Installation review: Underscore

A quick post about last weekend before the Queen's Jubilee mega-bash takes over.

Last Sunday, when the sun still shone over London town, there was an installation in Wandsworth Park on the Thames opposite the Hurlingham, called Underscore.

It allowed you to follow the route of this weekend's pageant, but underwater, with your ears.

As you walked along a curly path under those pregnantly green trees you passed by wooden boxes with names like Kew Bridge, Embankment and Thames Gateway, on which stood monochrome clothed artists with megaphones.

They performed sounds that had been recorded at those places along the way, animalistic croaks and machine like thuds.

I enjoyed the aural walk under Thames so much I did it many times, both upstream and down, then went for an ice cream.

It was a good afternoon.

What's on the fourth plinth now?

Replacing Nelson's ship in a bottle, a homage to "the heroism of growing up"
 

Nelson's Ship in a Bottle at its new home

While it was disappointing to find the Cutty Sark closed yesterday I took the opportunity while in Greenwich to see Nelson's Ship in a Bottle at its new home outside the National Maritime Museum.

And very good it looks too. It links the navy and empire with the peoples involved, combining a historic sailing ship with fabrics in a way that really works next to the new wing overlooking Greenwich Park (currently filled with Olympics preparations).

This evening there was a reception where its artist, Yinka Shonibare, gave a short talk about his thinking behind the work and what he wanted to achieve.

Make people think was one of his objectives, but maybe as important was to make a connection, for that is where it excels. It opens up the NMM to a wider audience and that can only be a good thing.

You can already judge its success by the steady stream of visitors having their picture taken with it in the background, at home as if it was designed for that location in mind rather than the 4th plinth in Trafalgar Square.

Diamond Jubilee's Biggest Poster and Culture in Stone

When Liz goes boating next weekend (along with 1,000 other vessels) she will pass this epically big poster from the Silver Jubilee back in 1977.

100 x 70 metres it has been hung on the sides of Sea Container house between Waterloo and Blackfriars.

I was a bit worried about the office workers stuck behind it, their windows darkened by the royal images, as in years gone by I've been to many a meeting there. But fortunately it's currently being renovated.

At its base you'll find the Gallery@Oxo which is currently showing an exhibition of Shona sculpture from Zimbabwe called "Culture in stone" - small but well worth visiting.

More pictures from: Culture in stone

Nelson's Ship in a Bottle - Victory!

Its a good day for art and the National Maritime Museum (NMM)!

The Art Fund has successfully raised enough money to keep Yinka Shonibare's sculpture Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle for the NMM in Greenwich.

It looked good on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square (above) and it will look equally impressive outside the NMM and as a campaign supporter I'll be no doubt be down in Greenwich some time to admire it.

What's more it will be in place in time for the Queen to see it when she visits Greenwich for the opening of the Cutty Sark and the NMM's 75th anniversary on the 25th April, which is this Wednesday.


Updated: The Queen in Greenwich as reported on the BBC web site here.

Out of sync at Somerset House

It's spring in the Northern Hemisphere and the daffs are out, but at Somerset House there's a reminder of the seasons down under.

This installation is called "Out of sync" by Chilean artist Fernando Casasempere, and maybe that's why the colour scheme is autumnal brown.

Anyhow very striking and can be found at the lovely Somerset House until 27th April, worth popping your head in the courtyard if you're near the Strand / Waterloo Bridge.

A sailing review of the film "The Artist"

The Boat Project

As O'Docker correctly identified, yesterday's picture was of "The Boat Project".

This is an art installation / boat being constructed as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad from 1,200 pieces of wood donated by the public, each piece meaning something to the giver.

It might be the drums sticks of a band, the hairbrush from the father who worked at Pinewood Studios, parts of HMS Invincible, a cribbage board, teak packing board from China, fragments of Brighton's West Pier, part of Jimmy Hendrix's guitar ..... the list is nearly endless.

Together they tell a story, a patchwork quilt of wood of the people of Britain. The boat is at present unnamed but you can vote from a short list on the boat project's web site.

She'll be launched on the 7th May and then make her way along the south coast of England stopping at places like Brighton and Portsmouth before reaching London.

The London Boat Show connection

Yesterday's mystery picture was a display of the wares from the Mayfair Gallery. What, I asked, is the connection between the Mayfair Gallery and sailing?

It was in a way a trick question, because my honest answer was that I didn't know. Hence my surprise when I saw it at the London Boat Show, which I went to yesterday.

But obviously someone thinks there is a connection. If a gazzilionaire turns up to buy a $$ million Princess or Sunseeker they might want to decorate it with some vases or something. Or indeed a Rolls as in the pic above (taken with an iPhone so alas not a great photo).

To be honest I can't see your typical member of the 0.01% joining the masses at Excel in Docklands, but apparently the super yacht segment of the market is booming.

Unlike much of the rest of the show that felt rather anaemic, as will post on shortly.

Blog review of 2011

It wasn't an easy year, what with a death in the family and the riots in London. There was also not just one but two periods where work loads were excessive for weeks and weeks in a row.

But there were good moments too. Despite the riots London proved it was great with a wide range of culture from Gauguin to the Book of the Dead to Steve Reich's Drumming to Miro to theremin SF to Iain M. Banks to string quartet plus didgeridoo to Barber's Knoxville to the Proms to John Martin's Apocalypse (and sewage system) to Film to Wild Beasts to Swallows and Amazons.

Just check out what was packed into one day off in London.

There was of course one rather well publicised wedding.

Hmmm...... looks like there was more culture than boating. But I did get paddling on the river, go ice skating and race in the Fowey Classics (allegedly). We were "not bad" three times in a row - yeh!

This year is already promising much, with both the London 2012 Olympics and the Queens Diamond Jubilee, and I've been plotting options for sailing routes and destinations.

Above is the classic yacht Mikado which we beat at the Fowey Classics - one definitely good memory to take from last year.

Of course Buff's year was even better.......

Save Victory in a Bottle

For the last year and a half Yinka Shonibare's version of HMS Victory in a gigantic glass bottle (above from this post) has been standing on the 4th plinth in Trafalgar Square.

Its stay is coming to an end early next year and rather than be sent off into the sunset like The Fighting Temeraire it has been proposed that it be purchased for the nation and located outside the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.

I think that's an excellent idea and will be adding my name (and dosh) to the list at the Art Fund's web site.

But it seems that not everyone is in favour - as the first comment on the site shows!

Oh dear :(

A frightful anniversary

Today I share something with Alex and Taru.

No, I do not have a glamorous life sailing around the world, enjoying stunningly beautiful blue water, but like them today is an anniversary.

For me it is blogging, for 6 years ago today the first post went live. If I were 6 now I would be out there banging on doors demanding free chocolate, for today is Halloween!!

Being a little bit older I'll be connecting some appropriately spooky dots, and going back to the painter John Martin. As well as a career in art and a side line in designing London's sewage system he had time to raise not just 6 of his own children but also take under his wing a young woman called Jane Webb.

Jane Webb went on to write The Mummy (above) and the ever connected John Martin could also claim to know William Goldwin whose daughter wrote Frankenstein. It might not have been a coincidence then that one of Martin's own daughters married an Egyptologist.

Indeed there sometimes seems no limit to the connections John Martin made. He shared lodgings with the future King of Belgium (who became godfather to one of Martin's children) and at his dinner parties you could meet Dickens, Michael Faraday, Turner and John Tenniel, the illustrator of Lewis Carroll's books.

One amazing story has him on the footplate of a steam train with none other than Isambard Kingdom Brunel thundering along at 90 mph as they proved conclusively that a train could go faster than a horse.

What a great life!

Film: Tacita Dean at the Tate Modern

One of the joys of London is being able to pop into the Tate Modern's cavernous Turbine Hall to discover the latest installation. And that's exactly what I did last weekend.

What I found was Tacita Dean's tribute to 35mm film called, er, FILM. Unlike in the cinema where the screen is much wider than it is tall here it is on end, reaching almost to the hall's roof.

In the 11 minute loop she demonstrates the range of techniques and textures than can be created by old fashioned analogue methods, using filters and cut-outs. And the loop itself is physical - a single loop of celluloid.

One of the main images is of the far end to the Turbine Hall itself, while others include fountains, streams, waves approaching a beach and mushrooms. Children love it, rushing up to the screen, trying to catch falling images, like the bubble above.

I enjoyed it, though I wouldn't rave as some reviewers have. I'm rather prosaically in favour of new tech, despite the odd hiccup.

Its really nice, lying there on that endless expense of poured concrete, watching silhouetted children and waiting for those mushrooms to come round yet again. I can totally recommend you go and see it.

However I couldn't help but think, again and again, why make life so difficult? It must have taken ages to do all of that the old fashioned way, cutting ribbons of film and gluing frames together again.

Just, like, load it up to MovieMaker dude. (or Final Cut Pro if you've got a Mac).

Maybe that work is the point. It was a bit like those Sunflowers Seeds of Ai Weiwei, in which each of the uncountable millions was created by hand (though it was a shame you couldn't walk on them as was intended).

But at the end of the day 35mm film is - or rather was - for me a tool that could be used to tell a story, and its that mix of character and plot that interests me.

Something, indeed, like Casablanca.

Play it, Sam, play "As time goes by"

Sigh. Now that was true magic.

Tate Britain: Apocalypse (last weekend)

Last weekend the world almost ended - or at least according to Harold Camping. It's hard to keep up, the world seemed to have been about to end soooo many times this year.

It seemed right, therefore, to go to the Tate Britain to see the exhibition Apocalypse of work by artist John Martin (as in the example above)

You certainly got value for money for his canvases were super sized and if you like the colour red, well you'll really like them. Epic scale, some with hundreds of people dwarfed by landscapes that seem to go on forever. Almost always there were snow capped mountains looming high above pastoral scenes, that, like Narnia, looked suspiciously like an English country estate.

The subject was usually biblical or classical era - think fall of Babylon or Pompeii - and the results were popular, drawing in the crowds like the summer blockbuster. The pictures went on tour, some going as far as Australia.

The art establishment was sniffy. "But is it art?" they would ask, as so many have before and after. Indeed when the Tate Britain was flooded and a John Martin got damaged the curators basically shrugged their shoulders. It was just a John Martin, after all.

It must be admitted they are not break-through material. It's not like Turner where you go wow, that's something new and different. It gets repetitive and the execution feels more like manufacturing than creation.

But it is good entertainment - pictures you like you haven't seen before, and you won't forget John Martin's name afterwards.

If, of course, there is an afterwards........

wonderful artwork girl pictures

wonderful artwork girl pictures

The Bonnie Boat

No, not Bonnie's boat, and actually in Gaelic it should be Bàta Brèagha.

This eye catching yacht has been covered with 60,000 mirrors as part of an art project called the Bonnie Boat which will be held on the island of Skye on the 10th September. The boat is called the Celeste and is inspired by the 1960s pirate station Radio Caroline.

The event program can be found here and the artist's web site here. Its one of those that uses the word "space" a lot.

The program ends with a call to "book your ticket for the ceilidh" - very tempting but alas not possible as I have family chores that day.

So I will not be following in the wake of Prince Charlie:

Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing,

Onward! the sailors cry;

Carry the lad that's born to be King

Over the sea to Skye.

How much?

London has the reputation for being an expensive city - mostly well earned. But that doesn't mean you have to spend a fortune to enjoy it.

Take this weeks' 24 hours extravaganza and this list of what remember of the outgoings :

• Timeout London (above) £ 3.25 which was a good investment even if it did get the times of Arrietty wrong, requiring a bit of on-the-fly re-scheduling


• Oyster card (also above) hard to say as I use a mixture of zones and pre-pay, but TfL says a day's travel in central London should never be more than £ 6.60 (unless TfL computers get confused)


• Roundhouse tickets concert plus Curtain Call installation £ 7.50 - how about that? Ok the friends went with (who I'd sailed with from Lisbon to Gibraltar) did get it via one of those special offer emails


• Tate Britain entry: FREE! (ok, I am a member, but most of the museum is free to view)


• Courtauld's two exhibitions and permanent collection: £ 6.00 - again, how about that? World famous top pictures for well under a tenner


• Home made burger with lots of trimmings in Covent Garden: £ 4.00


• Tea and chocolate brownie: dunno, maybe £ 3.00 if eaten in to avoid the rain storm outside


• Serpentine Gallery: Summer Pavilion and Installation: FREE - yup, not a penny to pay there


• Arrietty film at Odeon Covent Garden: £ 7.50 - not bad that, its their mid week afternoon reduced price tickets

Grand total: £ 37.85 - which I think is pretty good for 24 hours of packed arts, music and cinema.

Ok it might be steeper if had eaten out rather than grabbed a sandwich at home, and there was that round of drinks at the Roundhouse and sneaky taxi ride to keep on what was a rather tight schedule, but even so I was impressed by how little it all added up to.

Music, art and Arrietty: one day in London

It might have been raining (and hard at that) but JP's had a great 24 hours.

Yesterday went to the Roundhouse to hear a performance of solo cello performed by Steven Isserlis, which was great for three reasons. Firstly of course he's a great musician, and was playing works by Bach, Britten and Australian composer Carl Vine.

Secondly recently (ok, relatively recently) the Roundhouse has been transformed into a wonderful circular performing space.

And thirdly it is currently host to Ron Arud's installation Curtain Call. This is ring of 5,600 silicon rods, 8 metres tall, that surrounds the performing space and on to which are projected images and videos to create a real 360 degree experience.

It was a bit like the proms - no seats, just the floor (concrete, hard) or standing, but you could walk in or out of the curtain. During the Bach the videos were music scores, Britten clouds (as above) and for the Carl Vine (which actually turned out to me my favourite as the solo instrument was accompanied by tape) floating highly magnified pollen.

Afterwards there were some more Curtain Call works, including this one that reminded me a bit of the Global Communication gig at the British Library. Then two others wasn't so into before a final one that started off as a man dozing on a train and then went into his dream of him and some woman, which would happily have seen again. Great fun.

Then today took the day off to enjoy life a little. Instead of one mega art exhibition packed in a whole series of small scale ones:

1. The Vorticists at the Tate Britain - think short lived blighty version of Futurism. They had a manifesto that included the assertion that "the English character is based on the sea" -  liked that bit.

2. Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril, beyond the Moulin Rouge, at the Courtauld. Just a couple of rooms but interesting and its in a lovely building:

3. Falling up, the Gravity of Art, also at the Coutauld which basically a few pics plus just the installation below:

4. Quick look at the Courtauld's main works as they have some top-notch Degas, Seurat, Cezanne, Gaugain, Renoir, Modigliani, Manet, Picasso etc and Van Gogh's self portait after he chopped off his own ear.

Then it was time for lunch, and luckily the nearby Covent Garden had a food fair so was spoilt for choice and in the end had one of those proper burgers (with rocket, mustard, gherkin etc) then cup tea and chocolate something in Pret a Manager to give strength for the tube plus long walk in the pouring rain to......

5. Serpentine Gallery Pavilion. This year its a very sombre black affair with at its centre a secret garden full of scented plants:

6. Serpentine Gallery's installation by Michalangelo Pistaletto. This was disappointing for two reasons: firstly they didn't let you take pics with your phone (how 20th Century) and also was basically coils of corrugated cardboard with the odd mirror. No pictures for obvious reasons.

Then it was a bit of dash back to Shaftesbury Avenue to see the latest from Studio Ghibli, the pastoral Arrietty, which was simply gorgeous! Wonderful art work, leisurely pace (no explosions here thank you very much) and moving central relationship. If you know the Borrowers books then you know what happens, but here with Japanese green tea of course.

And with that it was back to JP HQ.

Not a bad day......

Miro at the Tate Modern

On Sunday I took the day off work (shock!) and went into town to see the Miro exhibition at the Tate Modern.

Joan Miro was one of the mold breakers of the 20th Century, one of those artists that is known simply by his surname, always eye catching and dramatic. The exhibition covered his evolution from naive-realism, to surrealism, to abstraction and then finally conceptual art.

But it was strangely uninspiring to see room after room of his paintings. All too often they were too similar, variations on a small set of themes, and often too insular.

One phase for example was in reaction to the Spanish Civil War, and involved stick figures with red hats - the hat apparently a crucial political statement of solidarity with Catalan peasants. That's a message that might have meant something in 1930s Barcelona, but is less universal and hence powerful than (say) Picasso's Guernica.

So after a room full of stick men with red hats that felt like more than enough.

The more complex pictures were more interesting, like the Constellation series as in this example:

This surely is great art, but presenting nine of them together there was the opposite problem: each scene is completely filled with abstract symbols and the audio guide described with some of them. But to go into all of them for all of the pictures in the Constellation room would take all day: it was overload, and too often the rewards, the message, insufficient.

Later on Miro ended up experimenting with burning his own pictures and sculptures of found objects, and it was hard to appreciate either that much.

My favourite was the triptic Blue I, II, and III, one of which is shown above. Massive canvases, their immersive experience bring the skies and water's of the Mediterranean into the heart of London. Without the overload of Constellation series or narrow message of the Catalan peasant's hat it's simplicity paradoxically had a greater impact.

Maybe that says something about our overloaded times - or my desire at this point for a cappuccino.

In the end my impression was that Miro's pictures individually have an impact as they show his differentness to other artists, but that together they show the lack of variety between his paintings.

With Miro, it really is the case that less is more.


Updated: for an entertaining take on the exhibition, Brian Sewell's review is here

Gauguin at the Tate

Gauguin was a bad boy and he paid for it, dying of syphilis aged just 54.

You see him in this self portrait with one of his classic paintings in the background. In it a naked young girl is observed by a devil like death - or is she is dreaming of it? Gauguin excused himself as so many have done in the past: he is a genius and it is for art's sake.

But what does that make the gallery visitor? As you enter the Gauguin exhibition currently on at the Tate Modern you find yourself face to face with this very picture, the Manao Tupapau or Spirit Of The Dead Watching.

It is a disconcerting image on many levels, but that is something that Gauguin would have relished. Often in his paintings he seems to challenge the viewer. Rather than just paint a still life of fruit there'd be a mischievous face to one side, watching.

Many of his pictures are from his time in Tahiti. He imagined it to be unchanged and unspoilt since the first westerners arrived on HMS Dolphin, where the sailors were warmly welcomed by the local girls. He was depressed to find a land changed by French colonialism and Catholic missionaries.

Gauguin, though disappointed, seems to have replaced the reality by layers of imagined or reconstructed myths taken from sources as wide apart as Greece and Easter Island. Though surrounded by the most beautiful of blue water it rarely appears in his paintings. There are just the odd boat, not very good ones at that.

For his eyes were most definitely on land, and on those young girls in particular, and you could see the resignation in their faces.

The exhibition leaves a disturbing picture of a man with many demons of his own: I did wonder whether the devilish figure in the picture above was Gauguin himself, aware of his own mortality and the path that would take him to his death.