Henry Moore and the Jets

K ponders the Harrier, one of the two fighter planes in this year's Duveens Commission

That title might suggest this posting might actually be about Henry Moore, whereas the only link is Tate Britain - and I just couldn't resist the rock'n'roll title, Henry Moore being possibly the person I least associate with rock'n'roll....!

James commissioned us to go along to Tate and assess this year's Duveens Commission, Harrier and Jaguar, by artist Fiona Banner - so we thought we would combine it with going to see the Henry Moore exhibition before it closed. Nothing much to say about that - apart from, as K observed, grouping a whole load of Henry Moores together in an enclosed space does nothing for one's appreciation of his wonderfully abstract creations. Each one needs to be contemplated on its own terms, the way you do when you stumble across them as public sculpture, but in an exhibition environment, after a while you get fatigued by the requirement to give each one an equal share of your intellectual capacity...

The most memorable thing for me was the room dedicated to the series of drawings he made during the Second World War, especially of coal miners in Yorkshire, and of sheltering women and children in the tunnels and platforms of the London Underground. Inevitably the hundreds of sleeping figures take on the ghostly feel of Moore's signature 'recumbent forms'...

But to the Jets. As an aviation journalist who appreciates art and museums, James was keen to know what we - as two curators - thought of the current installation of two fighter planes in the neoclassical surrounds of the Tate's Duveen gallery, the implication being they had become art objects rather than objects of destruction. I am going to attempt to get my thoughts on all this in some sense of order for him here.

The first thing is that it is completely awe-inspiring. You see the jets first as beautifully-designed objects, and then you remember that they are designed that way in order to be more effective killing machines. This creates a sense of tension and awkwardness inside you which is the essence of the artist's intention, I think. This is especially so with the Jaguar, cleverly shown upside down, so you find yourself admiring the sleek engineering of its under-carriage, and then discover you're face-to-face with its gun ports.


I don't know if I'm using the correct terminology to describe any of these bits of the plane, and in fact my utter ignorance of this type of object was also part of what disconcerted me about their display. I didn't know if what I was looking at had been 'interpreted' by the artist in any way (and the text on the wall panel didn't clarify that for me, even when I finally read it) - I didn't know if the suggestion of feathers painted on the wings, nose and tail of the Harrier Hawk were put there by the artist or whether they were part of the original design of the planes; I didn't know if a Jaguar normally looked that shiny. Having watched an interesting short film about it on the Tate website (what a joy, may I say, to listen to an artist being so articulate about their work), I now know that the Jaguar was stripped back and polished for the exhibition, but there was something unsettling about my ignorance at the time I was looking at them.


I wonder if this is a female response? Most of the men visiting the galleries seemed inexorably drawn to the planes and seemed to want to 'explain' them to the women they were with - I suppose a symptom of making Airfix models as boys, and all wanting to grow up to be fighter pilots... One man - and this was extremely perturbing - posed for several photographs standing astride the long nozzle projecting from the front of the Jaguar, so blatantly phallic. These photos were being taken by a female friend or partner who seemed to think it all very amusing, but you felt you were intruding on something too intimate - not to say vulgar and rather pathetic - to be out in the open like that.

I felt the planes were poised as if they had just come to land - crash landed in the case of the upside-down Jaguar, though obviously there was no damage to it. The Harrier was just hovering with its nose a few inches off the ground, as if it had just plunged through the roof and caught in the branches of a tree or something - though the curator in me wanted to know more about the superstructure supporting it in that position... There was something slightly sinister about the 'greyed-out' appearance of both cockpits - I felt if I looked too closely I'd see someone in there, a dead pilot perhaps.

I suppose that was the tension surfacing again, the fact that you are so strongly aware of these objects' original function - these are both actual decommissioned planes which have seen action in recent international conflicts: the Jaguar was in Desert Storm. I felt happier - if that's the word - comforted even, that this meant they were authentic - that we were not just looking at them as gratuitous symbols of conflict, they had actually been there. Though, again, the tension, the unsettling awkwardness...

The polished, seemingly silver-plated, precious-metal surface of the Jaguar now reflects the architecture of the galleries enclosing them, and more than one person was taking photographs of this artistic reflection. This is deliberately part of Fiona Banner's effect - the Tate built with the funds from slavery, in the neoclassical style that was the symbol of empire at the time it was built, now housing these modern symbols and tools of empire. The display works because of its environment, in a more successful way than I have seen for a long time - seeing the planes in that space generates thoughts and feelings which I can't imagine thinking if I saw the planes in a airplane hangar or in an aviation museum. Perhaps I would, but there is something about the creative intent behind stripping and decorating them in this way, the whole idea that they are now art, that makes you look at them in a completely different way. Well, it provokes thought, and that has to be a good thing in an art installation.

So thanks James for our own commission! My head was so deeply buried in the ground during the last few months that I didn't even know about it, so I'm grateful for the excuse it gave me to start to reopen my eyes to the outside world.

As I was going to St Ives...

I met a man with seven wives
Each wife had seven sacks
Each sack had seven cats
Each cat had seven kits
Kits, cats, sacks, wives
How many were going to St Ives?

The traditional answer to this riddle is 1 ("I") though it turns out there are a surprising number of philosophical and mathematical interpretations of this old nursery rhyme - which you can read here.


In any case, on this occasion, there were two of us. K and I spent a week's retreat in a lovely 18th-century stone cottage in St Ives, which we have rented a couple of times before, as a Christmas hideaway. This time we went over New Year. We couldn't remember exactly when we had been before (our collective short term memory is terrible), but there we were in the comments book, Christmases 2005 and 2006. We had to cut the second trip short, since K's grandmother, Betty, died. I suppose we have always harboured a sense of unfulfillment, so it was wonderful to be coming back.

As usual, my full set of photos are over on Flickr - you should see my slideshow in the window below, otherwise click here.

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It's the perfect cottage for two, and was an excellent find - though I did spend the equivalent of several days online until I found it!


St Ives is also the perfect destination - we can get there by train, which is essential since neither of us can drive (and we've discovered it helps if you treat the loooong train journey as part of the holiday!); it's beautiful and picturesque, full of traditional granite houses, whitewashed with slate rooves covered with lichen, giving the town its distinctive range of colours; it's by the sea - and for some reason I am always drawn to the sea, I could sit and stare at it for hours ... as well as being surrounded by amazing landscape; and it's got Culture, all of the above having attracted a colony of artists to settle there since the late 19th century, but made most famous by the likes of Barbara Hepworth and Bernard Leach, as well as the 'primitive' (such a disparaging adjective) local fisherman and artist, Alfred Wallis, whose work I love. In fact, 'our' cottage is right opposite Barbara Hepworth's former studio - now a small museum and sculpture garden, which is a wonderful and inspiring place to visit, even though freezing cold in the winter! I love her sculptures, which can also be seen in various spots around the town.


This strong artistic legacy - which I always intend to learn more about and never get round to - led to the foundation of an outpost of the Tate there in 1993, in this retro-Modernist building, in homage to the importance of abstract modernists such as Hepworth and her husband Ben Nicholson to the history of the town.

Every time I visit, I am disappointed that there is no permanent corner of the gallery given over to the history of art in St Ives. Their temporary exhibitions always feature the work of local artists but, alas, you cannot learn anything about the history or artistic trends sponsored by this local community by visiting the gallery whose very existence is due to their fame and their legacy. I seem to write this on the evaluation form each time I go and it obviously has no influence! No Alfred Wallis on display anywhere this time around - and I have to say we did not think much of the current exhibition. One of the problems with having such a strong architectural space, which responds to and encompasses views of the sea and the landscape within two of the major gallery spaces, is that the artwork on display within has to be really strong to compete with what is around and outside. I am always far more interested in gazing out of this picture window than I am in gazing at the works behind me.


A highlight of this trip was our first visit to the Bernard Leach Pottery, which reopened in March 2008 after a major refurbishment. The old pottery workshop has been really sympathetically restored so it very much has the feel of a functioning pottery, from which the potters have just stepped out for the moment, and you can watch a fascinating film made in the 1950s, showing Leach and his studio in action, with a recent voiceover from one of the potters who worked there at the time. Leach was the founding father of British studio pottery and was deeply influenced by his time in Japan, and the new areas of the building reflect that by having a very Zen style to them - low wooden buildings with walkways between, housing a modern pottery which continues the Leach tradition of teaching through working. We bought two very beautiful black, salt-glazed mugs as a memento - I am drinking my morning coffee out of one right now! - but I could have totally bankrupted myself in the shop...

Another highlight was unexpectedly seeing a pod of dolphins playing in the sea off Porthmeor Beach. After visiting the Leach Pottery, we wandered back down to the sea, to sit and eat our packed lunch of Cornish pasties. Suddenly several specks appeared in the water, which we gradually realised were fins. There were at least 10 of them, quite close to the beach, and after weaving their way deeper out to sea, some of them started leaping and playing in the waves. Porthmeor Beach is popular with surfers because of the size of its waves, and the dolphins seemed to be joining in! In fact one of them made its way quite close to one of the surfers who was out that day - crazy dude - but then backed off again when it seemed to realise it was just a human being. It was amazing! They played like that for about 20 minutes. I unsuccessfully attempted to take some photographs - K much more sensibly filmed them:

When I looked up from this spectacle, the whole length of the beach and the edges of the surrounding cliffs were lined with people all watching - it was great, how this unexpected event of nature really wowed everyone and drew them all together.

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On past visits, because we have been there over Christmas, everything has been closed so there was very little pressure to do anything... More was open this time, but for the first few days we still managed to resist doing very much at all. Relaxing was what we were there for after all. We had ordered our groceries via a Tesco delivery and were both rather surprised when this actually arrived without any fuss on Monday morning - on past trips, we've got to the cottage, unpacked our suitcases, then lugged them by bus to the out-of-town supermarket to stock up. No such hassle this time! After which we promptly nested. I don't think we did all that much for the first couple of days apart from snuggle up in front of the wonderful log fires that K built and read our books.


Yes it really was that cosy!

We just took a little light reading with us...


We were there for New Year's Eve which is a big deal in St Ives. We had heard rumours about it but didn't really know what to expect. We went out at the start of the evening for a pre-prandial drink at The Sloop Inn - a wonderfully atmospheric pub on the harbour-front which they say dates back to 1312, and which you have no problem imagining smugglers and pirates frequenting... as indeed they were this evening, since as we sat there a steady stream of people in fancy dress, some of it extremely elaborate, came and went at the bar...


Basically everyone in town dresses up in fancy dress, and the small town is inundated by people from around Cornwall and beyond, also dressed up in fancy dress... Apart from the many smugglers and pirates, we saw quite a few Roman centurions, some Darleks, quartets of people dressed up as all the characters from the Wizard of Oz, and a veritable menagerie of people dressed up as animals... Thus attired, an enormous street party ensues! We popped back out again just before midnight and joined the throngs congregated around the harbour, where the tide was far out, and at midnight people started letting off fireworks on the beach. The whole thing had a great happy buzz about it, and was a really fun way to see the New Year in! (though we did so in our normal clothing!)



St Ives has also got some really top-class cafes and restaurants: we tried some new ones this time, spurred on by the recommendations in June's issue of Olive, the foodie magazine we subscribe to. Some of these places did not even exist the last time we were there! Cornish cream tea in the Porthminster Beach Cafe was particularly fine - I think it's the clotted cream that does it! Though the amazing views of the sea help as well...


The Digey Cafe was fantastic as well - a really cosy little deli-cafe selling locally-sourced produce, and judging by the lunch we had, excellent cooking too. Amazing steak-filled crumbly Cornish pasties from the new St Ives Bakery provided the perfect packed lunch for our long coastal walk to Lelant, while The Dolphin on Fore Street provided really gorgeous juicy fish and chips which were the perfect accompaniment to the special episode of Dr Who on New Year's Day!!

One thing we did not manage to do - though we're determined to do it next time - was the lantern-lit ghost walk around the town, led by the magnificently-named storyteller, Shanty Baba. However, late one evening we were sitting in front of the fire, reading, when we heard them stop outside the cottage and overheard Shanty tell about the man who used to live there, one James Wallis, the last of the local "ghost layers" - exorcists, or 'ghostbusters'. We couldn't quite hear everything he said, but it was amazing to think he was talking about 'our' cottage! This James Wallis was also a maths teacher, and all the local smugglers used to send their lads along to him, to sit in that front room where we were sitting reading by the fire, to learn some basic tricks of the trade! This explained why the cottage has a home-made sundial attached to the front wall with 'J. Wallis, 1780' rather naively inscribed on it. A brilliant little bit of history to add to our appreciation of the cottage and our surroundings!

I think St Ives would be a complete hell-hole in the summer, when those wide open beaches are mobbed by endless crowds of sunbathers... We have vowed never to go in the summer, but it makes the perfect winter retreat! I have come home with a desire to reread the Daphne du Maurier tales of smugglers and remote inns on Cornish moors and feisty heroines, which I so enjoyed as a teenager! And fortunately, we both still have another week's leave, a bit more time to prepare ourselves to go back to work and the onslaught of 2010... though feeling recharged after our Cornish hideaway.

One that didn't win the Turner Prize...

I haven't been along to Tate Britain yet to see the Turner Prize show, but reading about Richard Wright's piece - a gold leaf abstract fresco on the gallery wall, which will get painted over at the end of the show - certainly makes me want to. There is something wonderful about the fact that the fundamental reason the judges all gave for selecting it as the winner was that it is beautiful.

One of the artists that didn't win last night was Roger Hiorns, creator of a rather amazing installation in a derelict council flat in Elephant and Castle, which we popped down to see a couple of Sundays back, in the pouring rain. This piece is called Seizure, and you can read more about it here. I have also posted my photographs of it on our Flickr site - it's worth a look (apologies, the picture link to my photostream doesn't seem to be working at the moment...).

The flat was turned into a watertight tank and 75,000 litres of super-saturated copper sulphate solution was pumped into it through holes in the ceiling. This was then left to cool and crystallise over the next two and a half weeks, and then they broke into it and pumped out the remaining solution. When you first visited, back in 2008, you were given wellies and rubber gloves since the crystals were still wet. When we went round the other week, we were told not to lick our fingers after touching the crystals, since it was poisonous! A little boy going round with his father earnestly said, "Daddy, will you remind me if I forget?", to which his father replied, "But if you forget, it will be too late!" Oh dear...

Every surface - originally the floor as well, even the old bath - is encrusted with large jagged crystals in this ethereally or supernaturally deep blue colour. It's quite stunning when you're cocooned in there. And perhaps because I had been there so recently, at one point I had an overriding sensation of being in the Alhambra... That sensation of every surface covered in glittering ornament, that you just can't take in in one go - you have to sit and be and absorb it gradually, in an almost spiritual way... Originally the plaster decoration of the Alhambra's walls would have been coloured in deep primaries - gold, red ... and blue.

And like Richard Wright's work, this amazing idea will be destroyed. The council block it's housed in is scheduled for demolition at some point in the New Year. In fact, it should have already gone by now, but the credit crunch stalled the developers. Lack of money combined with artistic creativity? Isn't that always the way?!

If you want to pop along and see it before 3 January, details are on the Artangel site.

Two Cities in One Day

Today we went to the Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern. It was a beautiful winter day, cold with a clear blue sky. We took the 59 bus to Waterloo Bridge and walked along the South Bank, which was busy with other Londoners enjoying the rare afternoon sunshine. Riverside London looked absolutely beautiful and we stopped and admired St Paul’s before passing into the cavernous interior of the Turbine Hall. We paused briefly at the current Unilever Series installation, which neither of us thought was up to much, though perhaps you only ‘get it’ if you spend more time there. It all seemed rather unimaginative, a collation of pastiches, which perhaps was what it was all about, in a postmodern kind of way.

The main perk of working in a museum – or, at least, the one I work in – is that I can get into most exhibitions for free, so there really is no excuse for not going to see everything that comes on in London – though there is usually quite a lot going on in London, which is one of the things that is so brilliant about living here, but trying to see everything would be practically a full-time job. Anyway, I love Rothko. One of the things I used to enjoy most about being a teenager in London (and I am one of those rare Londoners who was actually born and raised here) was sitting in the Rothko room when it used to be in the Tate at Millbank, before that was Tate Britain, or there were any other Tates, and it was just ‘The Tate’. This was probably my favourite art gallery when I was younger – everything under one grand and rather beautiful roof, and catering to all the different artistic phases you pass through during adolescence. I had my pre-Raphaelite phase (and am still rather partial to The Brotherhood, I must admit), my Turner phase, but there was always something other-worldly about the enormous Rothko canvases in what I remember as a dimly-lit and rather hallowed space in the old Tate. I have visited them in their new home at Tate Modern, but when I think about those paintings, the image that comes to mind is the old gallery at Millbank.

Anyway hallowed and memorable is not the nature of the space they currently occupy during this exhibition of his late series, which has the Seagram murals at its heart, but perhaps that is the fundamental problem with the transience of temporary exhibitions. The last show we had seen in those rooms was the Juan Múñoz retrospective (his is the Turbine Hall installation I most regret not having seen) and I could still imagine his works occupying those spaces – his works which are so representational and focused on the (his) human form, in almost diametric opposition to Rothko’s paintings, so there was a rather strange layering of the two artists in my mind. In any case, I think the way to experience Rothko’s art is probably to sit calmly and for several hours in the chapel in Houston for which he was commissioned to produce fourteen paintings of his Black Form series. That’s the kind of meditative environment you need to really look at these magnificent paintings, which suggest so many layers of meaning and profundity, opening like windows onto unknowable mysteries, endlessly resisting our natural urge towards interpretation. The hustle and bustle of the Tate on a busy Sunday afternoon was not it (though, of course, great for visitor figures etc etc).

I couldn’t help wondering what Rothko himself would have thought of the exhibition. He withdrew his commission from the Seagram building when he decided that a private restaurant on Park Avenue was “an unsuitable environment in which to experience his paintings”. He worked closely with the Director of the Tate Gallery in the 1960s to agree how some of the murals might be hung in that space, and one interesting piece in the show is the maquette from the Tate Archive showing the agreed arrangement of the hang. This is the gallery I used to love to visit, now lost in the mists of time. Reading the exhibition booklet it became clear that Rothko had very clear ideas about how his paintings should be hung (low), and lit (dimly), in spaces with warm-coloured walls – all features which had been completely ignored in the exhibition design, which had the standardised white walls and overly harsh lighting of modern art galleries, and which had the effect of flattening the tones and gloss of the paintings and made it impossible for you to really see into them in the way I remember being able to. The catalogue reprints his very specific instructions about how some of his murals should be hung for an exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1961 – I assume they were followed then. It seemed to me that if Tate Modern had a reason for disregarding how Rothko wished his own paintings to be experienced (apart from cost), they needed to make a case for it.

I also get a bit frustrated by exhibition text which focuses on the object (usually the case with paintings exhibitions like this one) to total exclusion of all context, refusing to indulge the viewer with biography, or any information about the creative process – we’re there for The Art, you know, which needs to be understood on its own terms. Perhaps I am too used to working in a decorative arts museum, and in a field which always seeks to make connections across societies and technologies. I guess I have developed a prejudice against an attitude which privileges (Western) painting as High Art, without any concern for justifying this place of privilege. If you don’t get it, you’re just not enough of an aesthete.

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It was dark when we left the Tate, but still beautifully clear, and the city lights were reflected in the fast-flowing waters of the Thames – when London is at its most beautiful, I think. We carried on walking along the South Bank, to Southwark Cathedral and past the deserted Borough Market, where we got another bus back to Brixton. At home, I settled down with my green tea and pastel de nata (Portuguese delicacies being one of the joys of living in Lambeth), to read “Here is New York”, the essay on the great city written by E. B. White in 1948. I had bought this little book in the Strand Bookshop during my trip to New York in the autumn, and it was one of the books in the box I shipped back, and only just picked up from the post office depot after getting back to work in early January. I guess it is a love letter to the city by someone who loved to live there, but not at all over-romanticised, a very warts-and-all view, which makes it yet more lovable. It brought back strong memories of my month there in the autumn – which have been rather fading in the onslaught of the more heavily-spiced Damascus memories – as well as drawing many parallels for me with London:

It carries on its lapel the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings…

New York is peculiarly constructed to absorb almost everything that comes along … without inflicting the event on its inhabitants; so that every event is, in a sense, optional, and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul.

The collision and the intermingling of these millions of foreign-born people representing so many races and creeds make New York a permanent exhibit of the phenomenon of one world…

My edition of this essay was printed in 1999 with a foreword by the writer’s stepson. The end of the essay is absolutely remarkable in light of the events of 11 September 2001, which were not even envisioned in 1999, but in 1948, E. B. White wrote:

The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now…

It certainly is today. How amazing his foresight was from 1948, but I suppose there must always have been a sense of the city being perched so precariously upon the ocean. I always find amazing the view you get of Manhattan from the plane, that utterly flat raft of land with the impossibly tall towers rising from it, somehow not capsizing it.

White talks of the construction of the United Nations headquarters, which was then being built:

The city at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence, of racial brotherhood, this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and all nations, capital of everything, housing the deliberations by which the planes are to be stayed and their errand forestalled.

Thank goodness the UN building was not the target, but if only the organisation was as effective as White optimistically believed – though perhaps their recent persistence has had some role in finally staying Israel’s hand in Gaza.

His final paragraph puts me in mind of a scene from my own recent history in New York – a small tree growing out of the top window of an abandoned low-rise building lost in amongst all the skyscrapers and multi-storey apartment buildings of Carnegie Hill, which I passed every day on my walk to the Met, and find now that I did not photograph.

A block or two west of the new City of Man … there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolises the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: ‘This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree’. If it were to go, all would go – this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death.