![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Art, bitch
May. 24th, 2015 04:02 pmInto a deserted, rain-swept West End to do Art (and shopping. And eating). We visit the Photographers' Gallery's annual Deutsche Bank prize, this year featuring heartbreaking photos of murdered or raped or assaulted black, gay South Africans. It seems horribly ironic that horrific homophobia is so rife in South Africa, where gay equality is enshrined in the constitution and same sex marriage has been legal for almost a decade.
There are also rather odd, old photos of Soviet sunbathers and Viviane Sassen's Rothko-esque abstract pictures, more like paintings than photography:
My favourite entry, also South African, is from Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse about Ponte City, a tower block in downtown Joburg built for whites in the apartheid era, abandoned by white-flighters to black South Africans and immigrants, now in the process of regneration/gentrification: the current occupants booted out. It reminded me of the tale of Balfron Tower and indeed, the views from the tower were comparable to those in Poplar despite Southern Africa and East London's geographical dissimilarities. Best were the towers of photographs of windows, doors, and windows to the world (TVs) in each of the flats.
Into Soho, we go up the stairwell of an NCP car park on Brewer Street and enter into the backend of the Matrix simulation. The darkened room contains three light boxes with swarms of ball bearings swooshing from side to side like massing insects, punctured by dizzying bursts of strobe lighting, sending my teeth into fits. In the back room, fifty computers trill out information, I expect cloned Kraftwerk members to be standing behind each projector. It's like living inside a hard drive as the machines burp out noise and flickers and sheet lightning flashes of inspiration.
C.P Snow would be delighted (I think) with this mixing of the two cultures. Comments in the visitors' book are a little more "London" than your average Turner exhibition commentary: 'I still don't understand super-symmetry, but I like it!' and the more prosaic 'Science, bitch!'
There are also rather odd, old photos of Soviet sunbathers and Viviane Sassen's Rothko-esque abstract pictures, more like paintings than photography:
My favourite entry, also South African, is from Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse about Ponte City, a tower block in downtown Joburg built for whites in the apartheid era, abandoned by white-flighters to black South Africans and immigrants, now in the process of regneration/gentrification: the current occupants booted out. It reminded me of the tale of Balfron Tower and indeed, the views from the tower were comparable to those in Poplar despite Southern Africa and East London's geographical dissimilarities. Best were the towers of photographs of windows, doors, and windows to the world (TVs) in each of the flats.
Into Soho, we go up the stairwell of an NCP car park on Brewer Street and enter into the backend of the Matrix simulation. The darkened room contains three light boxes with swarms of ball bearings swooshing from side to side like massing insects, punctured by dizzying bursts of strobe lighting, sending my teeth into fits. In the back room, fifty computers trill out information, I expect cloned Kraftwerk members to be standing behind each projector. It's like living inside a hard drive as the machines burp out noise and flickers and sheet lightning flashes of inspiration.
C.P Snow would be delighted (I think) with this mixing of the two cultures. Comments in the visitors' book are a little more "London" than your average Turner exhibition commentary: 'I still don't understand super-symmetry, but I like it!' and the more prosaic 'Science, bitch!'
