London: The Mithraeum

The London Mithraeum has been on my to-do list for a long time, but because Ancient Romans aren’t exactly a priority, I kept putting it off. But since I knew I’d be in the area anyway for a training course, and I was taking a trip to Rome the week following, I thought I might as well get myself in the mood by looking at some Roman ruins right here in London (I also made potato pizza al metro style, which is one of my favourite things to eat in Rome, but that was more because I had potatoes and slightly mouldy Gruyere to use up, and because you can never have too much pizza). Planning ahead with the Mithraeum is key, since they strongly encourage you to pre-book a free slot.

The Mithraeum is located in the Bloomberg building, which I was a little concerned about finding since the City is very easy to get lost in, but it is located right next to one of the many entrances to Bank Station and is clearly signposted outside. I arrived about twenty minutes early because my course had finished a bit sooner than anticipated, but I was welcomed right in (though I was asked for my ticket as soon as I walked through the door, so clearly they are serious about the pre-booking, even though it wasn’t busy at all when I was there), and given an introduction to the three floors of the space, which made it sound quite grand. The reality is a little bit different. The ground floor is meant to be the gallery space, though I really didn’t get the current installation at all, nor was there any explanation provided. It just seemed to be a load of bottles sitting on a tiled cube, with some tiled benches to one side that may or may not have been part of the installation.

The highlight of this section was definitely the big wall o’artefacts, actually a wall of Roman ruins excavated from the site, which were beautifully arranged and had a rack full of tablets next to them that you could pick up and use to learn more about each object. I’ve never seen shards of pottery referred to as “sherds” before, as they were here, but perhaps it’s an Anglicism I’m unfamiliar with (I asked my curator colleague about it at work, and she informs me that you come across it occasionally, but shard is more common now. I guess they’re more or less interchangeable, except in the case of the building. Maybe I’ll start calling it the “Sherd” just to be weird). Had I known how underwhelming the other floors would be, I might have spent more time studying the wall, but as it was, I only spent about five minutes looking at it before heading down to the mezzanine level.

This contained replicas of exactly three objects, each with a touch screen where you could learn more about it: the head of Mithras, the Tauroctony (a plaque with a bull on it, basically), and a replica of the original temple. Now seems like an appropriate time to get into the history of the site that I’ve been neglecting up til now. Basically, like pretty much everywhere in the Square Mile, this area was part of the original Londinium, Roman London. In 1952, a temple was discovered during the course of excavating a bomb site. This was the Mithraeum, a 3rd century temple dedicated to the god Mithras, who appears to have been known mainly for slaying a bull. Not much is known about the Cult of Mithras, except for it was men-only and probably involved drinking in some capacity, but it was certainly popular, as 100 different Mithraea have been discovered all over the former Roman Empire. The one in London was dismantled in 1954 and reconstructed in a different site, but when Bloomberg bought the original site in 2010, they agreed to move the temple roughly back to where it was discovered, which is where it is today.

They clearly have tried to turn the Mithraeum into a bit more of an experience than what is merited by what is actually here. They only let people in every twenty minutes to the actual ruins, so you just have to hang out in the dark mezzanine area with the three illuminated objects in the meantime, which is why I regretted not spending more time on the ground level. Once you are actually inside, you experience, as they call it, “an ephemeral installation,” aka some sound and light effects: hazy light and a recording of some men mumbling in Latin. The lights gradually come up so you can actually view the ruins, which are underwhelming at best, but that is what I tend to think about all ruins. I was wondering whether I had to stay in here for the whole twenty minutes, because I’d more than finished with the ruins after about three (there being nothing to read within the temple itself), when some guy came out and told us a bit more about the site. Apparently 80% of the ruins are original, and 20% are a reconstruction, which I assume includes the metal figure of Mithras and a bull in the middle of the altar. Fortunately, after he finished talking, people started to leave, so I felt free to make my escape too.

As I always feel when something is free, I can’t complain overmuch, but the word “underwhelming,” which I’ve already used at least twice in this post, is the main thing that comes to mind. Apparently the old site wasn’t much visited, and I think they’ve tried to jazz it up a little to make it more of an attraction, but there’s only so much you can do with ruins. I suppose if they’d tried to get more artefacts in they could have made more out of it, but most of those, including ones found on the site (other than what’s on the display wall) are now housed at the Museum of London. So I’ll give it 2/5. It’s nice that they’ve tried to preserve it, and maybe people who actually like the Romans (not me, though Mary Beard tries her best (and to be fair to her, her programmes are interesting, I’m just not motivated to learn more after I finish watching them)) will get more out of it, but I certainly wasn’t thrilled.

 

 

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London: “Van Gogh and Britain” @ Tate Britain

I don’t think I even need to say how much I love Van Gogh to anyone who reads this blog regularly, but yes, I love Van Gogh! And so Marcus booked us tickets to go see the new exhibition at Tate Britain, “Van Gogh and Britain” whilst there were still tickets to be had (I assume there are still tickets at this point, since it runs til 11th August, but I also know that exhibitions in London can completely book up if you’re not careful to get in early). Because Van Gogh is such a big name that they can get away with it, admission is definitely on the pricier side at £22, though fortunately they do offer discounts for National Art Pass holders, so we got in for £11. And yes, we did have to stand in the queue you see above, even with pre-booked tickets, but it moved quickly.

The purpose of the exhibition, as you may have guessed from the title, was to cover both Van Gogh’s experiences whilst living in London (between 1873 and 1876) and his posthumous influence on British artists of the early-mid 20th century. Van Gogh moved to London when he was 20 to work for an art dealer, which lasted for two years until he was dismissed (he was developing increasingly radical ideas about art, which proved incompatible with his position) and dabbled with preaching and teaching in Isleworth and Ramsgate. Although he never returned to Britain after 1876 (he left before he had even begun painting, though he did make little sketches whilst he was here, some of which were on display), the experiences he had here clearly shaped his life and art, especially the time he spent visiting museums. The exhibition had his signature in the Dulwich Picture Gallery guestbook on show, as you can see above (I can definitely read the “Gogh” and maybe a “van”, but that doesn’t look like “Vincent” to me. Honestly, it looks more like Theo Van Gogh, but they said it was Vincent, so I’ll go with it).

The first four rooms contained a mix of Van Gogh’s paintings and paintings that he saw whilst visiting London that inspired him, some of which he copied in his own style whilst learning to develop as an artist. As you can see, calling this exhibition crowded is an understatement, but due to how things were laid out, I found that I was able to slip in and look at paintings with relative ease. However, although it was clearly beneficial for me as a blogger, and I know I often complain when exhibitions don’t allow photography, in this particular instance, I felt it would have been a much better experience without it. People were just standing in front of the paintings for ages whilst trying to get that perfect shot, and not even looking at what was right in front of them, which really annoyed me – especially because Van Gogh has a tendency to make me a bit emotional, and I wish everyone could take the time to really appreciate his talent for finding beauty in the mundane.

Like me, Van Gogh had a bit of a love-hate relationship with London. He said, “I often felt low in England, but the Black and White and Dickens [“black and white” meaning British prints] are things that make up for it all.” The exhibition contained quotes excerpted from Van Gogh’s many letters, to great effect, and even some facsimiles of his letters, the originals being too fragile to travel (Van Gogh spoke four languages, including English, so the ones here were written in English, and I enjoyed reading them). He discovered Gustav Doré’s engravings of London, and absolutely fell in love with them, collecting as many as he could afford. He even made his own version of Doré’s print of prisoners exercising at Newgate, as seen above right. There was also a painting of the Victoria Embankment (above left) about which Van Gogh said, “A couple of days ago we got a painting by De Nittis, a view of London on a rainy day…I crossed Westminster Bridge every morning and evening, and know what it looks like when the sun’s setting behind Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, and what it’s like early in the morning, and in the winter with snow and fog. When I saw this painting, I felt how much I love London.” Which sums up how I feel when I cross over Hungerford Bridge at night. Oh, Vincent.

Like I said, it’s not hard for me to get emotional over Van Gogh, and that’s definitely what happened when I read the caption on the painting of a “sorrowing old man,” based on an earlier lithograph he did of a war veteran he sometimes used as a model. According to one of his doctors, when Van Gogh was mentally unwell, “he usually sits with his head in his hands, and if someone speaks to him, it is as though it hurts him, and he gestures for them to leave him alone.” Just like the man in his painting, which he did when he was staying at Saint-Paul Hospital. Reading that just about broke my heart.

There were lots of pieces here that I’d never seen before, including one of the hospital at Saint-Remy that I visited last year, which was one of my favourite pieces in this exhibition. I also really loved the sketch of Vincent and his brother Theo, done by Vincent’s friend Lucien Pissarro, which is thought to be the only image of the brothers together (and it’s gratifying to see that Vincent looks pretty much as he does in his self-portraits, so the picture we all have of him in our heads is probably fairly accurate).

My favourite part of the exhibition was definitely the half on Van Gogh and Britain, rather than on British artists and Van Gogh, but there were still some Van Gogh paintings to enjoy in the final five rooms, although they were heavily interspersed with those by British artists influenced by the Post-Impressionists. Obviously I enjoy the Post-Impressionists myself, but I still had to laugh at the cartoon showing “Post-Impressions of the Post-Impressionists” based on the first time these paintings were shown in London in 1910, twenty years after Van Gogh’s death.

There was a whole room devoted to Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, which was first exhibited in 1924 in the original location of the National Gallery at Millbank, in what is now the Tate. Since the painting moved with the National Gallery to Trafalgar Square in the 1960s, this is the first time it has made the trip back across town. The National Gallery was given permission to buy the painting by Theo Van Gogh’s widow Johanna (Theo died only six months after Vincent), who devoted the rest of her life to promoting Vincent’s work, and offered the museum the painting only a year before she died.

I’ve stuck to mainly including Van Gogh’s paintings throughout this post, but I had to show you this painting of a young Roald Dahl by Matthew Smith (above right), which was heavily influenced by Van Gogh’s style. In fact, the last room was entirely pieces by British painters, mainly Francis Bacon, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I felt like I had to return to the room before it to look at some of Van Gogh’s work again so I could leave on a high note. There was some discussion in here of how Van Gogh’s mental illness affected British perceptions of him throughout the 20th century, which I thought was quite interesting, and I would have enjoyed hearing more about it, though I suppose that topic could (and apparently has, judging on some of the books on display!) fill a book.

The shop had some nice merchandise, including the very expensive, but very cute crocheted Vincent doll (I went for the cheaper miniature key chain version, but he was still £8!), and I also went home with a print of the above self-portrait. The exhibition mentioned that the last Van Gogh exhibition at the Tate, in 1947, attracted 5000 visitors a day, and judging by all the people that were there when I visited, I could easily imagine this exhibition surpassing it. I didn’t love the experience of visiting because of the crowds and the issue with people taking photos (which I know is a bit hypocritical since I had Marcus take photos for the post too, but I would have been perfectly fine with no one being allowed to take photos in this instance) – lest you think I’m exaggerating, have a look at the collage Marcus made, below. It was a fairly big exhibition, and I’m delighted I got to see so many Van Gogh pieces, including some that had never been on public display before, but I’m still glad I only paid £11, because £22 is an awful lot of money (and to be fair, I spent more than £11 on stuff from the shop, so they got the full admission fee out of me in one way or another)! Nonetheless, I think the exhibition was well done, and I especially appreciated all the text, which can be rare in an art exhibition – thanks to Van Gogh’s eloquent letters, I feel I understand certain aspects of his life better, particularly the time he spent in London.  I liked that the exhibition focused largely on the lesser-known parts of Van Gogh’s life, since I think most people who are willing to pay £22 to see a Van Gogh exhibition are familiar with the most well known parts of his life story by now, and don’t need to re-read it fifty times. And of course, Van Gogh’s art is always gloriously moving. So, 3.5/5 for the exhibition, even with the issues with the crowds.

London: Dorothea Tanning and “Magic Realism” @ the Tate Modern

I don’t think I’d ever heard of Dorothea Tanning until this exhibition came to the Tate Modern and I saw an article about it in the paper. Her art looked intriguing, but to be honest I still probably would have skipped the exhibition due to the admission fee, had Marcus not been keen. But since he was, and I had been wanting to see the exhibition about art from the Weimar Republic that was also at the Tate, so this seemed like a good chance to get a look at both.

Dorothea Tanning runs until 9th June and costs £13 (but National Art Pass holders get 50% off), and there doesn’t seem to be any need to pre-book, though it was reasonably full inside the exhibition when I visited on a weekday. Tanning was an American artist (from Galesburg, Illinois originally) who escaped the boredom of everyday life by reading Gothic novels as a child, and there is definitely a strong sense of the Gothic in her surrealist paintings. The gallery was divided into rooms reflecting the different stages in Tanning’s life and career, starting with fairly tame newspaper illustrations for Macy’s from the 1930s (though I’m slightly disturbed that “beaver fur berets” are even a thing), and moving on to her first flirtations with surrealism, via her Birthday self-portrait (shown above) with a very cute little dragony-griffin thing that I would 100% have as a pet.

I quite liked Tanning’s early surrealist pieces, especially as many of them incorporated a funny little dog modelled on her husband Max Ernst’s (a German painter) pet Lhasa Apso. I was less enamoured with the ones in a more abstract style, made after she and Max moved from Arizona to France in the 1950s – I liked her use of colour, but they weren’t to my particular taste.

In the 1960s, Tanning began experimenting more with soft sculptures, which she produced on her old Singer sewing machine. They were used in my favourite installation, Hotel du Pavot, Chambre 202 (above left), which was based on a song about a gangster’s wife who poisoned herself in Room 202 of a hotel in Chicago. It was excellently creepy, with stuffed body parts emerging from the walls of an old hotel room.

The stuffed dog with the tiny turd (as it was described in the exhibition) cracked me up, and I enjoyed the video at the end of the exhibition which showed Tanning at work making some of her soft sculptures and arranging them on some stairs in a menacing fashion. It was interesting seeing the ways her work changed over her very long lifetime (she died in 2012, at the age of 101), but I wasn’t crazy about some of the pieces, and I felt it was quite expensive for what we got, especially after seeing the “Magic Realism” exhibition, which I’ll get to in a moment. I also didn’t like how you had to walk back through all the galleries to get out, which I think disrupts the flow of an exhibition. I always prefer separate entrances and exits, and I’m always surprised when larger museums with the budget to do so don’t arrange their galleries in this way, not least because it’s easier to make them flow into a shop at the end! 2.5/5.

And now for “Magic Realism: Art in Weimar Germany 1919-1933,” which I was actually properly excited to see. My favourite band for years and years was the World/Inferno Friendship Society, who are rather difficult to describe – they’re sort of a blend of punk, klezmer, polka, and various other influences – and my favourite song of theirs is called “Ich Errinere Mich An Weimar,” which is about the Weimar Republic, sort of loosely based on the plot of Cabaret. So I’ve always been kind of interested in the Weimar, and this exhibition just made me even more interested.

“Magic Realism” was free to see, and runs until 14th July. It just so happened that the first room of the exhibition was the best room, so I was enchanted from the start. This room had the theme of “Circus,” mainly thanks to the excellent circus themed illustrations of Otto Dix, who was my favourite artist featured here. Lest you get too carried away with how charming all the artwork in here was, there was a timeline on the wall explaining how the Weimar Republic led straight into Nazi Germany, and how so many of the Weimar artists (who the Nazis would label “degenerate artists”) were strongly influenced by their experiences fighting in the First World War.

I was struck by how modern some of the paintings looked, particularly the woman on the right, above. I could actually see ties between some of the works in this exhibition and Dorothea Tanning. I’m not super well versed on art terminology, but after all, surely “magic realism” is just another way of saying surrealism? But I think I still prefer the style of “magic realism” to surrealism, at least judging by the pieces that were on display here.

Each room had a different theme, ending up in a particularly disturbing religion themed room (with paintings like the one below left), but I think there was nonetheless something to enjoy in each section, even the more depressing ones, and I learned a fair bit about Weimar Germany. All of the artists who remained in Germany after the Nazis came to power (some chose to flee) were forced to join the Cultural Ministry and paint only “inoffensive” things, like landscapes, and many of the earlier “degenerate” pieces that remained in Germany were destroyed, so I’m glad at least these pieces survived! I enjoyed this so much more than the exhibition we paid to see, but sometimes them’s the breaks, and there are definitely worse ways to spend money than on a museum exhibition – at least it will go to support a sector I’m passionate about. 4/5 – if you like slightly weird art, definitely go check this one out if you can before it closes!

 

London: Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery

 

I think we’ve established by now that I am not the sort of person that gets invited to premieres. However, because my friend works at Pitzhanger Manor, I was invited to their opening weekend (this wasn’t an exclusive event though, I hasten to add – anyone was allowed to book a spot, provided they did so early enough), and I was very happy to attend and feel like one of the special people for once, even though it takes about an hour to get to Ealing from where I live.

 

Pitzhanger Manor was John Soane’s country estate from 1800-1810 (because back then, Ealing was in the country instead of just being absorbed into the sprawl of London), and a place where he could show off his architectural skills to potential clients (Soane is known for designing the Bank of England and Dulwich Picture Gallery, amongst various other things). He actually worked on a wing of the house as a young apprentice, and this was the only part of the original 1768 building that he left intact after moving in. Soane was forced to sell the house after only ten years for a number of reasons, which I’ll get to later, and it passed through a number of hands over the years (including the daughters of Spencer Perceval, who has the unhappy distinction of being the only Prime Minister to be assassinated) before being taken over by Ealing Council in 1900. They decided to turn one wing into a library (which is one of the few acceptable uses of a historic home, presuming they leave the interiors intact as much as possible) which remained open until 1984, when it was decided to restore the house and open it as a museum. It opened in 1987, only to be closed again in 2015 for a major restoration/conservation project, and it finally re-opened on 16 March 2019, which is when I went to see it.

Pitzhanger will normally cost £7.70 to visit, but was free on opening weekend, which is one of the reasons it was completely booked up, with a queue of people waiting to get in if there were cancellations. I breezed past them all, because I was on the list (again, the same list that anyone could have gotten on by pre-booking. I’m really not any kind of VIP, though I like to pretend). I met up with my friend shortly after arriving, and she was obviously super busy and kept getting stopped by visitors to answer their questions, but she still managed to give me a little tour of the house, which I appreciated. The interior of the house is fairly empty – this is mainly because the vast majority of John Soane’s possessions reside in his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which is also a museum (which I still haven’t gotten around to blogging about! I guess I’m due for another visit), but the rooms have been painstakingly restored, and there are a lot of gorgeous features. My friend explained how Soane’s architectural style was heavily influenced by the time he spent in Italy during his Grand Tour, and that one of the ceilings in the house was modelled on the Italian sky.

 

You can see a bit of that sky ceiling in a corner of the photo above left, but my personal favourite feature in the house was the fabulous hand-painted bird wallpaper in the Upper Drawing Room, followed closely by the ceiling in the “Eating Room,” below left (which is what the dining room is called – maybe Soane liked to keep things casual?). I still desperately want a house with some Georgian blue and Scheele’s green interiors (though preferably sans the actual arsenic). John Soane and his wife Eliza were circulating whilst we were at Pitzhanger (or, you know, some actors playing them), so we had to get a picture with Soane that mimicked our photo with the actual Gary Oldman (which I realise most of you probably haven’t seen, because I only put it on my personal Facebook, but it’s a good one!), with Soane in place of Oldman.

But Pitzhanger isn’t just an historic home – it’s also an art gallery (the £7.70 admission price I mentioned includes both house and gallery)! The wing that used to be Ealing’s library has been turned into a gallery space, and the inaugural exhibition is by Anish Kapoor. I have to confess that whilst I certainly recognise Kapoor’s name, I’m not terribly familiar with his work, and this is the first exhibition of his that I’ve seen. I read before going that his “sculptures echo Soane’s complex use of mirrors and light and will enable visitors to Pitzhanger to see Soane’s architecture from a fresh perspective,” and I must have skimmed over the part about the mirrors, because what I was expecting from “sculptures” was certainly not this!

To be honest, at first glance I was underwhelmed, because it just appeared to be some mirrors on a wall. But after interacting with them, I realised they were actually pretty fun! I’m not sure if I necessarily saw the connection to Pitzhanger Manor, but it didn’t really matter because they were a good time, and people inside were really friendly due to obviously enjoying themselves as well (a lady offered to take our photo, as seen above).

 

The only critical comment I would make is that aside from an introductory panel to the exhibition, there was virtually no text inside, but I guess sometimes it’s better to experience than to just stand there reading something (my friend also told me they had a problem with people touching the mirrors and leaving fingerprints, so please, look but don’t touch!). The gallery is also home to the shop, which features quite a lot of merchandise inspired by the bird wallpaper, because why wouldn’t you highlight your most fabulous feature?

After finishing with the art gallery, we returned to the house to explore a few of the rooms in a bit more detail, including the basement, which talked about Soane’s desire to become a hermit (he apparently used to hide down there or wander his gardens pretending to be one, which I can certainly relate to), which is perhaps indicative of his mental state near the time he decided to sell Pitzhanger. He was feeling depressed because both his sons were ne’er do well types who had no desire to follow in his footsteps and become architects, as he was hoping, and because Eliza was suffering from ill health and disliked being in the country. I’m sorry that Soane had such a hard time of it, but I did like all the masks on the walls used to illustrate his changing moods.

Because my friend works here and gave me a special tour which is probably not the normal Pitzhanger experience, I don’t think it would be right for me to give Pitzhanger a score, as I normally would. But I will tell you what I liked and disliked. It is a gorgeous house, and it is clear that a lot of love and care have gone into its restoration. I also think the inaugural art exhibition is fun and interactive, but not very much else in the house was. There were a few areas for children to get more involved, and the Eating Room had some sound effects, but other than a few faux old books you could flip through to learn more about Soane’s life, and a neat little moving timeline diorama, there wasn’t a whole lot for adults to do other than admire the property. I think they would do well in future to try to get a few more artefacts and things in (maybe Soane’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields House could loan something?) to make the house more of an experience, because for £7.70, it is fairly small (there were only a couple of rooms open on each floor, maybe seven rooms overall?), even with the art gallery attached. Still, I’m glad I got to check it out on opening weekend, and thoroughly enjoyed my experience there, thanks in no small part to my friend.

 

London: “Spare Parts” @ the Science Gallery

I think it’s fair to say that I was pretty excited about the opening of the Science Gallery and their first exhibition, “Hooked,” on addiction, and shared that enthusiasm in my post last month. Which is why their current exhibition comes as something of a disappointment. (If you’ve read my post on the Migration Museum, you will notice that I’m wearing the same outfit as in this post. This is because I visited both on the same day, not because I have a weird closet full of twenty sets of the same outfit, like Jerry’s girlfriend in that one episode of Seinfeld. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

Based on my initial positive experience (and my passion for Kappacasein’s grilled cheese) as well as my promise to blog about their next exhibition in a more timely fashion, I went out to see “Spare Parts” only a week after it opened. Like the previous exhibition, this was free, and I’m glad, because I got a taste of the general underwhelmingness of this exhibition right from the start. We walked in and were greeted by the first piece of art, which was supposed to be a series of four lights that flashed when you put your hands on some sensors, but it wasn’t super obvious where the sensors were at first, and even after I figured it out, they didn’t do anything (I know the lights are on in the photo, but they didn’t flash on or off no matter where I put my hands). This didn’t bode well.

The theme of “Spare Parts” was meant to be the “art and science of organ transplantation and tissue regeneration” which sounds interesting enough, but I don’t think that came across well at all in most of the pieces. “Hooked” was made up of a series of themed galleries, and even though I don’t think the themes were always super clear, at least the space was divided in an atmospheric way so that you felt you were having an experience whilst progressing through the exhibition. “Spare Parts” was far more open, and there didn’t seem to be any smaller themes at all within the larger theme of body tissues.

Also, I presumed that many of the pieces here were meant to be interactive, or at least reactive, like the typewriter that was meant to type stream-of-consciousness thoughts, or “New Organs of Creation,” which was supposed to play sounds unattainable by the human voice. I think I may have misunderstood the descriptions that were in the exhibition slightly, as I got the impression that we were supposed to speak to both pieces to get them to react (so apparently I kept saying “It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times” to the typewriter for no reason, as it was never going to type it. I must have looked like an idiot), though according to the online description, they were already programmed to do whatever they were going to do and my presence was never meant to have an effect. Either way, since they weren’t doing anything, they were rather pointless.

Therefore, I was excited when I found one interactive element, or at least one that sounded interactive – a 3D printer where you could print a miniature body part (not one of your actual body parts, but you could choose one from a pre-programmed selection, which is still quite cool). But it said to ask a member of staff for help, and sadly, they were all huddled in the corner having an in-depth conversation about somebody’s wedding. Marcus even approached them to try to get them to help, and they completely ignored him. Not cool. I get that the pay is probably crappy (if they’re even paid!), but c’mon, at least make an attempt. I was pretty pissed off to be honest, but I just wandered away and returned about ten minutes later to find that one of them had finally broken away from the conversation and was willing to help us (and to be fair, she was perfectly nice once we had her attention, it was just getting it that was the issue). Because the printing process took about fifteen minutes, and we’d already seen most of the exhibition, we just requested one ear between us. The end result is pretty neat, though I wish we had been able to obtain it on our first attempt!

I did find a few more interactive pieces, like a giant pair of plastic globes you were supposed to wear over your ears whilst walking around the exhibition, and some pictures of organs you could colour (somebody needs to sharpen the coloured pencils though!), although the wall where you were supposed to be able to hear your own heartbeat was just a wall with some insulation over it (as you can see above the previous paragraph), and not actually fun at all. At least some comic relief was provided by a video of an artist who had received a kidney transplant dancing around the desert in a very tight bodysuit. There was a central space in the exhibition that I think was meant to be for various activities like playing a “Superturd” card game and grafting a cactus, but other than a pack of “Superturd” cards sitting on a pedestal, where they seemed to be more of a display than something you could pick up and play, none of these activities were in evidence at the time of our visit.

Because of the lack of text outside of the object labels, which in most cases weren’t comprehensive enough for me to fully understand the intent behind a piece, as well as the disappointing lack of interactivity, we finished with the exhibition in about half an hour (and it wouldn’t have even been that long if we hadn’t had to hang around for a bit waiting for the ear to print). I like that they offer a take-home element (like the 3D printed body part, or the cool terracotta tokens in “Hooked”), which, as a free museum, they certainly don’t have to do, but the rest of the exhibition was really not great. Honestly, it felt like a bit of a rush job, like they didn’t have time to set it up properly, an impression reinforced by the empty space behind the gallery still full of water bottles and used tea things that they evidently hadn’t yet cleared away after an event (and speaking as someone who has worked in both events and museums (and events at museums), sometimes you are too busy to clear something up immediately, which I completely understand, but if you have time to sit around and chat, you probably have time to tidy up. I’m turning into a real crab apple, aren’t I?). I will still go back because I like the concept of the gallery and the subjects of their upcoming exhibitions sound interesting, but I was really not impressed this time around. 1.5/5.

 

London: “Room to Breathe” @ the Migration Museum

The Migration Museum is part of a project that was started in 2013 to help tell the stories of immigrants in Britain (London in particular). They have had an exhibition space in Lambeth since 2017, but I’m sorry to say I hadn’t made it there until now. They bill themselves as “the UK’s first museum dedicated to exploring how the movement of people to and from Britain across the ages has shaped who we are as individuals – and as a nation,” and though I am aware of an earlier immigration museum located at 19 Princelet Street in London, I think they have a point. The Princelet Street Museum is only open to the public one or two days a year, and I’m not even sure if they do that anymore, since their website hasn’t been updated since 2017. Believe me, since I work in a local authority-run museum, I understand all too well the many challenges facing the museum sector these days, but as a volunteer manager, I am also very aware of how many people are out there willing to give their time and effort to help museums function, and I’ve kind of lost patience with museums that almost never open to the public. If the public can’t access it, is it even serving its function as a museum? So I agree that the Migration Museum is the first proper immigration museum that people can actually visit!

The museum’s current home is a warehouse type space not far from the Garden Museum, called The Workshop (equidistant from Vauxhall and Lambeth North) – it also seems to be the future home of the London Fire Brigade Museum, as there were a few small displays set up in the downstairs area whilst we were there including one on the role of the AFS during the Blitz (interesting because I just finished reading Dear Mrs. Bird before my visit (formulaic, and Emmy got on my nerves, but it was still rather sweet) and the main character is a volunteer for the AFS). But since it’s not officially there yet, I’ll just be discussing the Migration Museum, which is located on the first floor of The Workshop, and is free to visit.

The building isn’t in the most attractive part of London (I find Vauxhall in general to feel a little like walking through a giant industrial estate) and the stairwell up to the museum wasn’t particularly promising either, but once we were inside, we were warmly welcomed and given an introduction to the exhibition. The gallery hosts one temporary exhibition at a time, and the current one is called “Room to Breathe” and runs until summer 2019 (their own vague date, not mine). From their website: “Room to Breathe is an immersive experience inviting you to discover stories from generations of new arrivals to Britain. Journey through a series of rooms filled with personal narratives and objects that bring to life the struggles, joys, creativity and resilience of living in a new land.”

You are encouraged to touch and interact with the objects in each room, which is in part set up like a house, with a bedroom followed by a kitchen. So I sat on the bed, petted the stuffed pig, had a look through some family photo albums, opened drawers, and just generally made myself at home. We were the only people in this space, so I really did feel like it was our own private room to explore, and took full advantage (I even discovered an EP of Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus” in one of the drawers, which made me laugh, though I much prefer the version from the Planet of the Apes Musical). There were stories and experiences of various immigrants written on pieces of cloth hanging from objects throughout the room, and I enjoyed reading them all.

  

I thought the kitchen was great too, as each spice and ingredient on the shelves had someone’s personal story of immigration written on the back, as well as the reason that particular ingredient reminded them of their homeland. There were even some family recipes, and you were invited to write down your own favourite ingredient from home, though I don’t really think doughnuts and frozen custard count as ingredients, so I didn’t write anything. If you sat down at the table, it lit up and told the story of one family through a cartoon projected onto the table, which I thought was really cool. Apparently, they actually host cooking classes in this space (there’s one on Nigerian cooking on 10th April) which is a neat idea.

One of the rooms in here was an artists’ studio that is hosting different artists during the run of the exhibition. I believe Ceyda Oskay was the artist during our visit, though I think she’s only there in person on Sundays to lead craft sessions and various workshops. There was a table set up with watercolours and things where you could presumably make your own art, but there was a group in there at the time of our visit, so we didn’t really get a chance to participate, and instead headed into the school room, where we could read about people’s experiences of coming into the British educational system as immigrants, and the barbershop, where we got to sit in very comfortable barbers’ chairs, and watch someone else do the same on a screen in front of us, as they discussed their family stories of immigration (mine was a guy with a Hungarian mother speaking to his Turkish Cypriot barber).

Because the previously mentioned group was using the cafe and shop space for a conference, we weren’t able to go in to that area, so the last room of our visit was one where we were invited to write the name of someone who helped us when we needed it most on a box, and suspend it from the ceiling. Unfortunately, they were out of boxes, but the ones that were there looked really cool. There was also a board outside where you could write your story of migration, which I wanted to do, but they were out of paper for that too (they might have had more if I’d asked, but I didn’t bother). Also out here was a series of portraits of various immigrants, and I found the story of a woman who came over from the Czech Republic very relatable when she mentioned how even though Czechia was where she came from and she enjoyed going back for visits, because she’d been in Britain for so long, she felt her life was there now, and that was home. So when she goes back to Czechia she visits her family and a few close friends, but she doesn’t feel that she’s really a big part of their lives anymore, because she isn’t there, which is exactly how I feel. My life is very much in London now, and though I enjoy going back to Cleveland for visits, it doesn’t feel like home anymore. I’ve gradually fallen out of touch with all but my closest friends over the years, and I find that I have much more in common with my British friends and colleagues because I see them all the time, and we have the same sort of lifestyles. It can sometimes be hard going back “home” and feeling like you don’t belong there anymore, but that’s part of the immigrant experience, and the woman featured in the exhibition articulated it better than I am.

I know a lot of Americans cling to the expat label, but I have settled here and taken on citizenship – even though I occasionally get in moods where I talk about moving back because I get fed up with the cost of housing and how crowded everything is in London, when it comes down to it, I’m just not very motivated to return to the US. I’d hate to give up all my holiday time, for one thing! I know I’ve had an easier time of it than immigrants from many other countries, thanks to already speaking English (but harder than some due to all the visa processes I had to go through, which I was fine with because of all the other benefits of being in the EU. Sigh), but I do feel like more of an immigrant than an expat (the word expat seems to imply more of a temporary stay, where you don’t really try to interact with the locals, which is definitely not my experience), and I could definitely relate to many of the experiences discussed here. I think this is a wonderful project and a really fun exhibition to visit, and I hope they have luck in finding a permanent home because I think now more than ever, the contributions immigrants have made to Britain need to be recognised and celebrated. I’ll definitely be returning for any future exhibitions. 3.5/5.

I spotted this awesome carving on a building near the museum. I love the cat!

London: John Ruskin @ Two Temple Place

I hope you’re not sick of these annual shots of the exterior of Two Temple Place, because here’s another one. But really, I think we can all take another moment to appreciate that weather vane. I guess I’m never all that interested in the topics Two Temple Place chooses for its annual exhibition, but John Ruskin ranked near the bottom in terms of my interest levels (OK, he’s better than Eric Gill, but let’s face it, it’s not hard to top that molester), so I didn’t exactly rush out to see it. But it is free, and I’ve blogged about it every other year since discovering Two Temple Place existed, so I figured I might as well make the effort (really I blame that Ancient Egypt exhibit, which was the first thing I saw there, because it was really good and now I feel compelled to keep returning in hopes something else will match it, even though nothing else has come close).

I never know if photos will be allowed during a particular exhibition – it seems like every year when Marcus brings his camera, they aren’t allowing photography, and if he doesn’t have it, they do allow pictures, but this year the fates aligned and we had both camera and permission to use it (although photos were still not allowed of about a third of the items there due to copyright reasons).  “John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing” runs until the 22nd April, and clearly waiting a bit into the exhibition’s run to go see it did nothing to reduce the crowds, as it was really really full when we walked inside, though it probably didn’t help (hurt?) that it was a really nice day outside (for February).

  

All I knew about John Ruskin going in was that he was in with the Pre-Raphaelite crowd, and that he was disgusted by vaginas, or at least, his wife Effie Gray’s vagina, as their marriage was allegedly never consummated, so I was eager to learn more (Effie later married Millais, and had eight children with him, so I don’t think she was really the problem). And whilst I did learn more about certain aspects of his life, I still felt the exhibition was very lacking as a whole when it came to biographical detail. About his marriage to the aforementioned Effie, for example, all it said was that he had produced a particular series of drawings whilst honeymooning with Effie in Venice. Nothing about the annulment or controversies surrounding his marriage (I could understand why they didn’t want to get into the nitty gritty of his sex life (or lack thereof), as it’s a fairly hoity toity venue, but they could have at least mentioned that the marriage wasn’t a happy one).

But it certainly did go into Ruskin’s interests, which were apparently pretty much everything, including geology, art, architecture, botany, social reform, politics, literature, birds, and many others – pretty much everything except sex by the looks of it, though there are rumours out there about some unsavoury proclivities he may have had (on Wikipedia, not in the exhibition, of course). He was friends with JMW Turner and other artists, and was also a lecturer at Oxford, though apparently he suffered from mental illness as he aged, and people would attend his lectures just to mock him, which made me feel bad for him.

As you may have guessed from the long list of subjects he saw fit to write about, Ruskin was a man of strong passions, and also hated a number of things, fifteen of which were listed on the signage shown above, and this gave me the only laugh of the exhibition (not really a complaint, because I wasn’t expecting the subject matter to be funny, so maybe I should rephrase that as being happy I got a chuckle out of it at all). The things Ruskin loathed (mostly architecture-related) are mostly not the sort of things on which I have strong opinions of my own (surprising, I know), but I’m not overly keen on rail travel – it beats air travel, which I’m sure Ruskin would have hated even more, but I’m still not keen on sharing personal space with strangers for a significant length of time. Especially the type of people who talk on their phones in the quiet carriage, who are the worst.

  

For a man with such a clearly defined aesthetic, there actually didn’t seem to be all that much art by John Ruskin within the exhibition – much of it was simply by contemporaries he admired, or modern artists from Sheffield, which is where Ruskin lived and created a museum, and is from where many of these pieces were on loan. But he did produce some lovely botanical and geological illustrations – Marcus particularly admired his drawings of cleavage (in rocks, that is) – and he was clearly a man who understood ducks, judging by his delightful description of them: “you have to consider whether the bird altogether may not be more than a fat, cheerful little stomach, and a spotted waistcoat with legs to it…fat, floating, daintiest darlings.”

  

This exhibition also seemed to be a bit smaller than they usually are. I do feel like they shrink every year, but this one had definitely left out a room or two, as I distinctly remember passing through two or three rooms upstairs before arriving in the main gallery in the past, and this year there was only one room before it, and that room had a handful of objects in, but no captions. Like I always say, I wanted more information throughout, but I suspect they purposely keep captions short to try to sell their own guidebooks (which I’m sure are lovely, but I’m just not willing to spend that kind of money for something I’m going to look through once).

  

And whilst I think Two Temple Place is a fabulous building, I’m not crazy about the atmosphere. It always seems to be full of rich, snobby old white people who feel entitled to block your view of something for as long as they want to, and are wilfully oblivious to your attempts to see around them. Some of that may be because of the time of day I normally visit, but I always visit museums on a week day if I can, and I generally see a more varied audience than this. The people working there are sometimes nice, but more typically, they’re more like old-school art gallery stewards, eager to pounce for any minor infraction, which also makes me feel uncomfortable. I’d really like it if they took this amazing space and used it in a way that was more inviting and might attract more diverse audiences, because John Ruskin, British Jazz, and Eric Gill (especially Eric Gill, blech!) really aren’t big crowd pleasers.

After viewing this exhibition, I do feel a bit more sympathetic towards Ruskin, as no one deserves to be mocked for their mental illness, but I definitely don’t think he’s going to top my list of favourite artists or writers any time soon (especially if some of the rumours about him are true). As always, I wanted more content, and a more relaxed attitude from staff (volunteers?) and visitors alike. I wanted to score this somewhere between “Sussex Modernism” and “Rhythm and Reaction,” but I see I’ve given the former 2.5/5, and the latter 3/5, so that really leaves me nowhere to go. So I’ll opt for 2.5/5, because I remember “Rhythm and Reaction” as being a bit more interesting, though I liked the art here better than that of “Sussex Modernism,” especially the wall of bird drawings and that fabulous bird lampshade (below left).

 

London: “Cats on the Page” and P.G. Wodehouse @ the BL

Everybody likes cats, right? Hell, even I like cats, and I’m allergic to them (and I hate most things, but let’s ignore that for now). I also like P.G. Wodehouse – I was even a member of the P.G. Wodehouse Society for a while until I got sick of paying the (modest) membership fee – though I wish he could have just spelled his damn name Woodhouse and saved everyone some trouble. So I wanted to make sure I got up to the British Library to see both “Cats on the Page” and the small display on Wodehouse in the “Treasures of the British Library” gallery before they came to an end. I also really wanted to get a piece of bakery from Outsider Tart’s stall at the market that’s normally at King’s Cross from Wednesday-Friday, so I specifically timed my visit to correspond with that, only to find no sign of the market with no indication of why that might be on social media. I assume it was because of the shitty windy rainy weather, but at least have the courtesy to mention that to people who might have made a special trip! So I swallowed my (considerable) annoyance, and headed to the BL, since I was already there, after all (and I totally made my own blondies when I got home, but it would be nice to have cake I didn’t have to make myself for a change).

“Tabby’s Breakfast Time”

I started with the Wodehouse display, which was even smaller than I expected – just one case. But it was free, along with the rest of the “Treasures” gallery, so I can’t complain too much. It contained a very brief biography of Wodehouse that seemingly spent most of the time defending him from accusations of being a Nazi sympathiser (because he agreed to make a series of radio broadcasts over German radio during the war about his time in an internment camp), and rightly so, because I really don’t think he was, based on his delightful send-up of Oswald Mosley and his idiotic Blackshirts via the medium of Roderick Spode, but devoting so much space to it in such a small display made it look a bit as though they were protesting too much. Nonetheless, I enjoyed seeing some of Wodehouse’s personal correspondence and manuscripts of some of his books, so it was still worthwhile for a Wodehouse fan, just probably not enough to justify a special trip. But the rest of the “Treasures” gallery is great (even though I think by putting the name in quotation marks, it makes it look as though I’m being sarcastic). I don’t think I’ve blogged about it before, probably because they don’t allow photography, and I’m pretty sure the displays change frequently, but highlights of what was there when I visited included Durer prints, some of Da Vinci’s sketches, an entire Shakespeare section, and even Magna Carta.

“Cats on the Page” was also a free display, and was located on the first floor of the entrance gallery. Photography wasn’t allowed of the objects here either (presumably for copyright reasons), but I’ve tried to include some I could find online. It was about various beloved cats from children’s literature, and some perhaps more unfamiliar books about cats, including a great (and creepy) one about a bunch of cats dying and coming back to life, because they still had eight lives left (it even included a drawing of their tombs, which of course had cats on them, though sadly I’ve not been able to find it to show you). I’m not that familiar with T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, though I know it inspired the musical Cats, which is not the kind of musical I enjoy (I love musicals, but not Andrew Lloyd Webber ones), so I was surprised to see that the original illustrations were actually rather charming, and nothing like the terrifying costumes from the stage musical.

This exhibition made me think that perhaps cats are more common in British children’s literature, because I don’t remember reading that many books about cats in my own youth (other than Tom Kitten, which is of course by a British author, and those books of Garfield comic strips that I loved for some reason, even though I don’t really find Garfield funny at all as an adult. That cartoon from the ’90s was pretty good though, and don’t get me started on those Garfield fruit snacks that they stopped making years ago. So delicious!), but maybe that was more because my mother doesn’t like cats so didn’t get those picture books for me, rather than any lack of American cat books. At any rate, I had certainly never encountered beloved British cat characters like Mog until after moving to the UK.

Letter by Edward Lear

This display was actually slightly bigger than expected, with fairly detailed captions and of course lots of illustrations spread throughout the whole middle section of the main hall, and there was even a small interactive station where you could try to identify different cat noises or sit and read one of a selection of cat books. The BL are also running a series of cat themed lectures to tie in with the display, though it looks like most of the interesting sounding ones are sold out. The main exhibition at the BL is still the Saxons one I saw a few months ago, but I did notice a King Edgar (with weirdly long crossed fingers that are never explained. We have the same drawing of him with the same creepy fingers in the museum where I work, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to search for an explanation, and found nothing) all set up for photo ops, so I had a picture with him in the end, despite feeling very self-conscious because of a bench positioned immediately opposite full of people staring at me. The cat exhibition is a nice little display worth seeing if you’re in the area before 17th March (the Wodehouse display is already gone at time of posting), but definitely don’t make a trip expecting to buy a blondie from Real Food Market King’s Cross, because you will probably be disappointed. 3/5 for “Cats on the Page” and a big fat 0/5 for the Real Food Market’s lack of communication. What’s the point of having fifty different social media channels if you don’t use any of them to tell people you’re closed? Boo-urns.

Oh, and to end on a positive note, I saw Hanson last week for the first time ever (despite being OBSESSED with them I was 12, then not listening to them for about 17 years because I thought I was much too cool for that, and re-discovering them as an adult after I no longer cared if people thought I was lame, and I realised they’ve been putting out catchy albums the whole way, and oh yeah, grew up to be pretty hot, which definitely doesn’t hurt), and they were amazing! I’ve been missing out all these years, and will 100% catch them again the next time they’re in London.

London: “Good Grief, Charlie Brown” @ Somerset House

I know that there are a lot of people who are really into the Peanuts (judging by the likes I got on the photos I posted on Instagram alone), and I certainly grew up reading the comic strip and watching the holiday specials, but I was never the sort of person who liked them to the extent that I collected memorabilia, for example, like my uncle who was obsessed with Snoopy. Still, “Good Grief, Charlie Brown” at Somerset House, which ends 3rd March, looked promising, more promising than most of the things on in London at the moment, so I decided to pop along and check it out.

  

Despite getting my Master’s at King’s, which is right next door, I’d never actually been inside Somerset House before, in large part due to the price of their exhibitions. They don’t accept the Art Pass or take part in National Rail 2-for-1, and I am not a fan of paying full price. However, after a bit of searching, I was able to find a discount code on TravelZoo that at least reduced the price from £14 to £9. Not quite half-off, but I’ll take it!

  

And actually, though I still think £14 is perhaps a bit of a stretch, it is certainly a £9 exhibition, because the gallery space was very large and spread out over three levels. The woman working at front desk advised that it might take two and a half to three hours to see the exhibition, but their website says an hour to an hour and a half, which I think is much more accurate, since we were there for around an hour and fifteen minutes in the end, though I suppose Peanuts fanatics who wanted to watch all the videos on offer could easily be there upwards of two hours.

  

The exhibition opened with some biographical information about Charles Schulz’s life. He was born in Minnesota in 1922 to parents of German and Norwegian heritage. He was quite a shy child, not helped by the Norwegian side of his family telling him not to have many expectations in life (not because they thought he was incompetent, but because that was their general mindset), but overall seems to have had a reasonably happy upbringing, with the help of his dog, Spike, who he later used as an inspiration for Snoopy (one of his first published cartoons was a drawing of Spike for Ripley’s Believe it or Not, complete with a caption about how his dog ate tacks and needles, which I sincerely hope wasn’t true!). He discovered a real talent for drawing, and after completing a drawing correspondence course, which was his only formal training, and a stint in the army, started work as a cartoonist. His first cartoon was called L’il Folks, but he was forced to call it Peanuts instead as there was already a L’il Folks cartoon in syndication. He always hated the name though, thinking it made his strip seem trivial (and L’il Folks didn’t…?).

  

The next section talked more about Schulz’s drawing technique and how it evolved, and provided examples of some of his strips that preceded Peanuts. In addition to L’il Folks (god I hate that name. I’m glad he wasn’t allowed to use it) he also contributed a one-panel strip to a Christian publication, which was about as funny as you’d imagine (not very). Schulz was forced to adapt his technique over the years as he developed a tremor in the 1980s, but somehow the shakier lines worked just as well as the clean ones.

  

From here we progressed upstairs to a massive central hall housing most of the exhibition. We’d already been treated to a selection of Peanuts strips downstairs, but there were many many more up here, with a description under each about events that had been leading up to that particular strip, and how Schulz used them as social commentary. Whilst Schulz was originally fairly conservative, he grew to oppose the Vietnam War, and was a strong supporter of women’s rights and racial equality. Whilst he always retained a fondness for the Bible, he also was referring to himself as a humanist by the end of his life, and this was reflected in his strips. Honestly, I wish they still ran more of the earlier strips in the paper, because these ones were much funnier than the ones I remember reading when I was growing up.

  

The comic strip displays were accentuated by displays of modern art that had been inspired by Peanuts – a lot of them were fairly meh, but I was quite taken with one that showed Charlie Brown and Snoopy in quite a lot of interesting situations, such as Snoopy using a toilet with Charlie Brown’s face, because, like the artist, I have a fairly juvenile sense of humour. There were also displays of retro Peanuts merchandise, including items from the “Vote for Snoopy” campaign of the 1970s (until California outlawed writing in the names of fictional characters on the ballot), and some that I owned (hand-me-downs from my mother. Inheriting isn’t the same as wilfully collecting) like a set of posters and a sheet set (which was honestly my favourite one growing up, since I, too, hate mornings), although actually the die-hard Peanuts fans back then didn’t like how the strip became increasingly commercialised, and thought Schulz was a bit of a sell-out (he even opened a Snoopy themed ice rink in the town where he lived).

  

There were yet another set of stairs leading off this gallery with two larger art installations on either side of the hallway, though I would be hard-pressed to tell you what was going on in either of them, I just wish someone had told us if we were allowed to lay on the beds or not (I wasn’t bold enough to do anything more than perch on the edge). There was also a movie room showing an hour’s worth of Peanuts cartoons with loads of comfy looking bean bag chairs spread on the floor, so this is definitely somewhere I could see people spending a lot of time if they came with kids or didn’t grow up watching all the holiday specials like I did (they’re always on TV in the US, but I’m not sure about the UK. I’ve never noticed them). I only watched about five minutes before I got bored though, because it was during one of Snoopy’s Red Baron scenes, and I’ve always found those really dull (I’m not that keen on Snoopy generally, I have to say. He’s cute and all, but I much prefer the strips with the kids and actual dialogue in them).

  

After we finally made our way across the massive upstairs gallery, we got to the bit I was most excited about – the interactive section! This included an adult sized mock-up of Lucy’s psychiatrist stand, a tracing station where you could design your own strip, and a writing station where you could finish Snoopy’s “It was a dark and stormy night” story – not quite as much stuff as I was hoping for, but still an entertaining space.

  

I think the shop is probably fantastic for Peanuts fans, with a custom selection of clothing, pins, books, and the like, but I personally think wearing Peanuts stuff is not really my style (which is also how I feel about Disney stuff, although Disney is probably worse), so I didn’t buy anything (no offence if you’re into it – this is coming from a woman with a collection of sweaters with stupid animals on them, so I’m really not in a position to judge). As we were leaving, we passed a display of wooden Peanuts characters that you were encouraged to rearrange and have a selfie with, but I found angling myself in for a selfie with them was nigh-on impossible (you probably need one of those stupid sticks), so I just had Marcus take some photos instead. I’ve always thought of myself as a cross between Charlie Brown and Lucy (as illustrated by some of the comics I’ve included in this post), so those were the two I wanted photos with.

  

Overall, this exhibition was much bigger than I thought it would be, and despite the price and my annoyance at their lack of participation in most discount schemes, I would definitely return to Somerset House for future exhibitions. Though I was sort of down on the Peanuts going in, I left with a new respect for Schulz’s skill and gentle humour – actually, some of the strips were genuinely laugh out loud funny, which is more than I can say for most comic strips (except Pearls Before Swine, which I love, and of course Georgian cartoons, which are one of my favourite things ever, but those aren’t really comic strips), so I feel like a bit of a grinch for my initial lack of enthusiasm. If you’re a Peanuts fan in London, I’d say this is a don’t-miss exhibition, but I think almost anyone who likes newspaper comics could find something to enjoy here. 3.5/5.

  

London: “Hooked” @ the Science Gallery

Yes, you read that right. The Science Gallery, NOT the Science Museum. London’s got a new museum (at least, I think it’s new – more on that in a little while), and as usual, I’m first on the scene I visited the museum as soon as I found out about it, via a London Museum Development newsletter I get at work, because I am definitely not high on any publicity department’s list. “As soon as I found out about it” turned out to be a week before their first exhibition closed, which is why I am sadly blogging about it too late for anyone to visit. But they will have future exhibitions, with a new one every quarter, so I might as tell you about the venue anyway for future reference.

   

The Science Gallery is located on King’s College London’s Guy’s Campus (and as King’s is my alma mater (I think? Is your alma mater the first place you went to school or just anywhere you did a degree?), you’d think I might have heard about it through them too, but no dice. They can sure send me plenty of emails about donating (never gonna happen), but can’t seem to send ones about things I might actually be interested in) – if you go out the Shard entrance of London Bridge Station, you will find it directly in front of you, just across the street (the Shard will also be directly on top of you, looming menacingly). This means it is also conveniently near to Borough Market, so you can easily pop over for a toasted cheese from Kappacasein after, which I definitely did.

   

The Science Gallery appears to be part of a larger international organisation, with branches in places like Dublin, Melbourne, Detroit, and Rotterdam. Judging by their website, the London Science Gallery seems to have been active as a project since 2014, but if I understand it correctly, this is their first exhibition based in this gallery space. And looking at their exhibition programme for the year, it appears to be Wellcome Collection-esque, with a sort of science-art hybrid going on that I quite like, and I especially like that admission is free. The exhibition I saw was called “Hooked” and explored addiction through science and art.

   

Each section of the gallery was meant to have a different theme, but I didn’t necessarily get that throughout. The first room was called “Natural Born Thrillers” and was supposed to be about the sorts of things people can get addicted to, but that also seemed (more or less) to be the theme of the second section. Nevertheless, it got off to a promisingly interactive start with a machine with a slot you could insert a coin into to see what happened (someone had thoughtfully left a 2p coin on top, and since the whole point of the machine was that the coin came shooting back out at you with surprising force, it could be used again and again). There was also a virtual reality mask that allowed you to watch drunk mice, and a video of a guy playing Playstation whilst coming down from speed. The table made out of sugar grossed me out a little because of all the sticky spilt tea around it, but not quite as much as the marshmallow pants (not entirely sure what addiction those were representing. Perhaps something sexual?).

   

The second section was quite dark and moody and seemed mostly to be focused on the addictions unique to modern life, like video games and mobile phones. There was a game that tracked your eye movements (not entirely sure to what purpose) and a room full of flashing low battery symbols from phones. I did manage to resist pressing the “Do not like this” button on Facebook, and didn’t watch the video about twisted fairy tales because the room looked quite full and I didn’t want to step on anyone, despite the presence of comfy looking cushions in front of the screen.

 

The third section, entitled “Free Will,” was meant to be addressing the question of who was to blame for addiction, but I didn’t really get that from the “Hashish Club,” which was a hallucinatory video meant to recreate the experiences of 1840s pot smoking intellectuals. I did like standing in front of the Victorian parlour video screen with the trippy green lanterns though. I listened to “Short Periods of Structured Nothingness” for quite a while, which featured a woman talking about her experiences with her deadbeat dad after her parents divorced, and was eagerly awaiting the opportunity to answer some questions myself that I’d been promised early in the conversation (well, I say conversation, but I was just listening to a recording), but it went on for too long and I hung up as other people were waiting.

 

I have to confess that I didn’t understand the suit hanging in a geometric frame in one corner of the gallery at all, but I thought the curtain made from wedding rings in “Divorce Index” was quite cool, though I thought tying it into addiction was a bit forced (apparently it was chosen because addiction can often lead to divorce, but that didn’t really come across in the piece).

  

The final bit of the gallery, called “Safe from Harm,” featured a series of short films called “Twelve,” where people struggling with addiction re-interpreted scenes from films (which sounds like it should have been entertaining, but it was actually quite depressing and bleak) and a very frustrating video of someone only scrubbing one tile of a tiled floor clean, while I was sitting there dying for them to wash the whole damn floor. There was also a reading room where people could read books about addiction or share their own experiences of addiction.

   

I assumed we were finished at that point, and was already rather pleased with what I’d seen – even though I didn’t always understand how the pieces tied to the theme, it was interactive and entertaining, and most importantly, free, so I was glad I’d stopped in. But then we went downstairs to check out the shop and encountered the final piece of art, “AGAIN” by Lawrence Epps. I’ve seen those coin pushing machines plenty of times at the seaside, but never played because I hate gambling. Doesn’t stop me from watching the very stupid Tipping Point though, because those machines are mesmerising. Well, “AGAIN” was free to play – staff members gave you a small envelope full of tokens if you asked, and if you won any tokens, you got to keep them. Apparently some of them were meant to be actual 24 karat gold, but all the ones we won were just terracotta. They had loads of different designs, and I desperately wanted a white one, only to have one fall and get stuck in the chute, so I spent most of my other tokens trying to get it out. Unsuccessful, and the one staff member said the artist claimed it was purposely supposed to do that, but she suspected it was just a design flaw. Either way, it did demonstrate the power of addiction in a very clear and disturbingly fun way. (I stood there for a good fifteen minutes feeding in tokens trying to get that damn white one – so long that everyone else had moved off, but I did go home with some terracotta ones at least.)

   

This was overall a very fun and interactive experience (more interactive than the Wellcome usually is, I have to say, but I still love the Wellcome) and I will definitely return to see their future exhibitions (the proximity to Borough Market doesn’t hurt, because Padella and Kappacasein are two of my favourite places), including the next one, “Spare Parts” which opens at the end of February (and I will try to see that one in a timely enough fashion that other people can still go after I blog about it). It’s always exciting to see a new museum open in London, and if it’s free and has constantly changing exhibitions, so much the better, though I am a little upset this wasn’t a thing when I was a student, as it could have provided me with some valuable museum experience (so maybe it wouldn’t have taken me like 8 years to find a job in a museum)! 3.5/5 for “Hooked.”