Lots of -ism's

I stayed up kind of late last night reading and just dinking around looking at more flights and more hostels and more possibilities for next weekend so I did not really know what I was going to do today. After some thought (I got on the Tube and then decided last second, haha), I went to the Tate Modern (picture 1). I liked it.

Like I said, I left my flat and no one else seemed to be awake so I just decided to go alone. Instead of going to the usual Gloucester Road Station, I walked the extra like 2 minutes to South Kensington Station, just to mix it up a bit. The way to Gloucester Road is the same way to Foundation House and the grocery stores and stuff so I am a little tired of walking it all the time. I got off at St. Paul's Cathedral. From there I walked across the Millenium Bridge. It was SO windy and it was raining. It was pretty miserable, I was really glad that I wasn't in the middle of an 11 mile hike, that's for sure. I walked in and started to explore a little bit.

Just to fill you all in, the Tate Modern was opened around 2000. It is an old power plant building which makes it really industrial looking (and feeling) when you walk around. There is a giant crack down the middle of Turbine Hall (where they used to have the turbines, obviously). Most of the time, sculptures or other art is housed here but not today apparently. Apparently, it is a real challenge to design stuff for the hall because the space is so massive (5 stories tall). On the top of the old power plant building, they built something they call the "skybox". It is two stories of glass on the top of the building. It helps let light into Turbine Hall and a cafe and other exhibits are up there. There are four free galleries to explore. Each day, there is 1 free tour of each of those galleries (11, 12, 14, and 15). I just missed the 11 tour.

So I walked around the gallery that had the 11 tour while I killed time until the 12 tour. The gallery I walked through on my own was called Poetry and Dream. It had a bunch of stuff about surrealism. I didn't really get any of it. That's the way life goes though. I did appreciate the effort and stuff that went into them though. They all looked very well done, I just had no idea what they were about really. It had something to do with Freud and dreams or whatever. I got the 12 tour of the next wing of the gallery entitled Material Gestures. This was about abstractism. This was my favorite wing of the whole place. I just liked the paintings and sculptures a lot. I really liked Monet's "Water Lillies" (picture 2). You might say that Monet was an impressionist not an abstractist, but this painting was one of the last ones he did and it has depth and different colors so some people lump it in the abstracts. On the wall across from that was a painting by Jackson Pollock (they guy who just flipped paint on a canvas and stuff). We saw "The Snail" by Matisse which I also liked. Basically, its just cut outs arranged on a piece of white paper (its really big though). There were sculptures by Giacometti (picture 3) which I liked as well. They are metal sculptures against a white background which makes your eyes feel funny and makes the sculptures have a sort of aura like thing. Very sweet.

The next gallery was States of Flux and the tour was at 14. This gallery had stuff from cubism and futurism. I should mention that at the beginning of each wing was two pieces of art from the beginning of each -ism and the end that are about the same sort of subject. I don't really want to explain what each piece was for each gallery and how they matched up but it was a really interesting and cool way of introducing each subject matter. Anyway, the tour guide said that we were going to see paintings by cubist and I immediately thought of the paper I had to write for my Geometry class. I wrote about the fourth dimension (don't fall asleep, it will be over soon) and part of my paper discussed how cubist used four dimensional representations in their paintings. I can't remember if I used this exact painting in my paper but I for sure saw it during my research, it was called "Clarinet and Bottle of Rum on a Mantlepiece" (picture 4). I sort of gasped when I saw it; I am a nerd. I used a semicolon there because they are sentences that correlate to each other, like I was taught in middle school. The rest of the gallery was not as spectacular as that was to me. I saw this glass thing by DuChamp which our guide explained but I had no idea what she was talking about. There was another Matisse. Lichtenstein and his comic book strip looking paintings were there too. There was one painting by Grosz called "Suicide". It was all blood red and there was a wealthy guy in the brothel while someone hung them self outside and another person was shot. Very depressing. This was my second favorite out of the three tours.

Last and maybe least (just kidding, sort of) was Idea and Object. This gallery was about minimalism. The guide's name was Basel. He was older with white hair and a sport coat and he had English written all over him. He was cool. Everything in this gallery was weird. There were three pieces by Flavin that were just neon lights arranged in certain ways. There were two paintings by Mondrian that were the black lines and primary colors that I am sure most people recognize from somewhere. The one piece that I actually did kind of like was by Beuys. It was called "the pack" (picture 5). It actually made sense to me. The last room had a bunch of things by Judd. One of them was a stack of bricks. That's it. Um, ok. Another was a copper box with no top and red felt on the bottom inside. Um, ok. Haha. Whatever floats your boat.

After that I was kind of pooped and came back to the flat. I did not eat lunch today (I forgot to pack one). So I was hungry. I had an apple and an orange and walked to the library. I got two more books and then came back and made dinner. I dinked around online some more. That's like all I do it seems. I was joking with Vanessa saying that I will spend more time researching and looking at stuff than I will at the actual place. Oh well, at least I will be prepared. Then I had my nightly tea and cookies and here I am. The Tate Modern is a must see in London, simply for the building itself, let alone all the (mostly) cool art inside. I was really glad I went today.

Ciao!