A quick 48 hours in London to catch up with some old friends and reacquaint ourselves with the old city.
Tacita Dean @ Tate Modern
Man I wish I had made it to see Fiona Banner at Tate Britain though.
Brick Lane Graffiti
Tag: London
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London Graf
Walking from the V&A Post-Modernism exhibition to central London. 
View down the Thames – the city scape evolving. Would be good to hire someone without Foster or Rogers for once, eh? 
Reflecting, as usual. 
Tacita Dean filling the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern … not quite as arresting or immediately accessible as previous years, but I was happy to see motion media being employed. 
Twisting and distorting film by hand 
This is what I call a real art space – one that kids can run through and enjoy 
View from behind 
Stairs 
Ai Weiwei … would have loved to have seen the original piece, but they had a few million on display for the visitors. 
Too cool for art 
Enjoying the street art along Brick Lane. 
Space Invader! 
Locals also enjoying it. 
Characters 
Old geezers – hey was that the same guy? 
HUH? 
I wonder how much the local authorities tolerate / encourage the work? 
Bright colours 
Seems that portraits are pretty edgy right now. -
My Life Summed-Up in a Single Photo
London Pride beer with a bowl of Hong Kong noodles (with one of the chopsticks the wrong way round).
🙂
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Happy New Year
A belated new year to you, beloved reader.
I don’t know about you, but Phil and I managed to find ourselves at an exceptionally gay, techno-cabaret night at London’s Cargo club. It was a riot, but 6′ 6″ hairy, mulletted men in leotards dancing cabaret for the bells was a little more ‘alternative’ than I had expected as a start for 2009. Down the pub next year, then.
‘Voulez vous couchez avec moi, ce soir?’ ‘No thank you, kind sir.’ -
Taking Granny to London
We had a marvelous day trip down to Londonon the train with Granny yesterday to take her to the National Portrait Gallery and the Annie Leibowitz exhibition. We had a cracking lunch at Carluccio’s in the newly renovated St. Pancras station, amid arrivals and derpartures from Paris and probably the finest Victorian-era Industrial Revolution Architecture in the world.
Granny striking a pose next to one of the delightful statues dotted around the platforms.The exhibition included some pretty striking images from the last 30 years that stand proud in the public consciousness. I didn’t know an enormous amount about her, but I certainly know a little more now.
After the museum, we wandered up to Covent Garden, and while there were many people shopping like crazy and stores doing reasonable business, it was also mildly depressing to see so many 50% sales and shops obviously feeling the heat. People are really watching their pennies this year, it seems. Still – Merry Christmas one and all!
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Back to London
On my way back to London …
Top deck
Reflections of the underground -
Carsten Höller – Tate 2006
I LOVE THE TATE MODERN.
Every time I go it just manages to blow me away with its scale and scope, and yet with its openness and refreshing lack of hautiness so common in modern art galleries.
I love seeing the tourists’ faces when they come upon the Turbine Hall. No doubt, they have been dragging their families from tour to museum to exhibition and you can imaging the kids whinging that they would really rather be having a Happy Meal thankyou very much. But that is all forgotten, and as the American art students studiously take notes, Grannies strain their necks and bepolonecked German art critics reflect, a dozen kids whizz around the exhibition imagining they are space fighters. This has happened three times in as many years (before with Anish Kapoor and Rachel Whitbread), and it is a credit to the curators that they can draw in such disperate groups.
This time though. This time. Wow. Never have I been challenged with such a physical, kinetic assault that at the same time piqued my engineering, art and whizz bang kiddo sensibilities. Forget all that – I WANT TO GO AGAIN!
For Carsten Höller, the experience of sliding is best summed up in a phrase by the French writer Roger Caillois as a ‘voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind’. The slides are impressive sculptures in their own right, and you don’t have to hurtle down them to appreciate this artwork. What interests Höller, however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the ‘inner spectacle’ experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend.
One thing I love – it’s free entry and the dryest route between the South Bank and the St. ‘Blade of Light’ Pauls Bridge … take 2 minutes or 2 days, as you please
LEVEL 5
It is quite popular – the image of kids egging their Mums on to the slide, and then the shrill scream of fear and joy as they hurtle down the tube was very amusing … almost as amusing was to sit near the bottom and watch people land, their faces lit up, before they allowed themselves to compose themselves once more as they walk away. -
Guns and Roses London Fan Club
Guns and Roses London Fan Club
The old days in London! I’ll be seeing you rockers in the new year.
“Slippery When Wet”
