January 2020
Tuesday, 28 July 2020 21:56![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
iguana
In a rotten omen of things to come, I started 2020 quite ill with flu-like symptoms, and had to miss a New Year's Party. I was just about well enough a few days later to, in a move that would be shocking now, travel to London on the train for a couple of art exhibitions I'd booked. For the other weekends, I watched Frozen 2 at the cinema, signed An Important Thing, and made vegetarian haggis for Burns Night.Olafur Eliasson at the Tate Modern
I only spotted this during my Christmas & birthday break, and this was the final weekend In Real Life was exhibiting. I was mostly there for Din blinde passager ("Your blind passenger"), a mist-filled room that I imagined would be like the excellent yellowbluepink by Ann Veronica Janssens which I saw in 2015.
The lobby area was showing some of his art before the exhibition proper, and so stepping out from the lift to the exhibition floor was quite a surprise, with the whole area lit in a monofrequency lamp, turning everything monochrome in a shade of an oppressive-feeling near-sodium yellow (in fact, having looked it up, it may be exactly sodium yellow).
The first couple of rooms felt like a bit of a let-down, with things like a collection of isometric objects and a set of three wave generators, and... a projection of a window.
I quite liked the moss wall.
While some of the items definitely felt like filler, and one of the headline exhibitions, Beauty, was out of order (a little guttingly, though I didn't know what I was missing at the time), the exhibition won me back over with The Seeing Space, a small curved mirror on the wall that people were queuing to look at, then walking away from a little confused as to what the fuss was about.
However, once you walked into the next corridor, which was darkened, it suddenly became apparent what its purpose was:
As people on the other side peered at it confused, their faces on our side were magnified and distorted, depending on their distance from the two-way convex mirror:
I liked it.
Next up was the thing I'd actually booked to come see, the 90-metre corridor filled with mist. The visibility was low enough that I could barely see my own feet. It was variously lit in regions of white and (you guessed it) sodium yellow.
Overall I think I preferred yellowbluepink, which was in a more square room, and lit in colours that I preferred, but honestly I'll go for anything that immerses me in a strong light, and I loved it. The museum also did a good job at not letting too many people in at once, and I often had periods where I could neither see nor hear anyone in front or behind me.
The front-of-booklet piece was Your uncertain shadow, which was neat because it made a virtue of the audience, but my favourite non-misty exhibit was Big Bang Fountain, which we unfortunately weren't allowed to take photos of, though sensibly enough because it took place in a completely darkened room. In the middle was a fountain of water, which was regularly lit up in a quick burst of white light, such that the water appeared to be frozen in place until the next burst, where it had changed shape. A clever effect.
The exhibition finished with a sobering set of photos taken from the air of glaciers in Iceland, the Glacier Melt Series
I only spotted this during my Christmas & birthday break, and this was the final weekend In Real Life was exhibiting. I was mostly there for Din blinde passager ("Your blind passenger"), a mist-filled room that I imagined would be like the excellent yellowbluepink by Ann Veronica Janssens which I saw in 2015.
The lobby area was showing some of his art before the exhibition proper, and so stepping out from the lift to the exhibition floor was quite a surprise, with the whole area lit in a monofrequency lamp, turning everything monochrome in a shade of an oppressive-feeling near-sodium yellow (in fact, having looked it up, it may be exactly sodium yellow).
The first couple of rooms felt like a bit of a let-down, with things like a collection of isometric objects and a set of three wave generators, and... a projection of a window.
I quite liked the moss wall.
While some of the items definitely felt like filler, and one of the headline exhibitions, Beauty, was out of order (a little guttingly, though I didn't know what I was missing at the time), the exhibition won me back over with The Seeing Space, a small curved mirror on the wall that people were queuing to look at, then walking away from a little confused as to what the fuss was about.
However, once you walked into the next corridor, which was darkened, it suddenly became apparent what its purpose was:
As people on the other side peered at it confused, their faces on our side were magnified and distorted, depending on their distance from the two-way convex mirror:
I liked it.
Next up was the thing I'd actually booked to come see, the 90-metre corridor filled with mist. The visibility was low enough that I could barely see my own feet. It was variously lit in regions of white and (you guessed it) sodium yellow.
Overall I think I preferred yellowbluepink, which was in a more square room, and lit in colours that I preferred, but honestly I'll go for anything that immerses me in a strong light, and I loved it. The museum also did a good job at not letting too many people in at once, and I often had periods where I could neither see nor hear anyone in front or behind me.
The front-of-booklet piece was Your uncertain shadow, which was neat because it made a virtue of the audience, but my favourite non-misty exhibit was Big Bang Fountain, which we unfortunately weren't allowed to take photos of, though sensibly enough because it took place in a completely darkened room. In the middle was a fountain of water, which was regularly lit up in a quick burst of white light, such that the water appeared to be frozen in place until the next burst, where it had changed shape. A clever effect.
The exhibition finished with a sobering set of photos taken from the air of glaciers in Iceland, the Glacier Melt Series
The Moon at the Natural History Museum.
After leaving The Tate Modern, I went to the Natural History Museum which was exhibiting The Museum of the Moon, a giant spherical reproduction of Earth's Moon. Ian Visits had raved about it, but I was left underwhelmed, not least because the room seemed to be used mostly for parents to sit down while their children ran around screaming.
After leaving The Tate Modern, I went to the Natural History Museum which was exhibiting The Museum of the Moon, a giant spherical reproduction of Earth's Moon. Ian Visits had raved about it, but I was left underwhelmed, not least because the room seemed to be used mostly for parents to sit down while their children ran around screaming.
