Read this book!!

I have decided to write separate thoughts in separate postings. I think this probably makes it easier for you to read them (if indeed you are doing so), as well as, later on, for me or you to find and link to them. So, some extra musings for today:

I have been meaning to share something with you for about a week now. There is a ‘gallery’ space by South Kensington tube station, which used to be a frame shop, but now stands pretty much empty, and is occasionally taken over by a temporary shop or an art installation. It is currently hosting a company called Stuff and Nonsense, which I can’t find online, but if you can’t get down to South Ken before 26 March when their ‘residency’ ends, I’d try a more concerted effort at Google than I have done. Basically, they sell designer lights. These lights are made out of stuffed animals. And not just any stuffed animals – stuffed vermin. The lighting they have on display in the window I have to walk past every day to get to work features stuffed pigeons, and I am pretty sure that at the beginning of the week there was a stuffed squirrel clutching a light, frozen in the act of scampering up the wall. This must have sold, as I don’t remember seeing it again. It’s a clever idea, and a very modern (postmodern?) take on taxidermy, but who in their right mind actually wants one of these lights in their home? The thought of it makes my flesh creep!

Something else I need to share: a fantastic graphic novel which I picked up yesterday afternoon in Clapham Books – a pleasant discovery in itself. It’s The Museum Vaults: Excerpts from the Journal of an Expert, by Marc-Antoine Mathieu (see the picture at the head of this posting), and no description can do it justice. It is one of a series of four graphic novels being produced in collaboration with the Louvre, which is a fantastic idea. There’s a really insightful interview with the artist here, about this and his other work, and one of the quotes describes it as “a kind of parallel world in which he examines, not the work [on display in the Louvre], but the discourse around art.”

The conceit is that “the Expert” (I love it!) has come to evaluate the contents of the subbasement levels of a museum so grand and old that its very name has been forgotten. He and his assistant spend fifty years exploring subbasement level after subbasement level, and their encounters with the various department supervisors they find along the way are existentialist musings on the very nature of art, in a simultaneously deeply comic and extremely profound way – the Flooded Gallery (“I was a guard before … now I’m a ferrywoman”), the Repository for Moulds (“All these moulds constitute the entire memory of the Museum’s statuary art”), the Fragments Room (perhaps my personal favourite, given my predilection for broken bits of pot…), the Restoration Workshop, where a minor paint touch-up is depicted as a precise surgical operation, the Frame Depot (of which there are some previews here)…

The idea that has stayed with me the longest is the chapter entitled “The Icon”, wherein The Expert muses upon all the slightly different variations which The Master created of You-Can-Guess-Which-Painting, which are subtly rotated so that no visitor ever has the same experience of the painting – “the interpretations are accordingly divergent and give rise to opinions, debates, interpretations and exegesis that, each time, only thicken the mystery a little bit more. Through this ploy, The Master wanted to represent the very mystery of representation” – though this mystery is threatened by the invention of “a magic box, a sort of camera obscura that can freeze the real and can reproduce it”, which will ensnare the painting and cause “the cold eye of exactitude [to] imprison the smile on exhibition that day”… Ahhh, just brilliant. I sat on Clapham Common in the sun and read this while eating my lunch, but I will have to read it again and again. What a wonderful way to give myself some well-earned time off from writing my own book!!