Move mouse to the left, move mouse to the right. Count total number of paperclips, adjust screen monitor settings. Check outlook, update twitter. Eat mouthful of dry supermarket sandwich, drink mouthful of tea that you forgot had gone cold. Get crumbs of said dry sandwich between the keys on your laptop. Attempt to remove the crumbs with (in successive order) plastic ruler, metal ruler, pen, pencil, staple, post it note and finally used envelope.
Never again have a lunch break like the above. The UK is chuck full of things that last around 40 minutes. On Thursday we headed down to Tate Britain to try and enlighten ourselves and learn more over lunch than the recommended daily amount of salt that is contained in a tuna and sweet corn baguette.
Our supposed photo shoot is scuppered by the fact that you can’t take photos in the Tate, but don’t let this put you off. Around 100 years older than it’s more celebrated cousins (Tate Modern, St Ives and Liverpool), this may actually be the most accessible of the family Tate. To the casual art observer, modern art curators appears to hedge their bets between the comic style escapades of Lichtenstein and the absurdity of the modern British Artists. They seem to hope that their pithy 50 word write ups will keep us interested.
This isn’t so much of a problem in Tate Britain. The scenes are recognisable to us, they simply look appealing and heaven forbid seem to actually have been painted using brushes (rather than a potato peeler held upside down in bio degradable hemp and organically sourced violet juice). They are pleasant to the senses and in a refreshing change, no one bumped me with a oversized rucksack and there were no unorganised scrums around the most popular of pieces.
It’s just the right size for a 40 minute perusal and for some reason you come out a tad happier than when you went in.
The Triennial is on until 26th of April and the entrance to the gallery is dominated by an enveloping mushroom cloud of pots and pans. Rather than stack their gallery full of oversized sculpture, the curators here seem to pick and choose only best. (cue spontaneous mass applause).
Best of all there are free tours at 12:00, 14:00 and 15:00. Helping you come back to the office full of insightful anecdotes (without even having to try) and giving you and excuse to fill the afternoon with dramatic hand gestures and dramatic scarf wrapping.
Sean Collins
12/02/09
Sean and Dan are escaping the shackles and trying to fit in more good stuff. Follow their adventures at http://sftw.typepad.co.uk/
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Posted by: Literature Review | 29/12/2009 at 04:43 PM