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| Still from Patrick Keiller's 'London', 1994 |
To Tate Britain between the downpours for the 'Robinson Institute' with Dave S. I had expected to spend an hour in the dark on a comfortable chair viewing the third film in Patrick Keiller's Robinson series - Robinson in Ruins, 2010, so the daunting miscellany of the film not screened - but rather unpacked and spread out - collided with artworks from the Tate's collection, came as a bit of a shock. It looks exhausting, I shamefully thought to myself...
The results are startling: grouped works arranged on shiny aluminium scaffolds already imply certain relationships, but there's an additional bounce that follows you around as well, the whole show building a rhythm that you never quite get hold of but admire nonetheless. A modest paint-on-paper Pollock draws invisible parallels with the graphic infrastructural maps of Britain's oil supply lines, chunks of scorched meteorite sit like icons in temperature-controlled boxes, and I overhear open conversations of people bringing their own experience and interpretations to these things.
As a foyer or hallway might, The Duveen galleries take on a democratic, communal feel leading up from the river-side entrance. There's not nearly so much of the gallery hush you might normally expect. As part of an 'open archive', the hallowed Tate works stand disarmed here, thoroughly levelled amongst the exhibited photographs, maps and books. The geological time-frames and political undercurrents of Keiller's installation locate each and every work as a product of its time and circumstance, a perspective that encourages them to be scrutinised as curious artefacts, little footnotes washed up in the political ebb and flow.
In the flimsy shop I bought the double-bill DVD of London with Robinson in Space. Quite mesmerising viewing in the hour or two after I arrived home. At 57 minutes my ears pricked up: Keiller's unnamed narrator (voiced by Paul Scofield) quotes from Alexander Herzen's Memoirs written in the late 1850s:
The results are startling: grouped works arranged on shiny aluminium scaffolds already imply certain relationships, but there's an additional bounce that follows you around as well, the whole show building a rhythm that you never quite get hold of but admire nonetheless. A modest paint-on-paper Pollock draws invisible parallels with the graphic infrastructural maps of Britain's oil supply lines, chunks of scorched meteorite sit like icons in temperature-controlled boxes, and I overhear open conversations of people bringing their own experience and interpretations to these things.
As a foyer or hallway might, The Duveen galleries take on a democratic, communal feel leading up from the river-side entrance. There's not nearly so much of the gallery hush you might normally expect. As part of an 'open archive', the hallowed Tate works stand disarmed here, thoroughly levelled amongst the exhibited photographs, maps and books. The geological time-frames and political undercurrents of Keiller's installation locate each and every work as a product of its time and circumstance, a perspective that encourages them to be scrutinised as curious artefacts, little footnotes washed up in the political ebb and flow.
In the flimsy shop I bought the double-bill DVD of London with Robinson in Space. Quite mesmerising viewing in the hour or two after I arrived home. At 57 minutes my ears pricked up: Keiller's unnamed narrator (voiced by Paul Scofield) quotes from Alexander Herzen's Memoirs written in the late 1850s:
“There is no town in the world which is
more adapted for training one away from people and training one into solitude
than London; the manner of life, the distances, the climate, the very multitude
of the population in which personality vanishes, all this together with the
absence of continental diversions conduces to the same effect. One who knows how to live alone has
nothing to fear from the tedium of London. The life here, like the air here, is
bad for the weak for the frail, for one who seeks a prop outside himself, for
one who seeks welcome, sympathy, attention. The moral lungs here must be as
strong as the physical lungs, whose task it is to separate oxygen from the
smoky fog…nervous and romantic temperaments, fond of
living among people, fond of intellectual sloth and of idly luxuriating in
emotion are bored to death here and fall in to despair.” *
Of course, the details do not any longer hold up to scrutiny, but the message rings clear. On low days this is precisely how it feels.
Of course, the details do not any longer hold up to scrutiny, but the message rings clear. On low days this is precisely how it feels.
* Alexander Herzen's Memoirs written in the late 1850s, and published as My Past and Thoughts (1982), University of California Press.
