‘just a warm summer’s evening sharing a drink and conversation, watching the light and colour change, riverside in Henley.
Archives for August 2016
Sculptures and Installations
Work and travel kept me away from the opening weeks of the Tate Modern’s new extension, the Switch House. Ten stories set atop The Tanks, the angular brick structure is dedicated to interactive art and video. It opened to generally positive reviews , and invited members in for a preview ahead of the opening week last June. This was my first chance to give it aa wander though, entering from the Turbine Hall and then up to Viewing Deck and back down level by level.
I can’t say I’m a fan of the new building. The lowest levels are close concrete caves: dusky lighting, low ceilings, and industrial ambiance. The exhibitions, corporate sponsorships, feel more like rough ideas than insightful art. Posted signs warn that the staff will periodically enter to rearrange the blue scaffolds on the floor, emphasizing the rigid transience of the work. Alcoves conceal flickering video screens, the sparse art overpowered by the heavy architectural elements.
The elevators were inadequate for the flow of visitors, often arriving full or passing completely. Eventually we got up to the tenth-floor viewing deck, which is spectacular. The wrap-around balcony gives wonderful views of the city, the river, and the adjacent £15 million+ apartments at Neo Bankside. (Predictably, the gallery’s heeled neighbors are not too happy)
The floors beneath feel limited and claustrophobic: the slit wrap-around windows pull the spaces in rather than open them up in the Café and the Member’s Lounge. There’s little space given over to showcasing art and, while I’m sure that the building will grow into it’s purpose, it doesn’t yet feel like an expansion for the museum’s collection. It is more a working extension of its premises.
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Less time spent in the Switch House translated to more time spent among the sculptures of Mona Hatoum. A Lebanese . Palestinian artist, she works with installations of everyday objects that play with light, sound, and space. The Tate’s overview closes in a few days, but I was particularly charmed by her illuminated and motorized works.
A sand table that creates and erases grooves beneath a rotating arm (+ and –) was nicely executed, as were two works with intricate metal and tonal meshes around flickering lights (Light Sentence and Grater Divide). Finally, the full-room high-voltage humming of Homebound was fun, both playful and lethal in depicting domestic confinement and small-scale threat.
Not missing the flowers
Georgia O’Keefe is an iconic twentieth century American artist, whose paintings are instantly and uniquely recognizable. Robert Hughes characterized her as “a ‘natural’: not a naive or primitive painter by any means, but one who seemed to be instinctively in touch with the vibrations of the cosmos.” I’ve visited her museum in Santa Fe, filled with simple, bold depictions of sensualized flowers, bleached bones and southwest landscapes.
The Tate Modern is hosting a retrospective of 
her work, on view through the end of October. It’s themed as ‘A century of O’Keefe’, celebrating 100 years since her first gallery showing. We spent a couple of hours exploring the thirteen rooms, nice for not focusing on the expected canvases. Although there were a few of her recognizable blooms, most of the exhibition has early works that anticipate the well-known paintings, showing how her methods and vision developed in the early decades of her work.
It also holds a number of photographs by her husband,
Alfred Stieglitz, that range from insightful (the portrait of her hands, above) to embarrassing (I can imagine him reassuring her that nobody would ever see the bedroom photographs as they were being taken).
I really liked her early abstract work in charcoal. When I took still-life classes, they were very geometric exercises, gridding off spaces and squaring off angles. Life drawing, in contrast, was all arcs and curves and living shadows: infinitely more appealing. I see that feeling in works like No. 12 Special, right.
The organic exploration of edge, contrast and shadow continued through her early watercolours (Pink and Blue Mouuntain) and oils (Abstraction Blue), which almost foreshadow later flowers. Abstraction – Alexius and Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow were also really striking close up.
The early landscape paintings were nighttime urban canyons , New York rather than Santa Fe. The liquid clouds and reflections of the moon in the lights are a nice unifying feature, repeated as she works through the ideas.
The realism gave way to full abstraction, soft and pillow-y, full of currents and storms.
And it’s easy to see it all coming together as she discovered the desert Southwest.
It’s a lovely show to spend time browsing the works, connecting the styles, and reflecting on her career. And, in the end, I didn’t really miss the flowers.
‘a bit like seeing beyond the wall of yellow sunflowers in the van Gogh museum as well
Back online
‘sorry to have been missing the past few weeks: it’s been a busy travel interval mingled with a couple of technical failures and a brief illness. Things are progressing with the products, though, and life has generally been good. My sincere thanks to the folks who have asked how things are going, I apologize for worrying you.
A friend pointed out that if I’m going to focus my attention on a limited number of social media channels, then I need to be both vocal and visible on them. For me, that would be narrative on this blog and images on Instagram. I will be more diligent on both.
Another friend reminded me of my resolution in leaving Facebook: The people who want to find me know where to look. A fair number have actually sent emails, but I’ve been unforgivably slow in replying. In my defense, work emails haven’t fared much better in recent weeks. But I take the point that waiting until I find the time to write a proper letter, or to finally settling circumstances once and for all, has meant that I don’t make any timely reply. That, too, will change.
I’ll do a bit of backfill here and I’ll try to be more regular in writing ideas and in sharing pictures going forward. And you should always know that a koffie or bierje is on offer for those with time to spare among the Maas cafés or walking the Poole beaches.
‘just drop me a line or a text.
Tokyo, briefly
We will be able to meet with you on Tuesday, advised the design team. We can arrange hotels and start at 9. ‘considering that the date was only five days away, it presented no small challenge.
Still, I love getting the opportunity to travel to Asia, and was able to set up flights through Amsterdam and Paris (despite the cabin attendant’s strike) on short notice. I dropped into Narita early on Monday morning, planning a bit of afternoon sightseeing ahead of the technical reviews.
Narita Airport is an hour out of the city, prohibitively expensive by taxi or hire car. The trains and buses are the best way to get into town, about the same price and time either way. I picked up the bus, connecting to the subway, as the best alternative. The woman at the ticket counter politely suggested that I might be eligible for the over-65 fare: I knew the flight probably made me look tired, but I didn’t feel that old yet. The bus dropped me at Tokyo Central station and I was off into the maelstrom of the Japanese subway ring.
It was easier to get the ticket than to find
the train tis time, the indicators seemed to lead around the station in contradictory ways. A ticket-taker was able to point me through the labyrinth of corridors and to the right platform. I made the customary mistake of taking the express train instead of the local, bypassing my stop, the the backtrack was straightforward. ‘tucked into the Tokyo Dome well before lunch.
With a half-day free, I thought I might take in the Imperial Palace East Gardens, the only portion of the Edo Castle grounds that are generally open to the public. Unfortunately, I arrived to find them closed on Monday. I walked a portion of the Palace moat considered my next stop.
The National Museum of Modern Art turned out to be nearby, with a set of Important Cultural Properties (the government’s designation for works of significance) that connect traditional styles of drawing and watercolour to modernist conceptual works. However, the museum, too, turned out to be closed on Monday.
A nearby bookstore was fun, though: Clinton / Trump interest was clearly high.
Giving up on high culture,I wandered over to the Akiabara District to see what was new in electronics and media. Back in the day, the district held cameras, computers, and players that wouldn’t be seen in the US for years at prices that were a fraction of retail. Unfortunately, the District has devolved to a gaming and hentai mecca, over-commercialized and under-aged.
Authentic dinner would be good before sleeping off the jet lag. I picked an intimate street near the hotel and walked a few blocks, checking out each warmly lit restaurant window with it’s display of plastic food. I finally fund one that seemed to have a nice selection and stopped in. (Complimenting it later to my hosts, they told me that I’d actually stepped into a Chinese restaurant, but it’s all indistinguishable after a long travel day).
Meetings began early the next day and stretched through to dinner. We worked through all of the 
technical questions and the contract structure and terms, so hopefully we’ll be able to finalize the arrangements soon. ‘Back to Narita early this morning and back in Amsterdam before the Dutch realized I was gone.
And, with a bit more warning, I’ll get the tourist guides i hand and make better use of an extra day n the next trip.
Tokyo twilight (and trains)
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