On Monday January 10th, we went to the V&A Museum where we got a tour from Glenn Adamson. This enormous museum was established in 1852 after the Great Exhibition in 1851. Adamson told our group that while competition seemed to be the museum's driving power at first, it soon valued education above everything else, including cultural wealth. I immediately loved the museum and I thought Adamson was a great tour guide, very thorough in his information and was clearly passionate about what he does. I really liked when he said that art should make the viewer question its moral decisions.
I really enjoyed the Casting Courts. This part of the museum consists of two rooms full of cast famous works; one room includes pieces from Northern Europe and Spain and the other room includes pieces from Italy. I was so impressed by the replica of Trajan's Column which was erected in 113 AD in Rome. They had to cut the cast of the column in half in order to even fit it into the space. Even though it was a cast of the sculpture and not the real thing I was so excited to see it. In the next room, there was a cast of Michelangelo's David which was carved in the very early 1500s in Florence. The sculpture was so much bigger than I had imagined it to be, I thought it was about the size of an average man, but this statue is easily almost twenty feet high. Once again, I felt I was in the presence of a great work of art even though this was only a cast of the David. There was also a copy of the School of Athens originally painted by Raphael in the early 1500s. I was blown away by this rendition and then I started to question the authenticity of all these things. I usually do not pay much attention to copies of things, but I felt differently about the casts in the V&A and I am wondering why. Perhaps because I am most likely never going to see the real ones? What is really the difference between them anyway?Glenn Adamson informed us that people some to the V&A to study Trajan's Column because it is in better shape than the real one. I think this is a very interesting debate over what makes something authentic and what makes something a fake.
My favorite exhibition in the whole building was Shadow Catchers: Camera-less Photography which displayed works from four artists experimenting without a camera to produce beautiful prints. I was so blown away by this entire exhibit and I want to consider using these ideas in my concentration instead of drawing and painting. I took Basic Photography last semester and learned the basics of photograms, of which I had great success making myself. I felt I had a greater appreciation for the exhibit after trying some of these techniques myself. The best part of photography is the element of chance, and while cameras aim to capture a documentary, camera-less photography "shows what has never really existed."
My favorite artist shown in the exhibit was Floris Neususs, a German photographer interested in the effects of the photogram. His work has a very high contrast to it and includes surrealist ideas about dreams and the subconscious. He started Korperfotogramms (whole-body photograms) in the 1960s and the ones shown in the show from later in the 1900s were absolutely amazing and beautiful. I thought his piece Be Right Back was original and kind of humorous, but his Untitled pieces of the models on white paper are just stunning. There is variation even within the black shadow by how close or far away the subject is from the paper. I agree that these images are dream-like and seem to be gracefully floating and there is just something about them that also seem delicate and almost secretive. I loved what Neususs said in his video about "making a picture of the window about the window," when describing photograms as merely a contact picture of the purely the paper and the subject. It is a very simple way of recording a "world of objects into a world of visions." I was so drawn to this work because I feel that it is a magical, different way of looking at things that we already see.
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