Link Heaven II



Many, many things over the last few days. I was supposed to have four days off but it seems like it was four hours. Big news is that I did program in Six Pianos (This is > 4mb so don't bother if you have dial-up unless you are really desperate to hear it).

Yesterday's notes are as follows :-

Tate Gallery
- Richard Wentworth
Bicentennial Man
Immortality - Continuation
Tiles at Samarkand
Another Place
Uniformity of people represented in ancient art
Divergence of thought from the senses
Poem for immortality
Ex Nihilo
Do teddies have brains?

To start at the beginning, we went to the Liverpool Tate Gallery yesterday, mostly to get postcards for my daughter who will be learning about Van Gogh next term but we went round the galleries as well We even paid for the special exhibition of art by Richard Wentworth which was well worth the family ticket price. One of the pieces, called False Ceiling, is about 1000 books which are suspended laterally, each on a single piece of steel wire so that they hang about seven feet off the ground. They fill the room they are in and in a way are a mirror to Field by Anthony Gormley in which a room is filled with small, roughly made terracotta figures though for False Ceiling you are underneath the piece rather than facing it, frustrated by your ability to get amongst the figures. The other killer piece is called Mirror, Mirror which consists of a set of spindly metal shelves leaning at about 20 degrees from vertical on which are placed face out a number of language-to-language dictionaries. There is a person-sized gap in the shelves allowing you to walk through them to see what my daughter described colloquially though accurately as 'the blurbs' on the back of the books. NOS was also impressed with the display though he seemed to be concentrating on the novelty of hearing his own voice echo around the galleries. I have news for the bloke in the Tate Cafe who was trying to look like Roy Orbison; you looked like whichever one of Peters and Lee was the man though with greasier hair. If there was a visual equivalent of Pseuds Corner you'd be in it. Shouldn't Pseuds have an apostrophe after it? Bosh! Straight into Pendants' Corner.

I have to flash forward now to the evening when my wife was reading the local paper. There is controversy over modern art in this borough regarding the hiring (not the at the expense of the local authority) of Anthony Gormley's piece, Another Place which is to be placed along the beach stretching from Seaforth to Hall road which is a fair proportion of the beach here. There were some anti-art letters in the paper last week, though they tried to cover this up by commenting on the cost, comparing the piece with Tracy Emin's wonderful new piece in Liverpoool, The Roman Standard. My wife is now not so sure about Another Place because it will leave no stretch of the beach at Crosby clear of Gormley's life-sized figures. She says she likes to see the sea and the ships.

I have run out of time. Has Six Pianos finished downloading?