Some other things that have been rendered irrelevant by juxtaposition against the genius of Jeremy Deller
I also saw the Royal Academy’s David Hockney exhibition, Brightly-coloured Paintings of Trees. That guy fucking LOVES trees. Sadly, I don’t love trees nearly enough for them to pacify my wish to MURDER EVERY SINGLE OTHER PERSON THERE. It was the most over-crowded exhibition I have ever endured, full of KNOBHEADS. There was one fit dad there who was talking to his kids about the different types of brushstroke in the paintings though, so that was cool. If only Hockney was more like Jeremy Deller, Fit Dad would have been the focus, but instead we got another fucking room full of tree paintings and knobheads. His films were good to be fair. If only all the knobheads had pissed off, I could’ve really enjoyed chilling out and watching those.
(Hockney and some trees.)
David Shrigley, on the other hand, is one of my favourite artists. Certainly, he’s one of the artists whose work I am most familiar with, because of all the lols. I love lols, me. Unfortunately for him, I went round his exhibition immediately after having my mind completely blown by the Jeremy Deller stuff on the ground floor. I should really have done them the other way round. Shrigley’s stuff was as amusing as ever (particularly the animation of the square guy getting his corners filed off by his new circular ‘friends’), but when you’ve just watched a film about the 1984 miners’ strike, it all feels a wee bit trivial.
OH MY GOD I LOVE YOU JEREMY DELLER
And finally, Tacita Dean in the Turbine Hall at Tate. I’d convinced my parents it was worth going to the Tate Modern purely to “whizz round the gift shop quickly” as they were flagging and had started to say worrying things about going back to the hotel for “a pre-dinner lie-down”. Therefore, I didn’t really have an opportunity to settle in and enjoy the Tacita Dean projections for long. They looked fucking lovely though. I’ve been to the Tate Modern countless times, but always forget how big the Turbine Hall is. It starts to shrink in my memory every time I leave, so the pillar of colour installed by Dean is a pretty incredible sight, for reasons of scale alone.
Ummm, what else did I see this weekend…? We went to the British Museum, which is full of pots and old bits of marble. The Lewis Chessmen were my favourite because they look so beautiful, and I like the Parthenon bits because time goes blurry for me beyond a certain point (somewhere around 1650), and things start to get conceptual, like when Brian Cox talks about how far away Pluto is and a nation of women spontaneously orgasms. Covent Garden is still quite nice, although the knobheads turn up at about 11am (probably straight from Hockney at the Royal Academy) so you have to be quick. Oh, and I like mushrooms now, because we went out for dinner and they brought me mushroom risotto instead of seafood, and I’d nearly finished it before I’d noticed.
