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November 02, 2003
art 3
Don't worry, I'm exhausting the exhibitions I want to see. And I'm starting to think about technology again. Normal service will be resumed shortly.
Continuing the grand tour, it's amazing to have two current shows I like based around old masters, and there's enough other contemporary and modern work to make London almost as hot as Venice was during the summer.
A trip to Tate Britain for two new exhibitions, Turner in Venice and the Turner Prize. Be aware that both are pretty busy (however the galleries don't feel crowded), and although the queues for tickets aren't snaking outside as they have been, you could be in for a long wait. Unless you're a member, which lets you just walk in. Fantastic.
First, Turner in Venice. If you've been paying attention, you'll realise I don't have much time for Old Master paintings. Pretty, sure, but they don't normally stimulate me. I was looking forward to this exhibition, though, as if any city can light up art, it has to be Venice (with London coming a close second).
This is an exhibition about the city first, and Turner's visits second. After an introduction to the city, featuring a period map, and works by Canaletto and contemporaries (more or less forgetting the sections on literary connections and examples of famous Venetian artists - too many paintings of fairies and people), we reach the main body of work, a tour of Venice through Turner's paintings. The rooms are themed by area of Venice, including one sequence along the Grand Canal. Wonderful location-based curating. You are given a map to help get your bearings, but I can highly recommend a trip to Venice before seeing this exhibition.
Turner captured more views, sketches, places and angles than others, even though he spent just 4 weeks there. Many of the paintings are postcard views - San Marco square, the Rialto Bridge, Santa Maria della Salute. Much more interesting are those of the sea, initial views approaching Venice, the Arsenale, Murano, and impressionistic sketches from his hotel, especially at night. Even so, you unfortunately never really get away from water, or even the larger canals.
The later paintings are less precise, and some appear to hardly even be there, ghostly. Some pieces were even completed once he was back in Britain - his sketchbooks are mainly of building fragments and pieces of scenes, meaning these paintings are almost imaginary, a dense rendered resonance of the city. Highly recommended.
So to the Turner Prize. There's little to say that hasn't been in the media frenzy. There's nothing really special here. The Chapmans' desecration of Goya etchings is nothing more than vandalism, Doherty's film uses bad jump-cuts, slack editing (and the film does stop and start, ruining any perpetual effect). Perry's vases work better here than in the Saatchi Gallery, especially those that aren't trying too hard to shock. It's easy to see some of them working as paintings or prints, rather than relying on the novelty value of ceramics. The hard thing to quantify is that the artists are being judged on their previous exhibitions, not what is presented here - on the basis of this exhibition, Perry should win, but for some of the previous work (especially the McDonalds ethnography), it has to go to the Chapman brothers.
Then to the V&A, primarily for Zoomorphic, an architecture exhibition of modern building based in some way on nature.
A waste of space. Small tatty pictures of buildings play second fiddle to jars of worms, the text does little to illuminate the buildings (you can't even tell if some are built, going to be built, or just proposals, such as Alsop's vision of Broadcasting House). It's the usual suspects - Foster, Piano, Gehry... the website is more informative than the exhibition. It's like a bad overtly kid-friendly display in the Natural History Museum. That bad.
This is the worst exhibition design I have encountered since, well, the last exhibition in the contemporary space. It is a hard space, but the curators insist on (are obliged?) to create a walkway taking up a third of the space, with almost nothing to see there. If there is a reason for the corridor, it should be used to greater effect.
To try and stop my blood boiling, I decamped to the cast courts, one of my favourite places. Unfortunately, the East Court was closed, because Rachel Whiteread's House is being constructed in there. Gah.
And so to the photography gallery. Which has been been halved in size, to make room for a shop for the temporary exhibitions. Time for home.
A little sidenote on gallery websites - the Tate site hides an amazing amount of information (for instance scanned images of all of Turner's sketchbooks), but it would be nice to be able to get a list of works from the Turner in Venice exhibition without having to buy the catalogue. The V&A site doesn't even include a gallery plan.
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