Tastelessly Gristly

It’s rare that I ever manage to go out on one of my weekly art rambles and then order my thoughts sufficiently to be able to return home, write up the log and then post the results out into the wide world of the webospheric ether all on the same day.  Nevertheless, in order to keep things fresh in my mind, I do try to keep the gap betwist taking in the visual experience and bashing out the written record as brief as is practically possible.  Today, however, is the exception to my anti-procrastinatory policy which means that in the land of the Berman blog time has stood still and Christmas hasn’t yet happened:  sprouts are still out in the fields shivering on their stalks; piglets are not yet ensconced in their Lady Gaga blankets; and turkeys are merrily gamboling round the farmyard unaware of both the proximity of their assignation with some cranberry sauce and the indignity they will soon be required to suffer as they become intimate with some combination of sage, onions and chestnuts.  Meanwhile, Santa himself has not yet oiled his beard nor…oh, well, enough of the dreadful seasonal clichés, suffice to say that while the rest of the kingdom is currently recovering from the annual festive indulgence, as far as this text is concerned it’s still the Sunday before Christmas.  And today I’m planning to check out a little walk that I’ve seen advertised that links together some of the galleries down Bermondsey Street and beyond.  First off, though, I decide to treat myself to a full English breakfast at Cote in the Hays Galleria, just across the way from London Bridge tube station.

And, with a couple of minor caveats, this turns out to be a smart call.  I think I would have preferred to have had a table outside the earshot of the gathering of taxi drivers and spouses who insisted in playing Mornington Crescent or some such game that required the loud precision delineation of various routes around the capital, followed by a heated discussion of alternatives that avoided roadworks but included sightseeing opportunities.  And when all the other constituents were so well sourced, cooked and presented, it was a real disappointment that the solitary sausage in the ensemble was so peculiarly, old-fashionedly, tastelessly gristly.  No matter, it was just about edible and everything else was really jolly good, including the bill which totalled just £11.  That’s cheaper than the entrance charge for quite a few of the exhibitions I’ve seen this year and though it’s not really possible to equate the relative merits of a culinary experience with the mix of mental stimulus and visual gratification provided by having a gander at a parade of well-proportioned canvases, I feel sorely tempted to forgo the world of the plastic arts next year and instead treat my tastebuds to a weekly tour of the capital’s gastronomic temptations and write about that.  On the other hand, I suppose if an exhibition is a duffer it’s easy enough to exit and search out a substitute to fill up a blog, whereas a poor meal is liable to follow one home and may even make an unwelcome return appearance later in the wee small hours.

Anyway, enough of all that, as I head down Bermondsey Street to the first stop at the Underdog Art Gallery, a place with which I’m not all that familiar, having only passed through its portals and into its gloomy surrounds a couple of times before.  My memory is that the ambience was Gothic and the artworks on display a sort of mix of the clever graphic designs more likely to appeal to an audience younger and more eager for quick hits and cheap thrills than myself.  But perhaps today’s visit will encourage me to review my opinions and change my mind – except that the place seems closed or rather the entrance into the gallery has been deliberately blocked off by a board advertising a forthcoming show.  I suppose that I could just push this aside and take a peek in but then again I might interrupt someone in flagrante and I definitely wouldn’t want to do that here.  So I decide to give up on that and head on to the more familiar and brighter welcome provided by the Eames Fine Art, a venue that specialises in the display and sale of prints, and which can usually be relied upon to have something interesting on show.  It’s a bit of a hodge-podge today with the unsold lots from their recent online auction of contemporary works plus some very attractive etchings of street scenes in Beijing, New York, London and Venice by Austin Cole and a small spread of Durer woodcuts documenting the life of Christ.  Maybe because thoughts are currently so much directed towards his happy entrance into the world rather than his complicated life and brutal exit that I have trouble concentrating on the biographical illustration on show here today.  They’re also a bit on the small side and since my varifocals are playing up and I’m in a bit of a hurry, I just don’t really feel able to give these works the attention that they so obviously deserve.

And so I exit, stopping off a few doors down the road to call into the London Glassblowing Studio & Gallery where, somewhat unsurprisingly, the place is full of vitreous matter.  All around are stacks of bowls and glasses, plates and pitchers and a man puffing into a tube and about to expel even more ornamental extrusions.  He’s clearly very skilled and hugely talented but I have to say that I just find all these kinds of glassy products just look too much like kitsch for my tastes.  Except, that is, for the selection of traditional tree decorations.  These weighty baubles actually look rather elegantly pretty and if I hadn’t already spent my daily allowance on satisfying my gustatory needs then I might have been tempted to buy a pair to add to the tinsel adorning my own arboreal display of seasonal good cheer.

After that rather jolly diversion into a mini-festival of lights, the next stop is a descent into a veritable maxi-festival of gloom and despair, courtesy of Anselm Kiefer who has transformed the normally bright walls of the White Cube into a Stygian corridor of doom.  Entitled Walhalla, the installation in this entrance area consists of two rows of metal beds, each of which is covered with a crumpled collection of sheets and pillows made from lead that’s been beaten into shape.  Other rooms are packed with all the usual props of mud-spattered books, dead flowers, and assorted rusty remnants – there’s a wonky spiral staircase covered in discarded clothes, a roomful of creaky cabinets with papers spilling out from the dusty drawers, glass cases containing an anvil, a wheelchair and all sorts of other junk that looks like it’s been salvaged from Chernobyl or Aleppo or some other godforsaken piece or real estate.  For those unfamiliar with his work I should think the drama, boldness and sheer scale of Kiefer’s paintings and sculptures carries a kind of apocalyptic authority that is very impressive, moving and perhaps even meaningful.  But there’s a problem for those who have come across Kiefer’s work before and I guess it’s something to do with the law of diminishing returns, in that the more you see of his displays and the bigger they get and the more grim they become, the less of an emotional impact they seem to inspire.  I’m not sure that familiarity with Kiefer’s work breeds contempt exactly but perhaps just a touch of ennui and a little bit of a groan at the sheer, overwhelming, unsavoury portentousness of it all.

Next stop is a bit further down the road but the Art Bermondsey Project Space turns out to be closed and, having consulted with my google machine, I discover that Arthouse1, which would have been my last stop, won’t be opening for another couple of hours.  All in all not really a very successful gallery trail but, since there’s still another paragraph of blog to fill I decide to change direction, take a couple of tube rides and go west over to Kensington Gardens and the Serpentine Sackler Gallery which was, of course, designed by the determinedly avant garde architect Zaha Hadid who very sadly died earlier in the year.  I can’t say that I thought much of the way she used a sort of heavy swirl of concrete to link the old, brick storeroom, that forms the actual Gallery, with the new, expensive, sparkling glassy restaurant that stands awkwardly to its side.  But then the introduction of this complicated piece of geometrical abstraction – not entirely dissimilar to the sort of absurdist curving sweep of matter that sits atop the bonce of President Elect Trump – was very much Hadid’s signature style.  It’s only the relatively recent developments in computer-aided design that has allowed architects to discard their drawing boards and set-squares and instead reach for their Apples and grab hold of their mouses in order to play with these kinds of ultra-complex structures.  Though whether all this clever technology is able to produce anything other than the transient glister of superficial sci-fi dramatics is something that I’m sure will become apparent with the passage of time.  In the meantime the Gallery, presumably by way of a tribute, is staging a show of Hadid’s early artworks and since I think it only appropriate to honour the maxim de mortuis nil nisi bonum, I will decline from passing any critical opinion as to their merit.