11: Fiction is stranger than truth at Somerset House this January

Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour
Tim Walker: Story Teller
Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 1LA
www.somersethouse.org.uk
Visited on Sunday 27 January 2013

There is something pleasing about the fact that while the culturecake project was devised to fill up my time following my departure from the Somerset House-headquartered National Youth Orchestra, the first cultural visit post-‘sabbatical’ actually brought me back to that very same location, for two free photography exhibitions – Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour and Tim Walker: Story Teller.

The courtyard at Somerset House

Somerset House is in interesting place to visit in itself. It was built in the 1790s, on the site of an old Tudor palace, and was intended to provide accommodation for the Royal Academy of Arts, the Royal Society, and the Society of Antiquaries, as well as various government offices and the Navy Board. The instruction to the architect was to create a building that would be "an ornament to the Metropolis and a monument of the taste and elegance of His Majesty's Reign". Originally the building could be accessed directly by boat from the Thames – a requirement of the Navy Board who needed to be able to travel to the dockyards at Greenwich. However, with the construction of the Victoria Embankment in the 1860s – a scheme which provided a useful new road next to the river, but whose literally underlying purpose was to create a much-needed sewerage system for the city and its burgeoning population – much of this was subsumed, and all that remains of the grand river entrances today is a central arch and the aptly-named West Water Gate (essentially, the tradesman’s entrance to the building, known by those who work there as Charmain’s Passage, after the utterly humourless security lady who guards it from within her little booth, as Brother Neil and Charlie will attest).

As it was in the early 1800s

The central quadrangle is still an absolutely splendid courtyard, though it’s often filled with temporary constructions such as the ice-skating rink round Christmas time, and accommodation for the twice-yearly hipster-and-fashionista fest that is London Fashion Week. Today, happily, it was empty and in the lovely Sunday morning sunshine it looked particularly grand.

After a rendezvous in the Seamen’s Hall, we began with the Cartier-Bresson exhibition. I learned from the information on the wall that Henri Cartier-Bresson is acknowledged as one of the 20th century’s greatest photographers, and is noted particularly for images that capture life ‘on the fly’ – that is, photos that preserve for future and lengthy consideration fleeting 'decisive moments' of order within apparent chaos. He worked almost exclusively in black and white, believing that colour would detract from the inherent power of a photo. The curator of this exhibition (one William A. Ewing) has chosen to display ten of his pieces that have never before been exhibited in the UK alongside colour photographs from more recent photographic artists who share Cartier-Bresson's fascination with this 'decisive moment’. I guess the idea is to see whether Cartier-Bresson’s idea that colour dilutes the power is really true.

I love this kind of photography because mostly the subject matter is ordinary and everyday – a man crossing a road, the reflection of a car in a bus shelter, a group of kids playing in the street. What’s captured in the photo is a moment that barely existed, one that would pass so quickly you might simply not notice it. Often such a moment is ‘decisive’ owing to the composition – for one fleeting moment, the man’s head in the foreground is perfectly in the middle of the arm of that construction crane on the site in the background, for example. The photo records the moment for us to consider and be delighted by, all the more so because we know that the very next second after the shutter closed, it simply wasn’t there any more. (Those idents for Channel 4 play on this exact theory – bundled blocks of hay float apparently randomly in the air, but as the camera moves left to right, for a split second they align to form the figure ‘4’, then the moment is gone and they are random floating blocks again).

The 'question of colour' is, I think, rather easily answered. Cartier-Bresson's black and whites are certainly powerful, but the others are no less so. I felt that their potency was if anything enhanced by their bold and vibrant colours. Moreover, many of the decisive moments in these photographs wouldn’t have existed if the image had just been black and white – for example a lovely one taken at a zebra crossing featured a man holding an orange in his hand that was at exactly the same level, and was exactly the same colour, as a dustcart left beside the pavement. It was a cute moment, pretty much insignificant in terms of its actual subject, and captured by more by luck than judgment - but the presence of colour was the thing that gave it its artistic impact. Though some shots were more appealing than others, generally this was a fascinating and delightful collection of split seconds from the 20th century that left me feeling very grateful to the photographers for bothering to capture them. Very much worth seeing.

The rooms in the South Building of Somerset House have beautiful marquetry floors, high ceilings and large windows, and as such form very pleasant, airy spaces in which to display art. As a viewer, you feel like you're strolling around a stately home, and the things you're looking at are clearly presented. Of course the space in a gallery can be used much more imaginatively, as we found with the Tim Walker exhibition, which brings to life his photographs in a vivid and almost confrontational way.

We entered the first room to find the tail fin and fuselage of what seemed to be a real Spitfire, the two pieces attached to opposite sides of the room. The descriptive information on the wall, written by the photographer himself, began very high up and descended in a curve - appropriate typesetting for the effusive and emotional wording. Some photographs were hanging on the walls, but many were displayed within shallow wooden cases set in ‘islands’ in the middle of each room and made, I suppose, to look like the kind of hay stuffing-filled boxes you might use to transport artworks around. We soon realised that the Spitfire was a prop used in several of that room’s photos, and this idea of displaying the props alongside the photos that feature them continued throughout the exhibition. Interesting.

Tim Walker’s work will be very familiar to readers of magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair. His fashion shoots go far beyond the depiction of models wearing particular clothes - they are hugely lavish, super-contrived stories in themselves. You can hardly even imagine how much effort must have gone into the shoot for each image, not least on the part of the photographer, who clearly has an enormously fertile imagination. The props, clothing, lighting, composition and post work have all been considered in minute detail, and executed with extreme care, in order to give the most robust support possible to the subject – and every single image in this collection packs an enormous punch.

In each room there was piece of flamboyant blurb on the wall from Mr Walker, outlining his thoughts and ambitions in creating the images, and laid out in a typographically quirky fashion. The images themselves depict improbable or impossible but hugely desirable scenes, where people, poses, colour and objects come together in an almost inexplicably alluring way. They couldn’t be more different in what they achieve artistically from those in the Cartier-Bresson exhibition, which are appealing owing to their serendipitous truth. Here, truth is banished with childlike glee and abandon. These images come straight from the artist’s imagination and connect with yours in a delicious visual conspiracy. Some of it is creepy – the oversized snail props on the walls, for example, or the disturbingly huge and slightly malevolent-looking doll – but mostly it’s playful, and saturated with delight in its own fantastical, fairytale world. Here are some examples of what I mean, and much more can be seen on his website:

Like a nursery rhyme come to life

Smouldering

Fairy-mong

Quirky-creepy

Clever, and funny

Beautiful and aaaaaaaaargh at the same time

Possibly the most captivating image in the exhibition

(Not in the exhibition - this is a self-portrait of the photographer)

That photo provides a rather nice segue to the baked goods part of the report. We took coffee and cake in Tom’s Deli, located just off the Seamen’s Hall. It’s not bad in there. They make a lot of effort to display the impressive selection of cakes nicely, though they’re not afraid to charge for it – two coffees and a brownie came to £7.50. Said brownie was particularly fine however – slab-like in proportions, with a wonderfully crunchy top that gave way under only slight pressure to allow the (regrettably plastic) fork to sink into a good inch of chocolate-y deliciousness. It was a 9 out of 10.

Damn pricey postcard!

All in all, I’d highly recommend both these exhibitions, particularly as they are free. The only real negative is that the Rizzoli Bookshop is shockingly over-priced and they only have a choice of three postcards on offer from the exhibitions, priced at £2.50 each! I bought one anyway. Somerset House is also worth a visit – though I think it’s best in the summer when you can go via Tesco on the Strand and pick up a bottle of wine for consumption on the lovely terrace that overlooks the Thames.

10: Museum of Childhood

V&A Museum of Childhood

Cambridge Heath Road, London, E2 9PA

www.museumofchildhood.org.uk

Visited on Sunday 20 January 2013

If the media hype is to be believed only the most intrepid would have ventured out onto the treacherous pavements of London on a day like this – but, unfazed by the powdery snow, I and my Russian friend Anna of the Karenina sallied forth to the V&A Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green for the final culturecake visit of the project.

The Museum has existed in its present incarnation, ie focusing on childhood, since the 1970s, but it was originally built in the late 1860s. It’s a very interesting building – the whole exhibition space is one huge oblong room, with a very high arched ceiling, which looks a bit like the inside of a Victorian railway station. The floor is notable as it consists of a pattern done in mosaic – by the female inmates of Woking Gaol apparently. The layout is interesting too because the central part of the room contains the gift shop and the café, with the actual exhibition items set on two raised floors around the edge.

Notable ceiling and floor

We decided to begin upstairs and work our way back down to the café, but I don’t think it really would have mattered. The exhibits are presented in a very old-fashioned way – large square glass cases with shelves inside, set in long rows. The only other museum I’ve seen like this recently is the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford (shrunken heads!). The Museum of Childhood shares another aspect with the Pitt Rivers – it’s pretty dark, so that when you’re looking into the cases, you cast your own shadow over the things you’re looking at. This is not the best really, and made me realize that even though they can seem gimmicky in places, museums that have modernized actually show off their items much more effectively.

The layout also seemed a little bit haphazard. They did manage to group some similar items in the same place, so most of the dolls houses were together for example, but one or two were dotted among other things and there were a few random cases of miscellaneous items that seemed to be outside of the scheme altogether.

Rehearsing for a possible career change

Malevolent beings that come alive in horror films and your nightmares

The vast majority of the exhibits are toys and so there is a fair amount of scope for nostalgia as you wander around among the toy animals, board games, zoetropes, robots, puppets, toy cars and trains, dolls and figurines, and a whole world of miniaturised domestic equipment, including vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers, tea sets, twin tub washing machines, irons and kettles. I found myself saying ‘Oh my god! I used to have one of those!’ fairly frequently, though as this is very much a collection of British items, Anna of the Karenina didn’t come across many items from her own childhood. There was a rather lovely set of Russian dolls however, which was pleasing, as well as a couple of Russian teddy bears.

Ruskie bears

We found ourselves reflecting on how the toys we favoured and games we played with them as children connected with the activities and ambitions we have now. Both of us, it seems, were interested in the toys that were like people – ie dolls or action figures – and made up dramas for them that would absorb us for hours at a time. Miss Karenina leaned more towards real family life in her stories, whereas I got wrapped up in florid medieval tales of chivalry and warfare in mine (I had a big set of Lego Knights). But essentially we were both interested as children in how people relate to one another. It has continued to fascinate me as an adult, though it’s something I’m more likely to muse about over a glass of wine than act out using little figurines and a gory version of some Arthurian legend. (God what a dork I was).

Having fun in the sandpit

Punch and Judy aka Pato and Sure

It was also interesting to observe what kinds of things have been produced as toys. One lovely item at the beginning of the exhibition was a bus conductor’s outfit, complete with leather shoulder bag and little machine for punching tickets, dating from the 1940s. The kitchen and cleaning equipment, plus the little prams, pushchairs and baby dolls seem designed to ensure we are rehearsed from our earliest days in the ways of adult domestic lives, while Action Man, toy guns, little tanks and fantasy goody and baddie figurines are perhaps intended to get us ready for the darker side of being a grown up. There was also a huge array of puzzles and craft items, plus board games to encourage us to compete nicely together, and visual wonders such as kaleidoscopes to feed our imaginations.

As A of the K observed, it’s almost impossible now for us to imagine what goes on in the mind of a child, or to remember what it was like when we were children ourselves. At one point we stopped to watch a little girl murmuring away to her two little dolls, quietly asking them where they wanted to sit and then explaining to them why their choices were good or bad. It was heart-warming, but also triggered very distant memories of a time when it was OK to devote one hundred percent of your attention to such a scene because there simply weren’t any other responsibilities in life.

Sure

For the competitive among us

It does seem to me that the Museum of Childhood is missing a trick in the way it’s laid out. By organizing the items differently they could generate a much more powerful narrative about childhood, and provoke some interesting thought about it. Setting up a route through the museum by date would enable them to show how developments in technology have affected toy manufacture and design, and illustrate more clearly the ways in which play has evolved as the role of children in society, the expectations of them, and the expectations children have of the world have changed. There were very few information boards, and the collection as a whole doesn’t seem to be actually curated – I much prefer a museum where the collection is presented to me in a way that makes me think, where parallels are drawn between exhibits or where I’m invited to make associations between one thing and another. They could easily do this without compromising the simple joy of seeing loads of toys, which is clearly what the children coming to the museum are excited by.

Some of the exhibits, particularly the older ones, were downright creepy – the puppets especially – but, despite the clunky layout and old-fashioned glass case presentation, most of it was rather charming. Both of us very much enjoyed the dolls houses, and I loved the trainset and miniature village. A of the K was pretty taken with the rocking horses, which were in use by some miniature humans, egged on by cooing parents. It’s worth pointing out that there are of course a lot of real live children in the museum, so if you are averse to these creatures and their periodic squawks and yelps I don’t recommend you come here!

I loved this!

Not sure what's going on here

Designed to scare the living shit out of small people

After a proper and thorough look around everything, hunger took over and we made for the centrally situated café, which is in fact a branch of Benugo. Basically this means that everything is pretty expensive. But it’s rather nice being in the middle of the whole museum, and the various little kids toddling around are funny to watch. At the table next to us was a mischievous little beast of a one-year-old, who managed in the split second that both his parents’ heads were turned to dispatch a ceramic cup onto the tiled floor (smash), followed not long after by its saucer (louder smash). The waiter came over to sweep up wearing a resigned expression – I guess this kind of thing happens all the time – while the baby looked at us with innocent wide eyes and a composed mouth as if to say ‘ummm, yep, it wasn’t me’.

Anyway, onto the refreshments.

Hole-filling if not mind-blowing

Chocolate cake and cappuccino with English Toffee syrup (A of the K)

“This looks dry but it isn’t! It has the consistency of a brownie in fact. The icing is delicious. I’d go so far as to say it’s one of the best I’ve had of its type. Coffee also delicious. 9 out of 10.”

Tuna baguette, pear and blackberry cake and a latte (thepateface)

“Aaargh, eyes bigger than stomach… But, yeah this is ok, nice ‘artisan’ bread, bit sloppy to eat though. Cake has an unexpected ginger flavour and is a bit crumblier than I’d like. Coffee is very bitter indeed. Generally all ok – I was hungry so it’s done its job – but not hugely impressive for the cost. 6.5 out of 10.”

Nice conversation and more entertainment from the not-so-innocent innocent on the next table followed food consumption and then it was time to go home so we forgot to go back to the shop. We’d had a quick scan earlier though and it seems to contain lots of activity items and little toys for children. I didn’t see any postcards, though I might not have looked hard enough.

After a long wait at the bus stop along with a mad drunk and three unutterably posh girls, the 254 finally pulled up to take me back to my lovely warm flat, and afforded a 20-minute ponder on today’s visit, and on the project as a whole. The Museum of Childhood was all right, not spectacular, though it’s kind of fun to see items in front of you that you haven’t even thought about for decades – and to look at toys from other eras. As for the culturecake project, I’m really glad I chose to do it, though I visited far fewer places than I thought I would over the three months. It’s certainly re-ignited my interest in museums, galleries and places of interest, and though the official project ends here, I imagine I’ll be making further contributions in the coming weeks and months. Thank you again to A of the K, Brother B Man the Mystic, MinustheMatt, Charlie, Brother Neil and of course little brass face himself, Sure, for joining me on this journey of pleasant cultural discovery.

9: Triple bill! La Bohème, Les Mis and The Minotaur

La Bohème at Hackney Picture House

www.picturehouses.co.uk

Visited on Tuesday 15 January 2013

Les Misérables at Hackney Picture House

www.picturehouses.co.uk

Visited on Wednesday 16 January 2013

The Minotaur at Royal Opera House

www.roh.org.uk

Visited on Thursday 17 January 2013

Since I haven’t written for a while, and as this is to be the penultimate contribution to the culturecake project, I thought I’d go for an unprecendented ‘three in one’. It has been a week of culture consumption bordering on the extreme as I’ve been spending the daytimes doing my revision on opera and ballet in preparation for my new job that starts on Monday, while three consecutive evenings have seen me heading out for some kind of musical / theatrical piece of entertainment.

The first was Puccini’s La Bohème, on Tuesday night. I’ve seen the opera only once before – almost 20 years ago at the Oxford Apollo, when Welsh National Opera visited. I don’t remember too much about it, except for thinking that the final scene where Mimi succumbs to her illness and dies her frail, tiny, cold little death was a bit difficult to believe given the robust corpulence of the soprano playing the role…

Tonight’s performance was a ‘delayed live’ relay from the Royal Opera House, ie it was recorded live last week and we were watching the unedited footage from that. There are some significant advantages to watching a performance like this in the cinema: for a start the cost of a very comfortable, modern seat is £20 and you can take your wine in with you; at the Opera House proper, the same view would cost you about £165, the seat would be narrow and apparently designed for the sole purpose of giving you backache, and there’s no way the apparently deferential but actually Nazi stewards would let you into that auditorium with a glass of anything. Additionally, at the cinema you get the ROH’s Music Director Antonio Pappano on the screen before it starts to give you a plot summary and to tell you all sorts of interesting things about the music and staging and so on. The disadvantage is that you don’t get the magical atmosphere of being in such a grand place as the Royal Opera House, with its poncey staircases and people dressed up to the nines and interval drinks that cost the same as food to feed a family of four for a week. The nice thing about the ROH’s ‘wear what you like’ policy is that you can go along in jeans and still get to hang out with people in fancy outfits who make you feel like you’re part of a posh and special experience.

Anyway, there was none of that at Hackney Picturehouse, although thankfully there was a gentleman in the audience who was of that sort, if you know what I mean. When the opera started there were no subtitles on the screen, Sir Ponce took it upon himself to stand up and boom ‘SHALL I COMPLAIN?’ – to which general assent was murmured and lo, within minutes the subtitles had appeared and we were spared having to watch 2.75 hours of Italian opera with no translation.

To be honest, I do wonder whether it would have mattered. Puccini’s music is, as well as being generally lush and gorgeous, quite consciously descriptive of the words it sets. Combined with some properly excellent acting from every member of the cast, we probably would have been fairly clear about what was going on even without subtitles. This production, directed by John Copley, has been around even longer than I have – it was first staged in 1974. It’s easy to see why the Opera House hasn’t changed it in those 38 years. 1830s Paris is wonderfully evoked by the detailed sets and costumes. The staging (which mainly involves the draughty apartment shared by the four student artists Rodolfo, Marcello, Schaunard and Colline) is presented on multiple levels, and there’s always something to look at and lots of opportunity for interesting movement by the singers.

I have always thought opera plots were a bit far-fetched – I mean, really? You really fell in love after gazing at each other for about 30 seconds and exchanging a couple of well-executed high notes? Obviously though, you have to suspend quite a bit of disbelief for this artform and rely on the talents of the director and musicians in the pit and on the stage to make that easy for you.

As an example, La Bohème (The Bohemians) starts with the four chaps bantering and generally horsing around at their apartment, bemoaning their poverty with mock-drama and silly antics. When his chums head off to the pub, Rodolfo is the only one in to answer the door to poor Mimi, whose candle has gone out so she can’t see her way up the stairs. Rodolfo swoons over how lovely she is, there is a bit of flirting, then she drops her key on the floor by mistake and they both fumble around in the dark for it, which results in the fizzing contact of Rodolfo’s manly mano and Mimi’s tiny frozen one, leading to the first famous aria ‘Chè gelida manina’. Over the course of the next 5 minutes, Rodolfo basically sings her his CV, she tells him about how she adores flowers and the smell of spring and then, boom, they are fully in love and pledging never to leave each other. Riiiight.

Yet, from the beginning the absolutely superb quality of the singing and acting draws you right in to the world where such happenings are completely normal. The banter between the four students was heart-warmingly believable, and though it’s set at a time and in a world so different from today, I think most people can identify with that kind of housemate vibe. Dmytro Popov’s portrayal of Rodolfo was such a great combination of honest and subtle that I found myself quietly cheering him on as he poured out his heart to Mimi, even though if a man did this to me only two minutes after us meeting, I’d be quite freaked out by it.

The good thing about this opera is that the story rattles along without any wastage – the economic informational conversations lead to one beautiful aria after another, none of which are overblown. There are glory moments for all the principal singers to show what they can do. Stefania Dovhan, playing Musetta, was brilliant (and slutty) as she sang her famous Waltz aria in Act 2, while provocatively running her hand up and down a pool cue, in her attempt to seduce former lover Marcello (played by Audun Iversen, with a goatee that made him look a bit like Ben Affleck). After various machinations involving either provoked or unprovoked jealousy on the part of both couples, and some jolly slapstick with a real live dog, we get to the closing scenes where poor Mimi’s frailty is now a serious concern. Essentially she has TB, and that, combined with a separation from Rodolfo in Act 3, has precipitated The End. She ends up dying round at the four students’ flat, after they’ve made really touching gestures to sell their own personal items to pay for a doctor and some medicine. Both I and Brother B Man the Mystic were fully and genuinely in tears when Rodolfo, who’d been holding up pretty well, finally turned away from Mimi and started sobbing himself, realising that she was done for. I imagine there’s lots of scope for overdoing this, but it was all the more affecting for being controlled. I massively recommend seeing this production, which is on at Covent Garden until 12 March.

The subject of crying and potentially overdoing it brings me on to Wednesday night, when I was back at Hackney Picturehouse again. This is now my third visit this month, and I’m so glad to have discovered this awesome cinema. There is a really nice bar as soon as you walk in – and there are CAKES, plus a proper menu of very delicious-looking food. If you become a member (£35 for the year) you get a discount on everything and don’t have to pay for online booking. All this is very good. I didn’t intend to go and see Tom Hooper’s new film version of the musical Les Misérables but Joshi Dreams of Sushi (an ace-looking documentary about a sushi chef) was sold out and I thought I might as well see something since I was there. I’ve seen the stage musical twice before – once in Manchester in about 1994 and once when it was still at the Palace Theatre in Cambridge Circus (as part of a most regrettable date). Both times I thought the music was a bit lightweight and that the whole show just seemed a bit flimsy. This film version certainly isn’t flimsy! The cinematography is sumptuously coloured and really spectacular in places, and, unencumbered by the limits of an actual stage, the director is able to use wide shots and sequences to fill in plot gaps that would only otherwise be communicated in the sung dialogue, so that helps the whole thing to feel a bit more substantial.

I was interested in two things about the casting – first that none of the actors are well-known as singers, and second, their vocal performances were captured live at the same time as their acting. This worked really well I thought, lending extra believability to vocal performances that were for the most part very convincing. Russell Crowe was the weak link in terms of singing, honking away slightly out of tune and without quite pulling off the emotion, but the other performances made up for it. Hugh Jackman was great as Jean Valjean, the hard done by bread-thief-cum-slave who makes good after a brush with the Lord and a few bloody decent actions towards his fellow man. His singing voice isn’t the most powerful, but he really, really meant it and it was hard not to be touched by his delivery. Anne Hathaway has the show’s big hit I dreamed a dream, but rather than belting it out Susan Boyle-style, she delivered it like the pathetic, delicate song that it is – and it was so much the better for it. Apparently she starved herself to get thin enough to play the role, and it was genuinely quite heartbreaking to see this skinny, filthy woman who finally crossed the line and let some awful soldier fuck her for money singing so wistfully about the better times she’d always hoped for. The camera boldly stayed right on her, close up, for the whole song and I admit I had a bit of a lump in my throat by the end of it.

There’s quite a lot to the plot – mainly involving some opera-style love at first sight, raucous slapstick from a Cockneyfied Sacha Baron Cohen as the Innkeeper and Helena Bonham Carter playing the slightly mad character she seems to play in every film she’s in, as well as quite a lot of fighting, and some serious undertones about the ghastly conditions that the poor had to endure at the time. It all ends quite triumphantly and happily though – the lovers get together, Jean VJ dies happy, there are revolutionary heroics – and the spirit, setting and acting are all there in this film version. The only thing that let it down for me was the music itself, and you can’t blame the film for that.

However, on this subject of crying. Every review you read of the film mentions that it will certainly make you cry, and there is even a video doing the rounds of some parents in a car saying they cried more at this than at some relatives’ funerals. I almost felt obliged to bloody well cry as soon as the film started. I do find this celebration of weeping pretty irritating though, as it seems to devalue the specialness of things that genuinely make me shed a tear. Anyway, the trendy boy sitting next to me had definitely received the memo because he started blubbing about 10 minutes in and barely stopped for the remaining 2 hours and 27 minutes. There were short pauses every couple of minutes or so for him to rustle around, fidget and then stuff another fistful of stinking peanut M&Ms into his Shoreditchly-moustachioed face, before one of the characters would get watery-eyed or sing something – anything – and he was off again. Honestly. I do recommend the actual cinema though – the film, yeah sure, it’s definitely worth a go, and really you don’t have to feel like you’re being an ice queen bitch if you don’t cry, I promise.

Thursday night was certainly not a weep-fest. I’d bought a pretty expensive ticket to the Royal Opera House itself to see the first night of Harrison Birtwistle’s 2008 opera The Minotaur. I wanted to see what it was like to have a really good view and be among some of the posh people (rather than practically touching the ceiling and only able to see 20% of the stage!). The opera tells the story of Asterios, the half-man-half-bull incarcerated in the labyrinth by King Minos of Crete, and to whom a sacrifice of ‘innocents’ – young men and women from Athens – is made every year. One year Theseus decides he’s had enough of this and comes over from Athens with the intention of killing this Minotaur once and for all.  The opera begins with Ariadne sitting on the beach, musing about the horror of the innocents coming over to be slaughtered. The staging is pretty sparse, but it does a great job of taking you away from any association with the modern world. You are transported to a time of myth, where strange and horrible things happen, but you accept them because there’s nothing to make it seem out of context.

After a bit of chat between Ariadne and Theseus, the innocents descend ladders into the labyrinth and the scene cuts to the middle of it, where the Minotaur stands, surrounded by a taunting Greek chorus in masks. It’s all a bit frightening. The innocents come in and the Minotaur rapes and gores them one by one, before a horrid troupe of Keres (kind of death-eater type creatures) swoop in to devour their remains. Nice. The Minotaur is tired after all his gorey-rapey action so he takes a nap and we see him dreaming. It was at this point that the opera really came alive – in his dreams Asterios believes he can speak, so we get to hear the brilliant John Tomlinson actually singing rather than just making anguished moo sounds. What I wasn’t prepared for was how sorry I would feel for the poor creature. To be fair, he was born out of a pretty dodgy situation: King Minos wanted to prove that he was the legitimate king, so he asked Poseidon (sea god) to send him a sign. Poseidon sent a white bull from the sea (sure), which Minos was to sacrifice. However Minos was so pleased with his white bull that he kept it. Poseidon was fuuuuuuriously angry to be disobeyed and as revenge made Minos’s wife develop zoophiliac desires towards the bull. She then persuaded some other guy to make her a cow suit and seduced the white bull into having sex with her. The issue was the Minotaur – half man, half bull. Shunned and rejected, full of lust and anger, neither fully man nor fully beast, and not great to look at either, poor Asterios has lived his life in torment, all the more so because the Oracle advised Minos to stick him in this horrible labyrinth underground. He dreams of the world above that he vaguely remembers, and wishes he was dead, or loved. It’s actually really sad.

Thankfully at this point it was the interval so I nipped across the road to the pub (most of the pit orchestra were there already) for a stiff drink. In the second half, Ariadne goes to visit a transvestite high Priestess with a pedantic assistant to ask for advice and they give her a big ball of red twine that she is to supply to Theseus so that he can enter the maze, paying out the twine as he goes, and use it to find his way back once he’s done in the evil freak. Before the ultimate fight scene we see the Minotaur dreaming again, and Ariadne does some slightly disturbing sex poses to a) demonstrate what her mum did with the white sea bull and b) try to seduce Theseus and persuade him to take her away from this horrid island. As you can guess, things end badly for the Minotaur as Theseus stabs him to death. In death, as in sleep, Asterios can speak, and, despite what I said about this not being a weep-fest, his final pathetic farewell had me fairly close to real tears.

Things then got quite jolly as there was rapturous applause and at the end of the curtain call – at which composer Harrison Birtwistle, librettist David Harsent and conductor Ryan Wigglesworth were present (the latter was a couple of years below me at University… he’s certainly made a more glamorous career for himself than I have!) - Tonys Hall and Pappano came on stage with a nice cake to present to John Tomlinson to celebrate the fact that 35 years ago he made his ROH debut. There was a lot of clapping to do.

I spent the journey home thinking about the very different events of the past three nights. I loved La Bohème, and Les Misérables was pretty exciting, but I think it was actually The Minotaur that touched me the most. It’s unlikely in a way: though expensive, my seat wasn’t hugely comfortable, and the person next to me was snoring all the way through; the music itself was almost impenetrable – not a single tune and no rhythms to hang onto; the story is bleak and tragic and there was a lot of blood violence and creepy wraith things eating people’s hearts; and the human characters are not very nice people – they all have a selfish agenda and say a lot of airy fairy stuff without really connecting. However, the libretto is absolutely beautiful – if I hadn’t worried that the stewards would cut my arms off for doing it, I would have whipped out my iphone at several points to note down some of the lovely, poetic lines. John Tomlinson’s singing was a huge highlight too – in his speech Tony Pappano mentioned the singer’s reputation for perfect diction and it was well-demonstrated here. His costume was also excellent, and his acting even better. Overall it was his depiction of this wretched beast that really got to me – much more than the expiry of dear Mimi or the many thou-shalt-now-cry moments in Les Misérables.

As mentioned, the culturecake project is nearing its end, or at least this phase of it is. Thank you to the kind companions who’ve joined me for my trips out. The last one will be on Sunday, when hopefully I will actually take some photos, and perhaps write a little bit less…

8: Saatchi Gallery

King's Road, Chelsea, London, Greater London SW3 4RY
www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk
Visited on Friday 4 January 2013

Today’s journey began in Dalston as I was there for an appointment, and so I was able to get straight on the Overground to Whitechapel and change for the District Line to Sloane Square. It was a pleasant journey, taking me unexpectedly round the back of the previously visited Geffrye Museum, and thus affording a very quick look at the gardens there (nice but bare, it being winter). There was virtually nobody on the train and I got to the destination in about 30 minutes. If you don’t live in London be warned – this is in no way typical of a journey on either of those lines!

The Saatchi Gallery began life in 1985 in St John’s Wood. Opened by renowned recluse, ad man and art aficionado Charles Saatchi in order to show his private collection to the public, it has received and indeed courted quite a bit of controversy over the years. Saatchi effectively launched the career of Damien Hirst, when he put on his famous show of Young British Artists in the early 1990s (featuring Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde piece), and provided a springboard for many others such as Rachel Whiteread, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin. Her piece ‘Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-95’ (‘the tent’) was lost in a fire at a storage warehouse in Leyton containing several other pieces owned by Saatchi, as well as many other artworks. The total loss was valued by one insurance specialist at over £50m. Indeed.

Anyway, the gallery now has its premises within the very splendid Duke of York’s HQ. Done up for the purpose and opened in 2008 it is undoubtedly one of the best gallery spaces I have been to. The fifteen white-walled and high-ceilinged rooms are light and airy and provide a serious but quite neutral context for the artworks displayed in them. Unlike other modern art galleries (such as the Tate Modern), where you have to pay to see the special exhibitions, everything here is free – except for the little exhibition guidebook, which maddeningly I seem to have mislaid somewhere between lunch and home (that’s what daytime wine does for you kids – just say no). Anyway it was only £1. There was a stack of free copies of the gallery’s own magazine ‘Art and Music’ in the foyer so I had a flip through one of those while awaiting today’s companion, the Lady Anonymous…

Dramatic entrance

There were two exhibitions for us to see - ‘Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union’, and ‘Breaking the Ice: Moscow art 1960-80s’. Together the two bring together works by about 40 Russian artists and we saw many pieces, so I will just give some of the highlights here.

The first gallery contained large black and white photographs of Soviet prisoners. They were all men, stripped to the waist (and beyond in some cases) to reveal their tattoos. The photographer, Sergei Vasiliev, had worked for a local newspaper, then got a job as a prison warden. His colleague had begun cataloguing the prisoners’ tattoos as the imagery contained subversive messages about the Soviet regime, and about the prisoners’ own crimes. When the KGB got wind of this, they realized that these DIY tattoos – made using improvised sharp edges and ‘ink’ in the form of blood or urine – could provide useful information, and so they sent in Vasiliev to make a visual document. The photos are immediately striking because the men have been quite deliberately posed – sometimes on their own with props, sometimes seated in pairs or groups with their arms over each other’s shoulders in comradely fashion, and sometimes looking directly at the camera with a very intimidating stare – these are portraits rather than merely technical pictures. The tattoos themselves are surprisingly intricate and well-executed, given the tools available. They are mostly images, though there are some words too – we couldn’t make out much of this as they use the Cyrillic alphabet, but there was a bit of Latin I did recognise on one of the men: Dum Spiro Spero, which means ‘While I breathe, I hope’. (In one episode of the BBC drama series Spooks, the character Lucas North returns from seven years in a Russian prison, where he had also been tattooed with this motto).

Don't mess

 

Moving on, we came to a room containing a line of what looked like cubicles or stables made from cardboard. Inside each one was a dummy of a man wearing suit trousers and business shoes, but his head was a colourful abstract shape, and his shirt was filthy and ripped. Each man had a different injury but all were brutal – arms missing, or a hand ripped off and pinned to the wall. The figures were cartoony enough not to be disturbingly gruesome, but also real enough to be quite unsettling. The artist, Gosha Ostretsov, is apparently a big fan of comics, which, we learned, ‘have not been assimilated into Russian art in the same way as they were by Pop artists in the West. In fact, they are still considered somewhat alien and certainly not the medium with which to convey anything serious. Ostretsov has knowingly subverted this received idea by co-opting the resistance to comics and pop culture, using them as a colourful, mass culture form “[to polemicize] with the profound, rather heavy-handed conceptualist approach”'. Sure. Quite good though.

Kind of grim, really

Vikenti Nilin’s ‘From the Neighbours’ series of photos was one of my favourites in the exhibition. The shots feature ordinary people seating on windowsills in desolate-looking high rise apartment blocks, but with their legs on the outside, as if they might jump at any moment. The buildings and clothes are drab, but, despite their precarious positions, the people are passive in this potential suicide situation, which I think is the point the artist is trying to make. You might joke that living in one of these utterly commonplace, totally uninspiring Soviet block of flats might make you want to top yourself, but these people seem to have no drive to do anything, not even that – they are bored, uninterested, slightly unimpressed. It’s a simple concept I suppose, but the I found the message affectingly direct, and the camera angles and composition gave me that same feeling you get when you're close to the edge of high cliff.

Suicidal, or just bored?

 

In the next room we came across some lovely paintings. They were mainly large cavasses, with very small, ghostly figures gently positioned in the middle. They had an ethereal quality to them and were plain creepy too in a way – they compelled you to look, but the figures depicted were reminiscent of something that might be in a dream at that point when you know it’s going to accelerate into a nightmare. It made me shudder a bit, but I couldn’t help looking.

Spooky but lovely

By far the most disturbing set of pieces – but in a way my favourite part of the whole exhibition - was a series of photographs by Boris Mikhailov, showing homeless people in the Ukraine. It was stark and direct. The people are known as ‘bomzhes’ – those who have no home or support. The artist states that he wanted to capture them while they still were ‘normal’ and still looked human. The implication that they were changing into something less-than-human owing to their appalling living conditions and alienation from society was deeply depressing. Many of the people were posed naked or half-naked and there were a lot of unpleasant genitals on show. Most of the subjects were looking directly at the camera, and the expressions on their faces were in some ways unfathomable, but in another way quite simple – accusatory and pleading. As viewers we felt almost guilty, as if we were the ones who’d put these people in this destitute position. The sexual poses were quite hard to deal with, perhaps because it was a difficult reminder that these people are indeed still human, and still have the same basic drives that we all do. 

Totally massive sure right here

The next gallery was a bit of a surprise as it seemed to be art from Hong Kong, therefore not part of the exhibition we were working our way around. We had a look anyway, and I particularly enjoyed the enormous wooden tank. Sure was also a fan of this item but there were too many people around to get a decent shot of him with it.

Bonus tank

 

On the top floor we found the Breaking the Ice: Moscow art 1960-80s, which contained some really interesting pieces, although we were pretty hungry by this point, so we skipped over quite a bit of it. Nonetheless, we did spend quite a bit of time looking at the series of paintings and lovely little illustrations by Viktor Pivoravov and the impressively large works of [did not write down and thus don’t know artist’s name!].

Good space

Nice letter-y thing

Pivovarov's 'Black apple'

Stalin meets Giacometti

Ironic

After all that it was time for lunch, so we decided to try out the rather posh-looking ‘Gallery Mess’ restaurant, which is situated just next to the exhibition space. This was something of an extravagance as it was not cheap, but we felt we ought to treat ourselves, since we had quite bit of catching up to do, and it was a Friday. So, any excuse really.

Very pleasant restaurant space

Look at that VERY BIG SHOE Mummy. (only one person reading this will get that joke)

Somewhat extravagant lunch

Salmon fishcake on wilted spinach (Lady Anonymous)

‘It’s good. Pretty tasty. I guess fishcakes are quite a boring thing to choose, but it suits my needs at this time. The crumb-to-filling and fish-to-potato ratios are perfect, and the spinach is excellent. Frankly this is one of the best fishcakes I’ve ever had and I’m going to give it a 10.’

Duck breast with lentils and pesto (thepateface)

‘This is super-delicious and the pesto is a stroke of genius. I’m loving this thin and elegant cutlery. Probably didn’t need quite so many lentils but there are some bits of something very tasty mixed in, which I am enjoying immensely. Portion size is exactly right. 9.5 out of 10.’

The high marks do reflect the price we paid, but we enjoyed very nice service and overall the atmosphere in there was very pleasant – light and airy like the gallery, with some added super posh people having a conversation worth eavesdropping upon at the next table (“Well I said to him, if you insist on slumming it then go ahead and move to N16, but know that I don’t approve of this’). Charming. A slight air of condescension was detectable in the waiter later on, but that might have been because we were still there at 4.30pm, taking our dessert in the form of red wine.

On the whole it was a lovely day out. I’d very much recommend the Saatchi Gallery in general, and particularly the two exhibitions we saw. Though there is a lot in there that’s just nice or intriguing to look at, there is some tough stuff as well, so I’d say go along if you want a little bit of a challenge. And that restaurant is certainly worth dipping into your savings for!