For years, whenever anyone mentioned the Tate Modern, I’d fall guiltily silent, because it’s one of those places that I hadn’t been to, and didn’t want to admit that I wasn’t particularly interested in going either. Despite coming from a family of artists (or perhaps because of it) I’ve never been that motivated to go and look at art, and particularly not modern art. Then one day a couple of years ago,I was passing by on my bike, and decided to go in. And in an instant, I was a changed person. I realised that I didn’t really know my own tastes at all, because I didn’t exercise them much, but when it came to it, I actually liked a lot of modern art after all. And I loved the Tate Modern. It’s one of the best venues in London for just hanging out in, meeting people in, dropping in on a Sunday etc. A few pics of my trip yesterday here.
The most exciting moment of that first visit to the gallery back in 2006 was seeing Juan Muñoz’s Towards the Corner (1998). It lived and spoke like a piece of music that you could walk around in, and I was transfixed. That being the case, I was thrilled when I heard earlier this year that the Tate were doing a whole exhibition, Juan Muñoz, A Retrospective. I would have rushed down on the day it opened, but a number of other pressures and commitments meant I couldn’t. So yesterday, when the sun was out and I realised I had a couple of hours if I dashed down on my bike, off I went. It’s amazing. Go and see it.
I was interested to read this about Crossroads Cabinets (1999) “[…]a contemporary ‘cabinet of curiosities’
– the Renaissance idea of bringing together disparate objects, whether relics,
works of art, freaks of nature and other oddities into a single collection.” A bit like my blog, I thought, and wished that I called it ‘Jonathan’s Renaissance Cabinet of Curiosities’ instead of ‘boring but useful’ (especially as it’s neither of those particularly, anymore).
I also nipped into the Picabia, Man Ray & Duchamp exhibition, and picked up another wonderful book of Susan Sontag’s articles, this one containing a brilliant one on dance called ‘The Dancer & The Dance’. I also became a member, and got in all the exhibitions for free, had lunch on the outside bit of the members room (it was warm) and got 10% off in the bookshop. My kind of Sunday.
