inspired by the art seen (some of it satirically funny) as I was impressed by the concept of the institute. Its mandate indicated pragmatic and community-minded decisions to support off-mainstream art and emerging artists. Besides its principle exhibits, ICA boosts emerging artists by having one room devoted to a series of 50 open-competition shows that change weekly during the year. Imagine that kind of support for unknown artists back home
in Vancouver!
Art is Everything Exhibit
We can all learn from art and not just indulge the already familiar. The refrain, I don't know much about art, but I know what I like gets worn threadbare. I believe art is a valuable mind-opener. So, when the ICA's current exhibition, Architecture id Everything didn't send me over-the-moon visually with its display of original magazine covers, I turned to the show blog to educate me.
The graphics exhibited pay tribute to Bau, a Viennese counter-cultural architectural movement and magazine whose interdisciplinary manifesto accords with the ICA. In contrast to the "form follows function" dictate, form has meaning and impact as a cultural, sociological, and ritualistic expression of how we live. The Bau perspective considers Architecture to be all-embracing, given the forms (structures) and spaces we live and work in channel certain cultural ideas and ways of life (monolithic power-structures come to mind versus other possibilities). Among the witty magazine cover art displayed, the pivotal one at left shows an aerial view of Vienna, with large block of Emmental cheese as part of the skyline. Notes explain that the term Emmentaler in Viennese jargon suggests a bad building , a tongue-in-cheek nod to housing projects of the 60s (and today)..This exhibit related an important concept, but (like the tiresome refrain) I know what I like and wish the visuals had been more exciting.
What would the Bau have thought of this part of London? The architecture was old-school but was enlivened by all that went on in and around the square. It was almost festive as we walked around outdoors.. Crossing Trafalgar Square was like going through a carnival with music, buskers, street performers, and festival tents.
Saint-Martin-in-the-Fields
Saint Martin-in-the-Fields was the next stop, partly because of its fame as a historic site. Mostly, however, because of its free mid-day concerts and to get out of the imminent rain. This was an opportunity to experience something traditional and something radical in the same setting. A string trio was performing music from Haydn and Beethoven to an almost full house. I sat in a side pew feeling pleased with the musical interlude and staring at the extraordinary contemporary window atop the nave (replacing one bombed in WWII). The close-up beside it shows the radical design by Shirazeh Houshiar of a cross with a focal ovoid/egg-shape (suggesting birth?). The birth theme resonates with an outdoor sculpture by Michael Chapman of a newborn boy with umbilicus attached to earth.Â
Just across the street from this cathedral is the National Portrait Gallery. Well worth a visits to see both historic as well as modern portraits. The contemporary stylistic divergence of each year's Best Portrait Competition, selected from thousands of international entries, offsets the many traditional portraits of eminent people. Not all is great art, but what I think great is how you can see historic changes that define "traditional" you walk along centuries of portraiture in this gallery. Looking at the faces, the poses, the fashions, offers quite a personal gaze, not only at people through history but at history through people (albeit a select bunch).
White Cube Gallery
Last stop of the day was the neighbouring White Cube gallery. A beautiful show there:Â abstract, minimalist, and very sensual. Filling all the rooms of this well apportioned gallery, the elusively coloured works on paper and vaporous kinetic sculptures of Larry Bell are about light/colour, space/surface, optical layering, and visual reverberations. Walking through a room intersected by huge glass panes (like a Richard Serra metal work), your own reflection mingles and changes with the layers seen and reflected through the glass. In the more contained smaller works (see photo) the colour is a vaporous phenomenon that shifts with viewpoint, rather than a substance, as in a painting. paint. one, like paint. Using glass, vacuum-applied metallic and quartz films on paper and acetate, the interplay of substance and illusion, changing as one walks around in this show, made it magical for me.
A friendly gallerist directed me to London's east end to view the not-yet-discovered artists' studios and galleries. I was overwhelmed by the map she gave me: the city I'd mistakenly coded as small shops and corner-pubs was studded by so many art galleries it would take many months to see! Â The tourist checklist approach, when one rushes just to check them off an a list, is not for me. So, I folded away the map for next time. Now, for some good curry and a farewell toast to a day well spent in London!
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