‘Eyes Lies and Illusions’ is the name of the exhibition at the Hayward Gallery along the south bank of the Thames. Cleverness saturated the show that focuses on a historical development of compelling visual trickery. Julia Malim and I peregrinated from Praxinoscopes to catoptric displays to Zogatropes. Some contemporary and decidedly artistic works greeted us as well: from Duchamp’s rotoreliefs to Christian Boltanski’s shadow puppets and Tony Oursler’s ‘Blue Dilemma’. Of interest among the funhouse mirrors and persistence of vision chicanery was a walk-in camera obscura filled with the upside down soft focus of the grey London city outside. Another memorable piece was a wine glass carved from a dark stone whose profile was a wine bottle. The afternoon’s National Portrait Gallery was engrossingly unprovocative and elegantly tedious.
V&A Rapheal Gallery
The V&A was without a doubt more engaging. Independent of any focused attention, I suppose that all of life carries an equal amount of detail from moment to moment, no more and no less than any other instant. However, I was struck at the amount of detail packed, jammed, squished and compressed into this building and its countless artefacts. They are details that quietly speak of history and accident and erosion until you investigate: and then, they abandon their humble soliloquy and shout at the top of your imagination. The smoke-like shimmer of the buffed plexi-glass covering the twelve or so grand Raphaels hint of the hours it must take to clean both sides of the protective covers. The detailed relief carvings spiralling up a Roman column narrating Trajan’s successful exploits suggest the hours of construction and preparation of a stone story removed by its massive size from the ground and from being read. A nineteenth century hanging scroll narrates scenes from the great Indian epic, the Ramayana next to enormous black carvings of Nataraja, a dancing Shiva: what providence does the painted paper and the chipped rock hold? It’s a history recorded in the missing arms and the creases of obsolescence that only specify consequence accurately.
The hum of footsteps, hushed voices, friction and hard floors fills a gallery space with its own music. Above the fashion exhibition, a floor housed old musical instruments with strange fret holes and paintings of Greek musical competitions between Apollo and Pan. On a wall hung an Italian double bass made in 1700 of sycamore. It is a giant among its kind, with three gut strings (two were missing) and a bridge with long legs, it stood silently in glaring lighting waiting for its cracks to be mended and the dust to be clean off its scroll. Perhaps is knows that it will never be played again. Domenico Dragonetti owned it: a gentleman affectingly known as ‘the dragon’. As I walked around this section of the gallery, the flash indicator beeps of a downstairs photographer’s fashion documentation endlessly chimed a minor tenth apart as he catalogued the dresses below with tripod and umbrellas of light at hand.
Although my gallery visits have been full, my live music investigation has been limited to passing underground saxophone-guitar-accordion players with six arms filling the hot busy tiles of the Tube network with refreshing music and silent but obvious requests for spare change.
Tomorrow I head to Glen Isla, north of Dundee in Scotland (willingly!) before returning to depart in two weeks time for Nice in south France. A French language course and a home stay await me there nestled kindly in the excitement and adventure of travel!
Tags: travel