Continuing my art-orgy, started with a visit to the Hammershoi at the Royal Academy, I went to Tate Britain, to see both Martin Creed's Work no 850 and the Orientalism exhibition.
I've referred to Creed before, on my running blog, but seeing it is another matter. Runners, I counted four different ones, three men, one woman, with different physiques and running styles, run the length of the empty Duveen galleries down the centre of the Tate.
Later, on my way to the cloakroom, I met a couple of them as they used the basement passages to return to the start. I am sure if I were allowed to run down the centre of the galleries I should be much louder; their footsteps are quieter than expected. An outdoor activity like running changes the indoor space of an art gallery, in some way I find hard to define. It is partly that the spectators are watching contemporary human movement somewhere where we are used to looking at work produced in the past which stays still for our examination.
In Orientalism, the first room is the fancy dress room, showing the English urge for dressing up in the costumes of the Near and Middle East from the sixteenth century onward, whether as fancy dress, as disguise or as some form of trying to identify with Turk or Arab. In the upper library of my old school, a picture used to hang of a Victorian man in Arab dress; I cannot remember who it was, and have written to the school archivist to see if it is still there, and if so if he can shed any light on it. After a room of genre painting, the room, the Holy City shows Jerusalem through the eyes of British painters. The insatiable needs of Victorian Sunday schools for depictions of the 'Holy Land' to hang on their walls must have created a market for any number of reproductions.
In the harem room, cleverly decorated with a screen, I found myself the only man, apart from the attendants, among a number of women visitors, and was struck by a whimsically Orientalist thought, that I might be the sultan, the other visitors my concubine, and the gallery attendants my eunuchs.
In a room of photographs, and an enlightening visual display the extent of the Ottoman Empire and of journeys by various travellers, Lady Montagu and Byron among them to the Levant and the Orient, I found a display of photographs taken in Jerusalem, Cairo and Constantinople. This last made me remember a song my father used to sing, whose first line was:
'Constantinople. With a C-O-N-S-T-A-N-T-I-N-O-P-L-E'
Recent Comments