Victoria and Albert Museum

     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.

Tower of London

     On Wednesday, January 12th we went to the Tower of London.  This eighteen acre fortress was founded by William the Conqueror about 1,000 years ago.  I enjoyed walking up and down the fortress' walls and into the various towers that lined The White Tower in the center.  The Bloody Tower is a main attraction and is said to be haunted because this was where the prisoners were tortured for valuable information.  Various torture devices can be viewed in it today, however I was informed that most of the prisoners were held in The White Tower, which I was disappointed we could not go into because it was undergoing renovations.  We were however able to see the Crown Jewels in the jewel house constructed in 1868.  I was blown away by the grandeur of the jewels, I have never seen such gems that sparkle so much in the light.  My favorite item of the treasures was the Star of Africa, or the Cullinan I, the largest diamond in the world, cut from the Cullinan diamond which is over 3,000 carats!  This beautiful jewel is embedded in the top of the Royal Scepter.  The jewel house was my favorite part of the Tower of London, apart from the great view of the London Bridge from the fortress walls.

Gallery #2: Whitechapel Gallery

     As one of our three additional galleries, we visited Whitechapel Gallery on Wednesday, January 12th.  I have to admit that I did not like the gallery space as soon as I walked in and saw there were only about nine rooms, half of which were closed due to renovations.  I did however enjoy two of the pieces.  The first was by Claire Barclay and was called Shadow Spans (2010) in one of the rooms on the first floor.  Her installation took up the entire space and consisted of black door frames, spilled dirt and pottery on the floor and large fabrics draped over the structure.  Barclay's work incorporates the relationship between the materials and making, and this piece dealt with the environment of urban life and ideas of exposure and observation.  I really liked this piece because I felt the whole room has a certain mood as soon as you stepped into it and I immediately walked right through and around the piece to get a sense of what that mood might be.  The black frames reminded me of a foundation in a construction cite or the very basic structure of something not yet filled in.  Therefore for me the piece was exploring themes of abandonment and emptiness, because while a foundation is usually the start of something, the feel of the piece made me feel as if it would never be finished.  I also got a sense of mystery as the drapery seemed to be hiding part of the structure and appeared to be covering something up.  I liked Barclay's work because I was able to draw my own interpretation from her sculpture.
     The other piece I really liked was in the upper galleries, and it was titled Current Disturbance (1996) by Mona Hatoum.  I could hear the piece through the doors before I could see it, and once inside the noise intensified, proving to be a buzzing sort of electrical sound.  The huge square structure was made of wood and wire cages that each contained one light bulb.  The bulbs were all synced to light up or get brighter or switch on and off while the electrical buzz that you could not ignore reflected what was happening with the light bulbs. Hatoum's piece dealt with themes of "surveillance and control," and I definitely felt this way because each light bulb appeared to be trapped in its individual wire cage.  I also loved this piece because it had high contrast between light and dark (as sometimes the bulbs would go completely out) and between noise and silence (when the bulbs went out the buzz completely ceased as well).  In the dark and silence, the viewer was left with their ears ringing until the bulbs flared up again.  This was my favorite moment of the lighting circuit and the whole piece because that one short moment of dark held such great potential.

Free Day: Evan Evans Tours (Gallery #3)

     We had a free day on Thursday, January 13th so booked a trip with Evan Evans Tours to take a coach bus to Windsor Castle, Stonehenge and Bath.  The bus picked us up in Bloomsbury and we drove for over an hour to reach Windsor Castle, which is currently the royal residence of The Queen.  I was surprised that the castle grounds were set right in the middle of a cute, bustling town.  We had to pass through security before we entered but I had thought there would be a lot more precautions taken.  We were lucky enough to see the changing of the guards which was accompanied by music.  That was so exciting!  St. George's Chapel was included in the tour and was beautiful, however I personally thought Westminster Abbey was much grander.  We also got to see The Drawing Gallery, which had drawings and sketches from the 1700s by Leonardo da Vinci and Hans Holbein the Younger!  I was very interested in da Vinci's medical sketches from when he performed autopsies and sketched the body alongside his "mirror notes."  There was also an exhibition of the work of the royal photographer, Marcus Adams.  The exhibit displayed photos of Queen Elizabeth as a young child which captured her youth, yet one caption said that she appeared to be mature beyond her years already at eight years old.  Some of the pictures taken by Adams of the Royal Family were the only thing available to the public before television, and I thought it was interesting how this made them closer to their subjects.  The whole castle was beautiful and it actually felt like being in a fairy tale.
     The next stop was Stonehenge, which was the destination I was the most excited for and was my favorite part of the day.  When we got there, I could not believe that there roads so close to the ruins.  Other than that, the structure was completely in the middle of nowhere.  All that was along the countryside were some sheep and the tourists who had come to marvel at Stonehenge.  I had imagined the stones to be a bit larger up close, but from far away they were exactly as I had pictured them and I took so many pictures of them from every angle.  There was a pathway that circled Stonehenge and in some areas you were right next to the stones and others farther away.  It was really breathtaking, especially after learning all about the impressive architectural feat from Art History and the fact that it has been there since about 3,000 BC.  I thought it was absolutely stunning and I loved that we were able to fit this into our trip.
     The last stop on our tour was Bath, located in the country of Somerset.  This was such a change in scenery from Stonehenge; within an hour we were out of the country and into a huge city that had a beautiful skyline set in the hills of the landscape.  We stopped outside Bath Abbey, however our main focus was The Roman Bath Museum.  This is a major tourist attraction and it houses The Roman Bath house that is no located underground.  The steamy water seemed very hot but we were warned not to touch it as it is untreated.  The amount of steam rising up from the baths was incredible and it was considerably hotter just standing in the same room.  These were the public bathhouses used early in the first century AD along with shrines built to honor the sacred hot springs.  It is so interesting to see where people bathed that long ago, however the idea of a huge public bath seems quite gross to me and all I could think was how far technology and architecture has come.  Overall the tour was great, my only regret was that we did not have more time at each event since they were such amazing attractions.

Damian Ortega

    When we saw Black Watch at the Barbican Theatre, we also went to see Damian Ortega's exhibit The Independent.  Ortega is a Mexican artist who creates sculptures out of found objects, and his exhibit in the Barbican focused on turning the events of each day in the September 2010 newspaper into individual sculptures making a time period of that month.  The one sculpture I really liked was Waves IN and Waves OUT.  There were tires and drums arranged in increasing and decreasing circumference sizes that created a tunnel when you looked down the piece.  This was in response to an article about gravitational waves from September 20, 2010.  I liked this piece because of how its appearance changes when viewed at different angles and how you could walk through the separate tires and drums.  This piece had a lot of space to itself, however I did not think the space in The Curve worked well with the body of work as a whole.  I thought it was very scattered and the titles were hard to connect to the individual pieces since they were so far away on the wall and most pieces were installed in the center of the room.  I think a newspaper is generally very organized and his exhibit was not; I do not know if he wanted this aspect to relate to the layout of the newspaper or if he only desired the objects to relate to the content.  I did like that Ortega said in the newspaper handout this piece was about him becoming aware about what he was seeing and what it meant for contemporary culture.  I guess my response to the work is that different people respond quite differently to the exact same events, and this exhibition was about Ortega's "own subjective viewpoint" during the month of September of 2010.

Barbican Theatre: Black Watch

     On Monday January 10th we saw the play Black Watch at the Barbican Theatre.  During dinner in the cafe we were all discussing the aesthetics of the building itself, and I personally felt it was too dark.  Tine made a comment that the walls looked like rock and the whole place felt like a cave, and I agreed but I felt that that gave the Barbican a negative atmosphere.  The place needed more color, everything appeared to be black or grey tones.  The theatre itself was very interesting, the stage split the audience straight down the middle into two raised seating sections.  As soon as I walked in I thought it might be an interactive play because sometimes when the audience is so close to the stage they call on volunteers, but it was not like that at all.  The play was about a group of young Scottish males who joined the Afghanistan War to help the Americans.  It takes the perspective of the soldiers which is very personal to their own experiences within the army and with each other.  Overall, I thought the play was very powerful.  However, I still can not decide if I really liked it or not.  I thought the actors were all great but there was a lot of strong language used throughout and it was very hard to understand their strong Scottish accents at times.  There was minimal scenery and costumes used yet I was impressed with the use of sound and lighting to produce an atmosphere, much like how I liked the special effects in War Horse.  It was a very different experience to hear about the war not from the American perspective, and at times the Scottish boys referenced the American soldiers in both good and bad ways that sometimes put me on edge.  And even though I do not personally know anyone in the war, I was still greatly effected by the play and felt a strong emotional  pull towards the characters portraying these soldiers, some of whom did not make it out alive.  I thought it was very powerful when the one boy was crying while sitting on the floor until he jumped up when the general came over to hand him a letter.  This shows that while the boys all acted tough and said they were there because they were excited to see some action and fight, the reality of war and death clearly upset them deeply in those vulnerable moments.  Plays or stories like this just make me appreciate so much that I have in my life and the people who are close to me.  I think this play was a huge success in the fact that the audience was engaged and emotionally willing to believe in the reality of the play, especially me personally.

ICA

     On Sunday January 9th, we went to the Institute of Contemporary Arts to see the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2010.  The exhibit included a wide range of contemporary work including sculpture, installations, video and paintings.  I was confused about the layout of the gallery and I do not think I was a fan of the space in which the pieces were displayed; I felt the rooms were very crowded and it was easy to get distracted.  The first room was so jam-packed but all everyone seemed to be focusing on was a disturbing animation projected high up on the wall of self mutilation and destruction called Cut by Kristian de la Riva.  I feel this type of art is unnecessary and simply a way to make everyone feel uncomfortable.  Instead of people trying to figure out the meaning behind it, they were just turning away disgustedly.  I felt a lot of the art in the ICA was difficult to relate to and I could not see any substance in more than half of the pieces there.  I found this surprising because I usually enjoy contemporary art but I had a very hard time finding anything in the ICA that was even interesting to me.  

   I did really like one sculpture on the upper level called Narcissus (2010) by Guy Haddon-Grant.  This was one of the only pieces I enjoyed because of the aesthetic and conceptual meaning.  I liked the rough way in which the half or a man's body was constructed and how it was reflected back at him because of the mirror on which he was placed.  I found it also satirical after reading the blurb about the piece on the ICA's website; it is making a humorous poke at narcism saying that is is boring and people are more self-loathing in today's society anyway and there is a lack of "moral guidance."  

     The other piece I was drawn to was a huge photo called In the Air (2010) by Raphael Hefti.  I liked the yellow-green tinge to the paper and I was curious as to what the white powder being emptied from the cup was.  It reminded me of milk spilling even though it was clearly not a liquid and I enjoy photographs that capture moments that happen to fast for the eye to see.  What Hefti was really spilling out of the glass was a material called witchpowder and was a study of its burning effects on the photographic paper.  I am drawn to pieces that are a mixture of art and scientific studies because the results are something I might want to consider as an artist myself.  I created a DNA animation last year that I thoroughly enjoyed researching and then drawing, so I try to keep works like this in mind whenever I need to come up with a new idea of my own.