Yesterday was a trip to the big smoke: London and her galleries. C and I were off for a day of art and attempted culture. In fact what we found was a day of art and culture. The main point of the trip was a kind of escapade in honor of my birthday on Wednesday. We started the day off with four hours of sleep. Because our entry to the Turner, Whistler, Monet exhibition was timed for the first slot of the day, 10AM, we had to be leaving the Midlands by 6:30. Luckily in Britain the police don’t really hit you for speeding unless you’re involved in an accident, at which point you are clearly out on your own and are under the full force of the law. A nice byproduct of having to be at the gallery so early was that we were driving down the English roads at an ungodly hour that no-one else wanted to see, and so there was almost no traffic the whole time. By parking on the outskirts of London, Golders Green, were were able to make a rush of it into Tate Britain for the show and get there with, in fact, far too much time on our hands.
I love getting into Golders Green because not only do you have a bit of peace from the scrum of central London, but you also get to see all the Jewish families walking to synagogue (it’s Saturday and since no work can be done by religious laws, driving is barred).
Also, on our wanderings around the city I was lucky enough to chance on a number of unknown litle stores selling this and that, selling gifts and nothingness. My benefit is that these stores also almost always sell a great collection of cards from non-Hallmark sources. This then goes to feeding my habit of collecting cards which grows more worrying every day through the size of it. I don’t want to do anything in particular with the cards other than keep them. They’re each a gem of an artwork in a quick little $3 package. And so I fall in love with them. As a result yesterday I ‘chanced’ up £21.65 on cards, which is just under $41; roughly $35 too much to be sensible.
Anyway, though the main point of the trip was to go to the Tate, I don’t have any photos of that right now, especially since they don’t really like people taking photos of the art, even when it is just boring pieces of metal welded together at great expense, though that should be seen as no judgement on the Caro exhibition on at the moment; I’m sure some people adore it.
It’s a strange experience, the difference between the Tate and the British Museum. The Tate is deathly quiet and appears to be very academic and sobre whilst the British Museum is bursting with energy and noise and genuine interest. Families can be seen with young children who are not being shushed by ushers but simply helped in not knocking over the priceless sculptures. Whilst at the Tate we saw one man walk across a piece of ‘art’, unaware that it was a piece of note; the curators should make it more clear that we’re expected to pay special care to multi tonne blocks of rusting steel the emulate steps. Though they mock steps, the foot is still not allowed to grace their surface. I have always liked the Tate but since visiting the BM, the art of stuffiness appears very tired and sagging when trying to compete with real content.
Without heads or arms. One statue’s caption [not shown] mentions ‘his missing right hand is meant to grasp a goblet of wine’, but doesn’t happen to mention what’s meant to be going on with his two feet, left hand or head; all of which are also missing.
Many of the friezes and statues of the Elgin Marbles, brought from Greece to the UK in the 18th Century by the British explorer Lord Elgin, are damaged because of years of defacement by the Greek locals ( ie lopping off a head because they wanted to display it in their home ) or because of warfare: the Parthenon greatly damaged when, in 1687, bombs from Venetian onslaught damaged the Parthenon and surrounding buildings in a huge explosion of the Turkish arsenal.
I’ve had a great correction to this thought by the author of a website called ‘Elginism’ which provides a discourse for topics surrounding this one and many of the same period.
Anyway, he says that it was less a desire to take the statues for personal pleasure, but, much like in the English reformation of Churches from Catholic to Protestant, here the Romans, in their desire to convert to Christianity fully, looked to destroy or hide much of their earlier Pagan heritage. History repeating itself…
a great day - can we do another one over the summer?
You talk about Greek locals lopping of a head to display it in their home, but this is not the reason for many of the marbles being damaged.
The actual reason for the ritual defacement of many of them dates to the period of Rome’s conversion to Christianity & the general attempts to deny & exclude the pagan past, once former temples were converted into churches (At one time the Parthenon was considered as one of the greates churches in the world)
A later phase of defacement occurred during the Iconoclasm of the 8th & 9th centuries, when throughout the Easter Roman empire figurative representations in sculptures, mosaics & paintings were destroyed.
If you hd wanted to take a piece of the Parthenon ust to decorate your house it would have been a lot of effort & probably required the erection of scaffolding to get up there