Tate Modern Regular Collection
Our second post-shielding gallery visit to Tate Modern for the regular collection. No trouble getting a booking even on a weekend; queue (spaced and short wait); relaxed about times (we were let in a bit early); more people than at Tate Britain, but still mostly easy to avoid crowds; most, but not all, masked. Some selections below:
Christian Schad
Strange, strange picture: I’ve seen it many times but I’ve never even noticed the woman at the bottom of the picture in the apparently subservient position. I’d plead the chest deformity and the supercilious expression as attention grabbers. I don’t think it’s unconscious racial prejudice – it’s more that I’m extraordinarily unobservant.
And these sculptures – Wifredo Lam? Germaine Richier? Couldn’t find the wall plaque – they’re often in odd positions…
Aubrey Williams
I like the splurged nature of this; as if it’s dribbled and smeared somehow.
Beuyss
Lovely collection of little leaden turds in front of the huge one dangling from the girder.
Beuyss
Granite corpses or coffins flung up by some earthquake…
Edward Paolozzi
Beautifully sculpted (cast?) set of totally useless…. boxes and mechanisms. I’m not sure if it’s all one piece or not.
Sigmar Polke
Big dotty print(?) with a statue and an angel or devil and spurts of some cream/yellow fluid – what could be easier to interpret?
I think the one at the front with the wheel is a Paolozzi – didn’t get the name of the other sculptor – sorry, appalling commentary.
Obviously this has to be called “Babel”. I though Nam June Paik-but no, it’s Cildo Meireiles.
Max Beckmann
Beckmann’s strange collection of glum clowns and/or musicians – I notice it faintly resembles his famous “Night” in it’s structure (the way the masked figure curves round the right hand corner).
William Sasnel
One of a series of the dead Gadafi.
In common with Tate Britain, the arches give great views. Paintings by Dora Maurer.
Apocalypse Now, Coppola (dir) 1979
Recently watched the “uncut” version of this on TV; I presume the scenes with the French ex-colonials hanging on in Cambodia were restored – I don’t remember them at all from the film I saw back in 79 or 80. Another thing that struck me was the night scene at the last bridge, where no-one is in command – I could have sworn there was Hendrix playing, “Voodoo Child” maybe; there WAS some music but nowhere near as prominent as I remember…
Hopper’s over the top hippie photographer gave me, along with “Eddie Coyle” below, the title for this blog; his crazed eulogy of Kurtz, “The Man” is this, “The Man” is that, “The Man is – the Man, you know”….
Everybody is deranged (except the Vietnamese and maybe some Cambodians) in this film. Here’s Martin Sheen’s intense assassin’s stare, years after his Charles Starkweather turn in “Badlands” (1973) with the wonderful Sissie Spacek – and a good while before he became liberal President Bartlett in the West Wing.
American Dharma, Errol Morris (dir) 2018
This was in the Sky Documentary Channel a couple of weeks ago. A fascinating portrait, but hardly a fair and unbiased one, of Steve Bannon, ex-Trump adviser, self proclaimed “street fighter” (I think he means attitude rather than actuality). right-wing hate figure of the liberal-left “Establishment”. Bannon was sweaty, scruffy, unshaven and unflappable, with a hard stare and a challenging grin. He speaks with relish of media stunts in which he undermined Clinton (Bill, not Hillary). His favourite animal is the honey badger, because it is obsessive and relentless in its pursuits. He seems to look to old films to underpin his principles and has picked some pretty good ones: Gregory Peck in “12 o’Clock High”. John Wayne in “The Searchers”, Kirk Douglas in “Paths of Glory” and Orson Welles as Falstaff in “Chimes at Midnight”. This last pertains to his breach with Trump – unlike Falstaff, he claims to feel no resentment at being cast adrift by his protege – it had to be, the time had come.
The director makes no real attempt to refute anything Bannon says, but periodically flings headlines from the US press onto the screen which may or may not relate to him or undermine him; you can’t tell. There’s no engagement, just another restatement of Democrat/liberal-left distaste and fear. In an extraordinary sequence at the end, Bannon is portrayed walking through a blazing building – an aircraft hangar? – as if he were Stephen King’s cowboy Satan in “The Stand”.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Peter Yates (dir) 1973
To end this week, a film which must be seen by any fan of US crime thrillers, with a brilliant cast headed by Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle, based on a novel by George V. Higgins. The first, I believe, of several films in which bank robbers use moulded rubber masks (cf. Bigelow’s “Point Break”). There is a “Man” conversation between Boyle an a mob go-between – “The Man wants it done tonight.”
“Tell The Man I can’t do it tonight; too short notice.”
“The Man says it has to be tonight”….and so on, for several minutes. The Man gets his way, of course.
A bank robbery.
Boyle and Mitchum at the ice hockey game, before the murder.
A couple of old ones of mine, gone to good homes, one in England, one in Finland, I believe.
Blackpaint
22/08/20
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