Third and last visit to the Lowry exhibition at the Tate yesterday, taking the scenic route from Epsom to Vauxhall by travelling via Waterloo and Bullingdon, rather than simply getting off at Vauxhall. Picked it up at the Waterloo Roundabout, after a slight pause while one Bullingdon, while apparently all up and running, declined to be hired. Crossed Waterloo Bridge, with the ramp up to the middle making me puff a bit, down the Strand & Whitehall, onto Millbank where the stand just short of the Tate was full so I had to push onto the stand at the north end of Vauxhall Bridge, almost empty as it happened.
Into the exhibition, jumping the queue altogether apart from interrupting the busy queue attendant to get my card swiped in. This no booking and no queuing making the member's ticket well worth while. But the exhibition was very crowded (this Thursday morning), including, inter alia, a bunch of quite young children from a Lycée français (according to the tops worn by the minders), presumably the Lycée français Charles de Gaulle in South Kensington. Children well behaved despite their youth. Gave up on the first two rooms and wriggled through to the last room with a view to working back a bit, which worked well - while the first two rooms stayed very crowded for the duration.
For the first time, I enjoyed the large pictures in the last room, previously panned, although in the end I still liked the middle sized pictures best (other than the gloomy black ones). But I did get to musing on the purpose of the exhibition for those such as me. One can say one has been and one can perhaps make smart remarks over dinner (or to one's blog). One gets a taster of the pictures, but one is not really enjoying them in the way intended, by getting to know just one by daily visits if the thing is in one's house or weekly visits it in one's church, by getting to know it in the sort of places in mind when pictures of this sort were invented in the Renaissance. I suppose one answer harks back to the original function of an exhibition, to show pictures for sale, so that having been to the exhibition, one then picks out one that one likes and buys it (or at least buys a reproduction) to hang on the wall - an answer which does not run in our case as we have enough stuff hanging on the walls already. Do I settle for jigsaws? I did not think to look for such in the otherwise well stocked shop.
So maybe the performance artists have a point. Public art is supposed to be consumed quickly and on the spot. It is not intended for purchase and does not stand contemplation; just a quick fix. Good for a quick laugh.
Tired out by all this reflection, thoughts turned to jerk chicken and Banners of Crouch End (http://www.bannersrestaurant.com/). Fine tea (pot, leaves, sieve; the full monty) and a fine jerk chicken burger with chips and salad. Succulent spicy chicken breast in a very respectable bun. This last being so respectable that I ordered a second bun to be taken with butter, to the amusement of the waitress who wanted to gee it up a bit in a toaster or with some goo. Chicken was fairly spicy by my standards so I avoided the green sauce which came with it; chances are that that would have been a lot hotter than I was comfortable. And if one was bored by the chicken, there were plenty of advertisements for massage, yoga, donkeys, vegans etc pinned to the walls.
Sadly, not Bullingdon in sight this far north, so I was reduced to the W7 (from which I was glad to see that Stroud Green Road (near where we used to live, many years ago) was still very much alive and well) and the tube for transport.
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