Exhibitions seen - and missed

Coming across the Tate's publicity booklet, now out of date, was a good reminder of recent exhibitions at Tate Britain and Tate Modern.

As a collector and sorter-into-categories type of person ("once a librarian, always a librarian"), I really enjoyed the "Classified" exhibition - but have raher a hazy recollection of it, apart from the ticking metronomes around the edges of the fist room, and Mark Dion's display cabinet of objects found on the Thames foreshore in the centre, with drawers that pulled out to reveal a collection of bits of blue-and-white china in one and a neatly arranged rainbow of plastic objects in another...

The video on the Tate website is interesting - a few people, and the exhibition curators, talking about their collections and how they organise them. I like the idea of subcollections ... and that we all have collections of treasured possessions through which we relate to other people, and accumulations of things that hold memories, in no obvious order, that relate to our biography. (But is this way of looking at things a matter of turning them inside out, or living backward, somehow?) Definitely the value and meanings of "treasured objects" changes - the smooth stone I've carefully chosen to carry on my walk across Hampstead Heath becomes just another pebble in a plantpot when I get home.
Also in the exhibition were Damien Hirst's Pharmacy (believing in medicine is believing in immortality, says the note in my notebook); the Chapman Family Collection - subverting traditional cultures into the Macdonalds ethos, or vice versa; and works by Simon Starling, Gillian Carnegie, Rebecca Warren, and Fiona Rae, among others.

On the same day we went to see the Richard Long exhibition. It opens with the hexagrams for Heaven and for Earth filling opposite walls of the same room - painted on in mud. At the end, there's a video of Richard Long painting with mud - fabulous! (And you can buy a tshirt with "mud splatters" - for a mere £25. Some of us will be making our own...)
More recently I visited the Futurism exhibition at Tate Modern (took the riverboat to get there on a sunny day ... but that's another story). The pictures by Severini, and one by Bomberg (In the Hold), looked ready to be made into patchwork, though why would you want to!
A large painting by Fernand Leger called The Wedding was my favourite - it's light yellow, uncluttered areas were a contrast from the darkness of most of the other works. You can see it here, but be warned, that website comes with a blast of music (or vice versa).

And there were, or are, some smaller exhibitions at Tate Modern - Stutter (which I missed) "explored ideas of the unexpected within the processes of thoughts and language in both written and spoken forms ... these artists create a space for error, interruption, transformation and difference which suggest that an excess of ideas can paradoxically render us inarticulate or mute." It includes works by artists not known to me - Sven Augustijnen, Anna Barham, Dominique Petitgand, Michael Riedel, Will Stuart. Reading about them (and the others for which I've added links above) is giving me Art Overload -- and that familiar "why bother?" feeling ... which probably fits right in with the show's stated purpose.
In the Scale exhibition (seen that - it's on till 24 Oct), there's a sign in the room with Robert Therrien's table and chairs saying "Please do not climb on the artworks". Overheard in that room: "I don't get it - but I like it." Other artists are Pierre Roy, Magritte, Claes Oldenberg, and Giacometti.

The "Annalee" exhibition is on till April 2010 - she is a Manga character brought to life by various artists "in a range of animated videos, paintings, sculptures and other art works that question the nature and ownership of authorship and representation." For copyright and related reasons, no doubt, there are no images on the Tate's webpage.

And in the restaurant, a panoramic painting by James Aldridge, exploring "his interest in the ntural world as well as the ideas and imagery of extreme heavy metal music" - "In this seductive landscape, crows exhale smoke in a scene rich in decorative flowers, yet loaded with sinister overtones."