Splendid...

Ah.  I'll bet yesterday's post made your eyes flutter and close.  What you really want is a bit of light weekend reading.  And a report on how a nice girl like me found herself galavanting around the Bricklayers Tavern last evening.  No.  But it was a jolly evening.  Wish you were there.

Waking with a dry mouth, all I could see was this Turner painting in my mind.  Perhaps it was the water theme that lodged it in my brain.  I saw it at Tate Britain yesterday in the Turner/Rothko exhibition.  Whoever thought of that combination deserves a kiss.  It made more sense that one could ever imagine.

The children were bored bored bored with that exhibition.  What they liked better was Jake and Dinos Chapman's room full of faux primitive sculptures.  It was equal to the Turner in brain-lodging power, and, had the trademark Chapman twisted kind of humour.  It also had a bit of an economics theme enmeshed in it.  

I'm sure glad the Turner was what was lodged in my eye upon waking up -- a morning vision of any Chapman piece would have meant I most sincerely had drunk too much.  I do recall meeting Dinos one evening last year and drinking and drinking and drinking hall-of-fame style.  It was splendid.

Speaking of splendid and hangovers,  I must now go find a glass of water.

Altermodern

A most worthwhile morning was spent in the Tate with the children.  We took in the Tate Triennial which, from a curatorial perspective, was one of the best "of the moment" exhibitions Missmc has seen in a very long time. Entitled "Altermodern", it was pitched as a theoretical exhibition but it was easy to digest; much of the art expressed a great deal of sentiment.   Most surprisingly, it entertained the children as well.  A discourse about These-Modern-Times and how they are shifting is lost on a child: the perspective of a child is always in flux and an ever-shifting perspective is a given.  Humor and menace were the prevailing attractions for the small ones.  Clearly, they are my children.

Altermodern - the ideas of alternative ways sprouting and intermixing in a global world was the base concept and a nice broad one so that the art covered tangents across the spectrum. There was a strong bleakness to much of the work but the humor of many of the pieces lifted it out of the apocalypse.

The exhibit nailed the credit-crunch moment but the moment is changing rapidly.  The artist Charles Avery contributed a piece that will survive the "momentness" - his head of Aleph and associated drawings are divorced from the present and float in an imaginary narrative.  It is the absurdity and escapism of the piece that places it in the now.  The idea of discourses in art, literature, philosophy and well, anything, being in a rather large state of flux is exciting and this snapshot of current sentiment will be glanced at again in the future.

I'm still mulling over the exhibition title "Altermodern".  A reasonable choice perhaps --Postcrunch sounds too much like a cereal and postcrunchinism brings to mind a hobbling one-legged thing...