So it's been a busy very rainy past 2 days.. unfortunately we had the Sepentine Gallery on our raining morning one show we went to see was inside and the other was outside.. On one of my days off I'm going to go back to take some photographs of Anish Kapoor's Turning the World Upside Down in Kensignton Gardens. We took a walk in the rain to see it but the reflection in the disk was rain clouds, so i'm looking forward to a better day and being able to see not just that one. Her large scale highly reflective disks are quite amazing and from the other side of the water.
I never experienced something like Philippe Parreno's Installation that was inside the Serpentine Gallery. There are four different rooms in which Parreno's installation takes place. A film starts and ends in one room and then the next film starts in another room. This is how you are told to move through. We were not actually told to go to the next room but the sound it what moves the viewer to the next room. In each room four different films play. In the two room on the end, when the films are over the shades move up and the exterior now becomes part of the piece, the viewer is watching snow fall as the films come to end. There was an underlying loneliness in a four films. Realistic vs. false. Repetition of movement and sound. And in every film there was a running theme with light.
We then trenched through the rain to the Saatchi Gallery. Here there is a mixture of contemporary photography, scuplture, painting, and much more. I don't normally like this style but for some reason I enjoyed the paintings by Mustafa Hulusi. I think it was the contrast that I really enjoyed about this piece. The geometic versus the organic, the natural versus unnatural, the color palette. I also enjoyed toby Ziegler's paintings and large sculpture. My favorite was in the basement of the Saatchi. Richard Wilson's 20:50 was my favorite part. At first when looking you dont realize, a little confused and wondering okay... because all it looks like is a reflection of the ceiling on a highly reflective black surface. Then looking to my left I realized that there was a steal walk way, now blocked off, but if i were to walk up within the, what I found out was motor oil, it would most likely come close to my shoulders. This illusion of space interged me, and especially with my camera. I like the fact that at first I thought it was something different. Then all of a sudden I was seeing these contrasting colors, and hard edge shapes, and a tonal range on the reflection on the motor oil.
After a long day of walking in the rain we headed to the Globe Theater. I appreciated the purpose and history of the Globe Theater, and I dont know if it was due too all the rain and what not but I wasnt highly impressed, I think my interest went down a little after I found out that it wasnt the original. I like that idea that the theater is open to the sky, and that the audience is so close that it's set up almost like a concert. One thing I found interesting that I could relate back to our second night in London was the small figures that had the wire horse structure over them. To show that people carried the horses, that they were the horses. It reminded me of the play we saw called War Horse.
The following day we headed off to the Westminster Abbey. I found it quite interesting how the outside structure is supporting the actual building. That because of it's height it needed these outside almost rib like structure to support it. I also never knew that people, let alone alot of people, were buried in the Westminster. Its amazing their attention to detail, how old the building is, how they've added on, the ceilings in some of the rooms, and how massive the building is.
After the Westminster Abbey we headed back to the Tate Britian to see Rachel Whitereed and Eadweard Muybridge, and to take a closer look at the things we missed the first time around. Wandering around I came across a installation done by Mike Nelson. The piece entitled Coral Reef.
Nelson's Coral Reef brings you into a completely different world. Especially that outside of the gallery space or should i refer to it as the white cube. I didnt even feel like I was still in the Tate Britian. I felt completely out of my realm of space. Nelson gives the viewer the chance to make choices about what room to go into but he has chosen the space. Almost feeling like a bad dream his labryths make you wonder whats behind the next door. Though there is noone in the rooms you can feel as if they were, or just walked out, or are going to be sitting on the couch. Even though each room is completely different they make up a community of rooms. Nelson turns the white cube into a completely condemned space where often leaves me wondering what these people's lives are/were like and what the common thread through them all. Though each room being different there is a sense of a type of person in that each room has. I see the illusion of real versus unreal, even with in the space. It may be a far leap but I see a similarity between Nelson and Weiwei. There sense of the individual but that also of a community. Nelson wants the viewer to feel "lost in a world of lost people."
Later on that evening we had a guess artist speaker, Bridgette Jurack, come and speak to our class about her work and her work with foreign-investments. Her work spans over many mediums to work with and her work based with Foreign-Investments, is mostly performance based, and relational, and highly interactive. She says how her work with Foreign-Investments, colaborative, as influenced her work. She talks about how she feels more advanced in her drawings and putting her ideas down and comments how it can take years to finish a piece. She also talked with us about what is going on in the UK for students attending and soon to be attending college.
The two major exhibtions at the Tate Britian are Rachel Whiteread and Eadward Muybridge. I honestly wasnt sure what I was going to think of the Whitereed show but I really ended up enjoying it. I like some of her work and I think now after seeing more of her ideas behind her work. I like how she says she looks at her drawings as a diary of thoughts. The pieces that were photographs with the buildings whited out were my favorite. This once present space through whiting it out is now negative. I also like the ones where she layered to photographs, for example in the Trafalgar Square piece, its almost as you can invision that she imaging it there. Her drawings were light and soft, which made these heavy casts seem delicate in thought and on paper.
One thing I really enjoyed about the Muybridge show was the large scale photo books he had done. The large panaromics were nice in the sense that you could really look at things. It seemed like an over sized table book but when opening it up it was this fine detail of the city scape. I dont know if it has to do in part with the fact that I like maps so this "map" was intriguing to me. I really liked how in the beginning of the show they did an example of Muybridges movement studies. I didn't realize what it was until I walked on the other side and realized it was a mirror and came back around and asked some of the girls if they could see me from the other side. It was an interesting twist, or perspective, on another way to physically try to explain.
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