Blackpaint 582 – Muddy Clothes, Bloody Sex, Endless Poetry

Tate Britain – Paolozzi

Early films by Paolozzi showing; influence of Picabia, Ernst, Metropolis immediately evident – as is Paolozzi’s apparent influence on Monty Python.  An intriguing soundtrack by the serialist composer Elisabeth Lutyens – must find out more about her.

Design Museum

It’s now in the former Commonwealth Institute building, up at Holland Park (High Street Kensington tube).  There’s a permanent exhibition (free) and two for which you have to pay – a Design Prize exhibition and one called, for reasons which I didn’t ascertain, “Love and Fear”.

Prize competition – jewellery from air pollution, Scandi I think; Nunhead London, a Green building community centre, opposite and responding to (architecturally) a pub; bike helmet lights… and a lot of other stuff.

“Love and Fear” – Gers (traditional Mongolian dwellings, I’d thought were called  yurts) made out of thick carpet-like material; apparently the Mongolians, because of their nomadic history and life style have little sense of community.  Chinese dresses and cloaks, mud-coloured, presented on a bed of…mud; a whale/dolphin saver project; an inquisitive electronic crane thing that inspects you with it’s robot eye but soon loses interest.

Permanent exhibition – no chronology in display, irritating for some of us who are used to absorbing things in date order – or indeed, any order – display wall (below) reminded me of the Millenium Dome exhibition in which random objects were spattered randomly over a similar wall.  Mops, skateboard (I think), Tube symbol, bicycle…

 

The old Bush TV – yes, we had one – and the white 60s one (Courreges, the Avengers maybe), Sony Walkman, etc.

(Below) Cardigan made from human hair, part of a school project.  All clothes on display looked to be made from old oven gloves, teflon or metal; dark, harsh, Japanese-y in style, gender-less..

There was a hospital-like smell in the building; an amalgam of disinfectant, medicine and cooking; the signage was bad – had to ask the way to the toilets, and as often, difficult to find the captions to some exhibits.  In the bookshop area, interesting books were displayed high and out of reach.  Piled on the lower shelves beneath, but still sealed in plastic, so unbrowseable.  All attendants wore immaculate black aprons for some reason.  Why are design museums always so badly designed?

The building, on the other hand, is great; huge, ship-like curved ceilings, built around 68, I think, by Pawson.

Endless Poetry (Jodorowsky, 2016, ICA)

It starts where “Dance of Reality” finishes; same actors, plus Jod’s older son.  Mother still singing her lines, Father still a screwed-up bully (kicking his “thieving” customers repeatedly as they lie cowering on the floor); still the masks, cardboard trains and store fronts, dwarves, skeleton suits, red devils.   Plenty to shock the shockable; hanging suicide, rampant penises, graphic sex with a menstruating woman (who has dwarfism) – but all somehow OK because of the relentless – well, optimism.  Jod’s younger self actually says “Life is beautiful!” at one point – so laugh and smile through the pain, bereavement, torture, disappointment; there’s nothing else you can do.  So what, if it all burns down, you can’t take it with you…  It’s Fellini, of course, but rather explicit; the message, that is.

I think I can take maybe one more episode of this, without it becoming slightly winsome.

Jodorowsky’s Magic Real-ish autobiography (sort of),  “Where the Bird Sings Best”, is out in Restless Books; the similarity to Maya Angelou suggested by the title is misleading.

Maggi Hambling, Touch (British Museum print room)

I wasn’t keen on Hambling’s drawings before – I thought they made her subjects look thorny and scabby.  There are two superb life sketches in this show, however, and three small figure studies on a matt black background that are just as good.  See also her portrait of the dying Cedric Morris.  John Berger and Stephen Fry are instantly recognisable from across the room.

From Clouet to Courbet (also BM print room)

Clouet like Holbein, but without that spark of life that makes Holbein unique.  Two lovely Ingres,  a great Gericault, and these two:

Attributed to Biard.  Touch of Spike Milligan out of Kirk Douglas?

 

Lautrec, of course.

 

Little Sea Quay

 

Little Ice Fall

Blackpaint

14.1.16

Tags: Biard, Clouet to Courbet, Eduardo Paolozzi, Gericault, Ingres, Jodorowsky, Maggi Hambling, The Design Museum, Toulouse Lautrec