Tuesday March 27 went to the Whtiechapel Gallery in London. I hadn't been for ages. I went because my husband wanted to go to the opening of a small exhibition of loans from the Government Art Collection Fund. These are works from its collection which Prime Minister's have chosen to hang in their residence at 10 Downing Street. (Above an image of one of the state rooms in wartime.) At the Whitechapel the choice of what to show was made by the staff at number 10. It was not easy to find this show. But the main exhibition was impossible to miss. Entering the Whitechapel's usually handsome, airy space, the place looked like an art storage warehouse. It was filled with tall, wide crates in a cockeyed zig-zag arrangement. These turned out to be the backs of roomlets created as viewing spaces for videos in the Gillian Wearing retrospective. Presumably the artist wished to create this brutalist welcome to her show. Surely an imaginative museum designer if not the artist herself could have created a series of rooms the outside of which were part of the art. Then again, as the art itself turned out to be dead ordinary it was all of a piece after all.
Upstairs there were large photographs--oversized has become the new normal. Many of the images were of the artist wearing a clearly visible mask of her own face or the face of others including her family. This is a homely, less engaging version of Cindy Sherman==at that is Wearing at her best. Many were photographs of "the man in the street" holding hand written signs which were--or were not--a commentary on their feelings or the state of the world. (see above.)The over all impression was of banality and lack of vision. When it comes to art, with two strikes of this kind, you are out.
VIP the invitation read. The crowd, mainly in their twenties and early thirties, were mostly drinking beer from bottles (the new champagne although it has been the vogue for half a dozen years). Dress was either military uniforms, nurses outfits or school children's garb and even those in Prada, nerd division, carried school bags. Fortunately for us, white wine was also available and fortunately for others pastel colored small bottles of possibly health boosting stuff.
Eventually we found the small gallery upstairs with the Art Collection pictures. The most interesting was a portrait of Ada Lovelace, Byron's daughter. Augusta Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace was a hugely gifted and
accomplished mathematician. She worked with Charles Babbage, on the development of
on the first mechanical computer, The Difference Engine. (see above.). She wrote its program and is widely credited as having been the first computer programmer.
We were prevented from leaving the Whitechapel the way we had entered so found our way to a corridor through which we were expected to exit. My husband went off to the W.C. and I drifted into a cozy, modernist room off the corridor. Red wine was quickly offered and it was good (that made a welcome change). There were snacks on a table. This appeared to be a gathering place for those who didn't fit the profile of Whitechapel VIP's. We didn't either but these folks looked faintly related or anyway like people belonging to yet another world as it turned out they were. They came in all ages from gray heads to kids. At the front of the room with windows looking out onto the street was a table piled with books, copies of one book: "A Man in a Hurry: the World's Greatest Walker. The Extraordinary Life & Times of Edward Payson Weston" I'd stumbled into a book launch. And what a dandy subject: A Victorian, called "the father of
pedestrianism, who was a hugely popular figure if also, perhaps, a part time charlatan. As I was taking this in my husband reappeared and James Corbett, the publisher of deCoubertin Books approached. They describe themselves as a "small family run enterprise." They want to bring out two or three non-fiction books a year mainly about sport. Their aim is to publish readable works but not guff or fluff. The list will be kept small maybe for money reasons but also==and listen to this fellow writers--because they want to give full attention and support to each book on their list.
What started out as a disappointing even irritating evening ended up sending us out into the streets of East London with smiles on our faces, books under our arms and the feeling that contemporary literature (and art) can still be an adventure and even a source of joy.
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