Once again, I’m struck by the architecture, the geometry, and the use (or absence) of colour in contemporary museums, almost more than by the photography I went to see.
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Bruges’ Groeninge Museum was excellent. Laid out in a somewhat traditional chronological fashion, century by century, it offered laminated placards in every room with explanations for most of the artworks so you didn’t need to bend over to read ill-placed, scantily illuminated placards and block other visitors’ view. Of course, as I’ve been doing in almost every museum we’ve visited, I found the mirrors tto photograph myself in.
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We visited the Museum of Contemporary Art. I photographed some items I found particularly compelling, particularly if I could find an artistic shot to take, rather than a simple deadpan documentation, continued my series on the geometric spaces in museums, found mirrors in which to photograph myself, and was introduced to Grace Ndiritu, who we would see again in Antwerp.
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Since we finished viewing the Fin-de-Siècle on level -8 the way to exit is via an elevator that’s immense with couches like the one shown below on both sides of it. Then an escalator ride and some stairs to emerge again at level 0.
The Magritte show is on level -4. We then descended to levels -5 through -8 for the Fin-de-Siècle museum. Again I was struck by the geometry, space and architecture that museums always exhibit as much as the art they display.
The Magritte Museum is currently being renovated and is temporarily staged in the Royal Museums of Beaux-Arts
We were headed to the Magritte Museum and saw this window sign. Another example of me finding a mirror to photograph myself in at a museum.
We also went through the Plymouth Museum. It tells the story of the English colonists in America and their depredations of the native people they found in North America. It was certainly interesting to see this story told both from a contemporary historical perspective and also from an English one, since, contrary to how we think of it in the States, for the couple of hundred years before the revolution, these were indeed Englishmen and not Americans. Outside the museum, meanwhile, plaques commemorated the great voyages of colonialism with no regard for the revised history told inside. If viewing in email, click the post title to click into the images and see them larger.
The notorious Dartmoor Prison maintains a museum!
HM Prison uniforms. Note that women are not issued shoes.
The prison camera and the sitter’s chair for keeping bums in seats, requires the patience of the Buddha. If viewing in email, click the post title to click into the images and see them larger.
Billed as the largest art space outside London, The Turner Contemporary (named for JMW Turner, the English landscape painter) was somewhat disappointing from the point of view of how much art there was to see. Here I’ve shown images that are mostly more about the space and the light than the exhibits. Click any image to see them all enlarged.
In Plato’s cave allegory we are bound and can only see images of the shadows cast by statues of real things. As we free our minds, we first discover that we are looking at mere images, shadows. Next we discover that the shadows are cast not by the real but by statues, imitations of the ideals which they represent. Only when we emerge from the cave do we discover the world of real things.
with apologies to Joseph Kossuth
The day after we went to Paris Photo we went to the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and got tickets to the Zoe Leonard exhibit, Al río / To the River, recommended by classmates who had seen it the day before. It’s an immense show that goes on and on for rooms and rooms, vast expanses of white space, perhaps conveyed by the images above. We arrived late morning and were, initially, the only ones there, other than the guards. I was almost more impressed at the opportunity to wander through the vast, empty white space of the museum (reminiscent of my trips to NY’s Metropolitan as a kid, when it was often so empty you could go bowling without disturbing anyone) than I was by the photographs.
The images look at the US/Mexico border area, as loosely defined by the Rio Grande/Bravo. On each wall is a series of pictures, looking at a particular scene, over the course of time (seconds, or minutes, I would guess). Some of these are very affecting; cumulatively, they certainly are. But I was unable to guess at the reason for some of them. One entire room was dedicated to pictures of the swirling water taken, perhaps, over the side of a bridge. While they are far from identical, they are all the same. Another follows a man on horse from a distance, behind, as he travels a short way. The final room is a series of color pictures of a laptop showing security footage of people crossing a barbed-wire-surrounded bridge. No indication of whether this is a public website, or if she’d been granted access to a security control room. Beyond the brochure materials about the exhibit (shown at the link above) there are no placards, captions or other text to explain what you’re looking at or why – which is, in itself, a kind of statement, I suppose. I confess, I didn’t quite know what to make of it. Of course, the same might be said of my series of images of the exhibit.
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I’m not sure how historical this bog village really was. Each hut in the collection was stuffed to the rafters with old, decrepit stuff but I’m not fully persuaded they were all of the era they purported to be. A lot of it just looked to be old junk, but not necessarily of the claimed 18th-19th century.
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We visited the Owens-Thomas House, part of the Telfair trio of museums. Interestingly, they have shifted their historical focus from showing off the pleasures of genteel, ante-bellum life to the realities of enslavement. Of particular interest was a plaque discussing the impact of language on our discourse and recommending that instead of “slave,” we use the term “enslaved person,” separating their enslavement from their essential personhood; the term “enslaver,” in preference to “master;” and to eschew the bucolic “plantation” in favor of “slave labor camp,” a more apt description of their essential character.
