Photographs at the Tate and Gormley at the Hayward

[rhythmaning]

The tube was closed. I took a bus instead, a long journey in, but I had time. A bendy bus, it took me through Stamford Hill, crowded with orthodox Jews leaving temple; they wore thick yarmulkes of fur, some of them protecting their hats from the heavy rain with specially moulded pieces of plastic. The area was a rich mixture of faiths and races: there were Turkish shops, polish shops, and Mormon and seventh day Adventist churches. Outside Seven Sisters tube station there was a revivalist choir giving it their all, and two guys with a microphone belting out bible readings. I think they were competing with each other. The leader of the choir started explaining how she had sinned, how she had lived in sin, and how she had found the light. People looked like they were interested in the sin, but less interested in the light. Most people were ignoring both the choir and the bible readers; two women waiting at the bus stop, wearing hijabs, seemed most interested.

The bus was caught up in a traffic jam at Kings Cross, so I hopped off and caught the tube to Victoria; not easy without the Victoria line, mind, so when I got there I had been on a good few lines. There were a couple of guys on the Piccadilly line arguing about Spurs players. "Maybe the manager knows something we don't," one said. As if.

Walking through Pimlico in the rain, I noticed a sign in a window. I was shocked. Printed on A4 paper, it read Flat.s to let. It was the shopkeeper's apostrophe in absurdum: I can only imagine the full stop was keyed instead of an apostrophe (which would have been irritating enough) and then no one noticed. Except me.

I met my brother at Tate Britain; I actually wrote The Tate, because that is how I think of it. In the main hall was Mark Wallinger's entry for the Turner Prize, an installation based on the anti-war campaigners based in Parliament Sq. It was curious - I agreed with the sentiments of banners and posters, but it seemed bereft of any creative spark.

We went to the photographic exhibition - Britain as captured on film. It didn't really grab me. There were some interesting pictures individually, but the show as whole was too diffuse, too vague - it just didn't hang together: there were too many photographers, too many topics, too broad an interest. I wandered around, liking the pictures but disappointed with the whole. There was some pretty neat software though, used to display albums - you could drag the photo to turn the page. Nifty.

I was also appalled by the grammar on the various bits of blurb. There were misplaced commas, verbs which didn't agree with their subjects. It was just unprofessional. I wanted to go along, scratching out the offending commas. I must be turning into a grammar Nazi.

My brother and I spent a couple of hours walking through the picture halls. There were so many photos. Some of them seemed like scenes from our past - I expected to see myself in the corner of a picture, running through the street as a child or sweating at a gig. But then a lot of the pictures seemed like a completely different world.

After a tasteless chocolate muffin and a coffee (how could anyone make a tasteless chocolate muffin? Where did they learn to remove the taste of chocolate?) we walked along the bank of the Thames, looking at the MI5 building and boats on the river. We walked east; I was surprised to see Rodin's Burghers of Calais on the grass outside the Houses of Parliament. In Parliament Sq I stopped to photograph the peace camp. Not surprisingly, it seemed much more vital, much more important than Wallinger's art. One of the protesters saw me waiting for the traffic to clear so I could take a photograph, and he turned so that I could read the signs hung around his body. He waved as I lowered the camera and I gave him a thumbs up sign.

I also went to the Anthony Gormley exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. This was just wonderful. Exciting, inventive; just superb. We approached the exhibition from Embankment, cross the river again. Suddenly, I became aware of the figures on the skyline: stationary, hanging there. Once we'd seen one, we started to look for others, scanning the buildings. We could see several - some close, other barely visible. As we crossed Hungerford Bridge, more came into view, perched high on the edges over the city. I was expecting this - the statues had been in the press for ages (one lovely story - and I hope it is true - was that Gormley wanted to place one of his figures on the roof of the Ministry of Defence; they understandably turned down his request. In the run up to the opening of the exhibition - when the papers were full of pictures of the statues scattered across the roofs of London, the Minister for Defence suddenly wanted to know why there wasn't one on his roof, too. His underlings apparently tried to get the Hayward to erect one on the MoD, but by then it was too late - all the sculptures were accounted for.)

This was Event Horizon, and it was a stunning piece of art. The figures, modeled on Gormley himself (he seems to be his own favourite model), were eerily beautiful. There was something sinister about them - as if they were part of a Dr Who plot - gazing endlessly over London. Looking at them - looking for them - made one look at the city differently: they not only changed how you looked at the art, but how you looked at everything.

photographs of Event Horizon on FLickr

Much of the exhibition was like that. Entering the Hayward, there is a towering sculpture like a fallen satellite. And lo, it is called Space Station. An extension of Gormley, created by scanning his body into a computer and cutting large boxes from sheets of steel, this is massive, barely fitting into the space available, towering over the visitors looking at it.

(I wanted to take pictures of it, and asked the servitor if it was ok. He said no. So I didn't. [Edit] The Hayward's website has only Flash animations. Howeer, there are a lot of pictures on Flickr, and I have provided some links to some of those!)

Space Station is lit by a diffuse, stark white light: itself a work of art. Blind Light is a cloud chamber, a large room created inside the gallery, full of light. The water droplets catch the light, creating a solid white fog. From a distance it appears luminescent. Up closer, it is full of ghostly figures looming out of the fog as they approach the glass edges, they quickly disappearing.

Inside the cloud chamber, it is quite disorienting; it is very disturbing. The fog is thick and bright, and uniform; you cannot see below your waist, and if you hold you hand out in front of you - and the need to do so is great, to avoid hitting other people - your arm disappears into the mist. You can hear a lot, but there is so much light that you can see nothing. You cannot see the floor to place your steps; you cannot see the ceiling.

The experience is the artwork: re-examining the way we look at things: our bodies, how we are present in the environment; the way people appear and disappear.

After a while, walking about, lost, it is quite frightening. There are no anchors, nothing to orientate oneself. The wall suddenly looms up; people appear - right in your face - and disappear as quickly. I found it hard to breath (which is strange; I thought water vapour was meant to loosen the airways), and it would have been easy to panic. The only way to find the door out is to head forward, and hit the glass wall; and then slowly follow it around, a hand keeping to the glass to stop one getting lost again.

link to a picture of Blind Light on Flickr, by sosij

Walking down to the next gallery, we passed hanging figures - Gormley again - swinging by the stairs. Called Critical Mass - Gormley likes using scientific terms as names for his works of art (the first piece of his I remember seeing consisted of a large room at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the floor full of tiny little clay figurines, scarily staring up at you: a mockery of the emperor's terracotta army, perhaps. It was called Field); there were figures lying in corners of the gallery, as if they had been left there. Others had been cut up and dissected.

Link to a picture of Field on Flickr, by Trois Tetes

Allotment consisted of 300 boxes, abstractions of people in Sweden: each box being the smallest volume that could contain the subject. Gormley called them "rooms". This gallery was like a maze: one had to weave a path between the figures. It felt like a graveyard, the "rooms" standing a three dimensional stones.

Upstairs - past the hanging figures again, swinging gently in the breeze - was a room full of sculptures made from a grid of wire. Apparently based on fractals extruded from forms of Gormley's body (see - fractals: he does like his popular science), these were large, abstract pieces each containing a body at their centre. They hung from the ceiling, and gradually rotated as people walked by, disturbing them. (The pieces throughout the exhibition seemed very tactile; but of course we weren't allowed to touch, which was a pity; and which a lot of visitors ignored. It was very hard to resist.) The bodies within the frames were contorted and misplaced - as if caught falling through the air (several pieces in the exhibition reminded me of photographs of people falling from the World Trade Center; this may well have been me rather than Gormley - but falling bodies did seem to be a theme); some of them were curled in foetal position, as if the wire around them was the womb.

The outdoor terraces of the Hayward were open as part of Event Horizon. Some of the statues could be seen comparatively close, others barely visible on the horizon. It was even more impressive high up, on a similar level to the statues. There are three terraces, allowing one to look at the art - and the skyline - from three different perspectives. A handful of the statues - three or four of the thirty-odd - were placed on ground level, were they blended with the pedestrians walking past them.

There were a couple of pieces we didn't get to see: they were more internal rooms, and there were long queues to get in. But you could also look in from outside, through tubes piercing the walls. It was like looking through a kaleidoscope - interrupted by people walking past and cutting off the light.

The whole exhibition was magical, but there were dark overtones, too. It was quite special.