London: “I Object” @ the British Museum

Wow, it’s been a long time (almost three months) since I’ve done a London post, even though I live here. Actually, there really weren’t many exhibitions over the summer (or at least ones I was interested in), so it’s probably a good thing I went to France and America – it gave me something to blog about! But autumn is looking much more promising on the exhibitions front, including this one currently at the British Museum (until 20 January 2019): “I Object: Ian Hislop’s Search for Dissent.”

  

I do quite like Ian Hislop (I really liked the Wipers Times musical, and I like a bit of HIGNFY as well, though I would not recommend actually going to see it filmed, because you will be there for HOURS with no toilet breaks), so I was eager to see this. Admission is £12, though we were able to get half off with our National Art Passes, and because it is not the British Museum’s main special exhibition, there was no need to pre-book (at least not on the day I visited, though if you do pre-book, be sure to leave time to get through the (newish) security/bag check shed, as there is often a lengthy queue). This isn’t to say that it isn’t still popular – there were definitely more people inside than I find ideal (bearing in mind the number of people I find ideal is zero), which would have been fine in a larger space, but because it was fairly cramped, I did have to contend with annoying people who spent way too long standing right in front of various displays and refusing to move, even when people were obviously queuing behind them.

  

I’d read a few reviews before visiting, which were mainly negative, so my expectations were not terribly high, but I think the exhibition got off to a strong start with Hislop’s five favourite objects, one of which (seen below left) was also my favourite object (so much so that I went home with a print of it, though I really don’t know why I keep buying prints). Unfortunately, it went a bit downhill from there. The whole premise of this exhibition is that Hislop believes history is written by the winners, so he was trying to find subversive objects that challenge the traditional historical narrative. Of course, these objects were taken from the British Museum’s collections, so were thus already part of the narrative in some sense. Ironically, the exhibition itself didn’t have much of a narrative; rather, the commentary was in the form of those little talk bubbles you see above, showing Hislop’s thoughts on each object, combined with a curator-written description of what the object was, but there was nothing particularly tying the objects together, and it skipped from different historical eras the entire time, with no coherent timeline.

  

That said, a lot of the objects on display here were pretty great, so even though I didn’t always understand what was going on with society at the times they were made (I was fine with the British stuff, but a lot of it was Egyptian and Roman, and my knowledge of those periods is pretty damn patchy, so just naming random emperors and assuming the general public would know who they were talking about was a bit presumptuous, even for the British Museum), I could still enjoy looking at them. And who doesn’t love a fart joke? Or a skeleton? (OK, maybe I’m the only one that loves skeletons, but I think a lot of people find fart jokes funny, judging by their prevalence throughout history.)

  

Or a poop joke for that matter, as seen above in the rather mean-spirited take on George III’s madness. Georges III and IV were well represented here (it’s hard to talk about satire without showing Georgian cartoons, because they were so brilliant), as was Louis XVI, though I suppose in that case the satire took a darker edge, given what ended up happening to him. I was intrigued to see that there were some dollars with political messages on them here – money that has been written on is still legal currency in the US, so I spent much of my teenage years scribbling poems and punk slogans on every dollar in my wallet, and I think I would have peed my pants in excitement (to go with the bodily fluids theme) if one of those dollars had someone ended up in here, but alas, these were much more boring than my angsty defacing.

  

I did laugh out loud when I saw the brilliant Louis Philippe pear drawings though (a caricaturist noted his resemblance to a pear, so that was how he was regularly portrayed in French satirical publications). Obviously it’s much easier to see the hilarity in a cartoon than in something like a statue – Hislop told us that the one above left was definitely satirical because of the “deliberately unattractive shape of the body,” (by the standards of that culture) but I just don’t really see it, given that it just looks like a normal fertility figure. I guess maybe if I had more of a background in ancient cultures and their standards of beauty, I could have appreciated the satirical bent of some of the objects more, but frankly I think the reasons given for the inclusion of some of the artefacts were a bit far-fetched, or else merited more explanation so they didn’t seem so far-fetched, because it kind of felt like he had run out of obviously satirical objects and was clutching at straws.

   

The most famous thing here was undoubtedly the copy of the King James Bible where “Thou shalt not commit adultery” was changed to “Thou shalt commit adultery,” which Hislop definitely views as satire because he thinks it seems too perfect to be a genuine typographical error – even if he’s wrong about that, at least it was a cool thing to see. The fake artefact that Banksy put inside the BM back in the early 2000s (it took a few days for anyone working there to notice) was more obviously satirical, and the caption is pretty great.

  

There were a couple minor opportunities for interactivity, such as listening to protest songs on headphones in various places in the exhibition, or drawing a protest badge, which Marcus did to what I think is great effect. Other than that, though, it was a traditional, fairly staid exhibition, so there was certainly nothing subversive about that aspect of it. I think maybe if there had been some opportunities for object handling, or otherwise interacting with the collection, it would have helped carry the theme through a bit better than being confined to looking at things in cases, as you would in the rest of the British Museum.

  

The exhibition was fairly small (only three rooms), so it didn’t take us very long to look around. Worth 6 pounds, but definitely not 12. In the end, it seems that much of satire does just come down to fart jokes, which I certainly don’t have a problem with, but I guess it’s not very highbrow, which may have been why a lot of the reviewers took issue with it. I think it was entertaining enough, but if you’re looking for a lot of analysis, an actual “alternative history” of the world, or just want to expand your knowledge of other cultures and civilisations, this is probably not the exhibition for you, as the commentary was mainly limited to the objects themselves, with no real background or narrative. Still, I liked it a lot better than “Living with Gods,” the last exhibition I paid to see here, and there was some pretty great merchandise in the exhibition shop (in addition to the print, I got a “Truck Fump” badge). 3/5.

  

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London: BMoF’s Scoop: A Wonderful Ice Cream World

After that very weird honey experience a couple of years ago (it was just a honey tasting thing, lest you be picturing something worse!), I decided I wasn’t going to give in to the allure of Bompas and Parr events any more, no matter how appealing they might seem. And I was doing well, until they sent me an email about a potential pop up ice cream museum they were trying to obtain funding for. Well, I’m sure all my regular readers know about me and ice cream (I’m obsessed), and I’ve been wanting to go to the ice cream museum in America for some time (it sounds very overpriced but fun), so, hoping for something similar, my willpower gave way completely. Not only did I buy tickets, I also actually helped fund the damn thing (albeit at the lowest level that included tickets, so I wasn’t spending a massive amount or anything) so my name is on their wall of donors, which is a little embarrassing. Clearly my idiocy knows no bounds where ice cream is concerned.

  

So a couple weeks ago, shortly after “Scoop: A Wonderful Ice Cream World” (as they’re calling it) opened, I went to revel in my stupidity check it out. I couldn’t really have picked a better day for it (from an ice cream eating perspective; not so much a going outside one, because I do not like the sun), since it was pushing 90 degrees and I had the perfect excuse to wear my ice cream print sundress (not that I need an excuse, though I was disappointed that no one there seemed to realise I had coordinated my outfit with the museum).

  

We had booked a 12 o’clock slot (admission is £12 (plus booking fee), and they do take walk-ins if they’re not busy) but because it was hard to find (it is in the Granary Square area, but we went out the wrong entrance from King’s Cross, and ended up approaching it via a back route), we ended up arriving a bit late, so were asked to wait about 10 minutes until it was time for the next group to enter, which was fine, since it was our fault for being late. While we were waiting, a woman with a young child came in, and was persuaded to go inside despite her concerns about taking the child in, but the child ended up screaming her head off about three seconds after entering and they both quickly left, so I hope she was at least able to get her money back (take this as a word of warning if you’re going with young children, since it is a bit dark, which is apparently scary). I was actually surprised by how many children were there – everyone on our tour but us was with a couple of older children; obviously children like ice cream, but Bompas and Parr events are usually aimed at an adult audience, so I wasn’t expecting to feel so out of place.

  

When we were finally allowed to enter, we were ushered into a theatre that was showing a film about ice cream and was already about halfway through (you’d think if they were doing timed entry, they would make sure it was at the start for each new group). We swiftly progressed into the walk-in cooler, which in retrospect was the best damn part of the experience. Everyone else got out pretty quickly, but I hung out in there for a good few minutes, luxuriating in being a comfortable temperature for the first time in weeks (I used to hang out in the walk-in quite a lot when I managed an ice cream shop, although then it was mainly to hide and eat graham cracker ripple out of the pitcher. God, I loved that stuff. It was basically liquefied graham cracker that solidified when it hit ice cream, and tasted so much better than I’m making it sound).

  

After finally leaving the icy embrace of the cooler, I entered a museum-style room containing some antique ice cream moulds and some information about the Victorian “Queen of Ices” Agnes B. Marshall (the best part was that cartoon of the guy eating ice cream. Totally what I do when I eat ice cream). We were then asked to wait in a hallway with scent panels on the wall (which I did enjoy, because I like smelling stuff) before progressing into an ice cream making class wherein we made the world’s smallest amount of poorly flavoured ice cream in a shaker container. (For the record, Bompas and Parr described this lame activity as “Visitors will be encouraged to travel back in time with a performative interpretation of Victorian ‘Queen of Ices’ Agnes B Marshall’s Cookery School originally on Mortimer Street, where visitors will meet Ida Cooke, a fictional character who introduces herself as Agnes’s star pupil. Ida will share some of Agnes’s recipes and encourage guests to try tasty morsels of various iced concoctions. Each cone is topped-off with a sparkling garnish from SCOOP’s very own hundreds and thousands fountain – a world first invention by Bompas & Parr.” See below paragraph for how the fountain disappointed.)  I think they forgot to add sugar to the base and it was just milk and cream, because the finished product was pretty bland; even the granny smith apple flavouring we put in couldn’t save it (apple was one of the only non-gross flavouring choices – it was mainly things like smoky bacon and parmesan cheese (I don’t think the actual cheese would have been so bad, but the thought of artificial cheese flavouring makes me want to gag)).

  

The next room contained the hundreds and thousands fountain, which I was really excited about, even though obviously hundreds and thousands are nowhere near as good as sprinkles. As stated above, we were supposed to have a chance to use it to top our cones (presumably the Whippy cones, as the cookery school tasteless ice cream we just had to scrape out of the shaker with plastic spoons), but it may have been out of order, because no one mentioned it, and it wasn’t moving or anything (not very joyous). I liked the cheesy jokes written on giant popsicle sticks (best one: What do you call a metalhead who works in an ice cream shop? Alice Scooper!), and the collection of vintage postcards, but the “Dark Side of Ice Cream” adults only room about the Glasgow Ice Cream Wars was pretty crap, being just a video with one set of headphones, so Marcus and I couldn’t even watch it together (and there was a chair in there, but if you sat in it, you were much too low to watch the video, so I’m not sure what the point of it was).

  

We were given a teensy tiny sample of Ben and Jerry’s to eat while wearing a headset that was supposed to project your brain waves on the wall (obviously it was just reacting to your chewing), and seriously, could Ben and Jerry’s not spare more ice cream than that? It was like a tablespoon of ice cream. Finally, we were handed a very small (but not as small as the Ben and Jerry’s) Mr. Whippy, and sent into a “futuristic luminescent cave” where the ice cream was meant to glow in the dark. The “cave,” which I had eagerly anticipated, was literally just a darkish room with bare walls and some socks with cotton balls or similar in them hanging from the ceiling (I’ve half-assedly put together spider egg sacks for Halloween using that method that looked better than these), and the ice cream didn’t glow any more than any other white substance would when exposed to black light, so I think it was a sham. It did appear to be made from actual dairy products though, so at least it tasted better than your average Whippy.

  

And except for “Conehenge,” the delightfully named but ultimately disappointing ice cream shop at the un-air-conditioned entrance that you had to pay extra for (£3.99 for one small scoop of one of the five or so not very appealing flavours (including cucumber and water mint)), that was that. Given the bombastic description of it I was sent, this was yet another case of style over substance from Bompas and Parr (and not even much style, as some of the rooms looked a little unfinished, especially the cave, and the bloody fountain wasn’t working) that I was stupid enough to fall for yet again. They didn’t meet their funding target (I think they only raised like three thousand pounds out of a target of fifty thousand), and it definitely showed – maybe it would have been better just to cancel it rather than deliver such a lacklustre product. I hated it less than the honey thing, because my fellow visitors were not pretentious and at least we got very small amounts of free ice cream, but my god, it was a pathetic effort given all the hype. Never again Bompas and Parr, never again (unless they do some other food I love as part of their British Museum of Food project, but really, ice cream is the best thing, and they screwed that up, so I don’t know what would even have a chance of being better; or offer some kind of free ghostly experience that at least I’m not wasting money on, but even then, I’d probably still be wasting my time).  Another reason to be annoyed with Bompas and Parr is that it appears that most of their events rely heavily on volunteers rather than paid employees; as a volunteer manager myself, I get that volunteers are essential to most museums, including my own, but the vast majority of those museums are free to visit, and particularly in the case of smaller museums, don’t have much money – if you’re charging 12 pounds for admission, and turning a profit out of your business, you can at least pay people minimum wage, especially if you expect them to volunteer twenty days a month, which is essentially a full time job. 2/5, and it’s only getting that because of the delight I experienced in that walk-in freezer on such a hot day.

  

London: “Fashioned from Nature”@ the V&A

It’s been a while since I’ve visited a fashion exhibition at the V&A, so I thought I might as well pop along to see “Fashioned from Nature,”  especially since the Frida Kahlo exhibition was booked up the day we visited (actually, we were intending to see Frida that day, because it finishes first (in November), but I wanted to see “Fashioned from Nature” too, so I wasn’t just settling. I’m not a Frida superfan, like the women I saw there dressed up like her, but I like her well enough (and can relate to having a unibrow, though I’m not as brave as she was and pluck mine), so I’ll go back to check it out on a day when I’ve pre-booked!). Admission to “Fashioned from Nature” is normally £12, but you get half off with a National Art Pass or National Rail 2 for 1 (which I advise doing).

  

“Fashioned from Nature” (which runs until January) is located in the same fashion gallery where I saw “Undressed,” and had much the same layout (probably because those cases don’t really look like they’re moveable). It explored “the complex relationship between fashion and nature from 1600 to the present day,” and I have to say I much preferred the 1600-early 1900s part, which was the lower gallery. I was a little worried there would be things made of butterfly wings in here (given my lepidopterophobia), but aside from the framed butterflies you can see in the shop, the creepiest bug thing was the dress decorated with the iridescent wing cases of thousands of beetles (see below), and that was only creepy because I felt bad for all the beetles (their wing cases were admittedly beautiful though).

  

But plenty of other animals were horribly slaughtered to make these clothes, although there were a relatively small number of furs here, probably because it’s obvious that animals are killed for those. The exhibition preferred to focus on less well-known clothing materials. I knew about whalebone and its use in corsetry, of course, given my interest in the Victorians, but for some reason I’d always pictured it as more of a solid, bony substance (like, you know, the actual bones of a whale). I didn’t realise that whalebone actually refers to baleen, and it pulls apart in layers into flexible wire-like strands which can be used to line umbrellas or give hats shape. There were examples of bonnets and corsets here that had been x-rayed, so we could view the whalebone structure within. There was also information about how whole species of birds were going extinct due to the demand for feathers. In fact, when the RSPB was originally founded in 1889, it was called the Plumage League because its whole aim was to stop the feather trade. They conducted demonstrations in London of how feathers were harvested (I hope no birds were killed in those demonstrations, but they might have been!), and feathers eventually became unfashionable as a result, at least until synthetic imitations were invented (there was a Linley Sambourne cartoon (remember Linley Sambourne?) in here to show how women wearing feathers were caricatured as evil bird women, but I have to admit that it just made me want to wear some kind of awesome black feather cape so I could be a raven woman too, as long as the feathers were synthetic).

  

Fortunately, the exhibition wasn’t only full of things that animals were killed to make. It was also full of things made of natural materials like cotton where the harvesting and manufacturing processes led to lots of suffering for humans too (ok, yeah, still horrible)! It talked about the environmental impact of various industries and the grossest was probably the manufacturing of the dye used to make “turkey red” until they invented a synthetic version, as it involved blood, pee, AND poop (animal rather than human, but still). There’s a passage in Little House in the Big Woods where Pa threatens to buy Ma a “turkey red” piece of fabric for her new apron unless she picks a colour herself (she was protesting that she didn’t really need a new apron, and he wanted her to have it. He wasn’t being mean or anything), and now I see why that was enough to goad Ma into picking a more attractive fabric. It wasn’t just because of the colour! We tend to think of acid rain as more of a modern problem, but it has been a real issue since the Industrial Revolution because of all the smoke produced by the cotton mills. And of course this all had a human impact as well, in addition to just living with the effects of pollution, because the demand for cotton led to slavery in America and terrible working conditions for mill employees in England.

  

Therefore, the least depressing things here were the clothes that were merely patterned with things inspired by nature, like the charming waistcoat featuring crab-eating macaques, or the many gorgeous flower-patterned dresses (I particularly loved the banksia scarf, because it made me think of Joseph Banks, who banksia is named for), though probably slave labour was used to create the cloth in the first place, so really everything involved some kind of exploitation. I guess the good thing about this exhibition was that it made you realise that fashion comes at a cost beyond money.

  

I was less interested in the upstairs (and unfortunately, larger) gallery, which contained modern sustainable fabrics (it’s good they are sustainable, but the clothing they were used to make was way less beautiful than the antique pieces). The descriptions of how these fabrics were made were just too technical for me, and that’s what most of the text up here was about. I was intrigued by the leathers made from fungus and grapes, however, because they really did look pretty good, and obviously doesn’t harm animals. There was also a quiz where you could see what kind of sustainable fashion model you’d be likely to follow in the future (model as in a pattern of behaviour, not actual models), although it did seem to place a lot of emphasis on making your own clothing, which is not something I’m skilled at by any stretch of the imagination, so I’m picturing a future of me wearing a lot of ill-fitting potato sack dresses. There were loads of clothes up here, but the vintage fashions (particularly in the section showing unsustainable clothing of the past; I’m the worst, but how gorgeous is that leopard print gown?!) were really the only ones I found appealing (and those badass bird witch shoes, but there is no conceivable way a human could actually walk in those, so they’re basically useless). I mean, you can create cute retro styles from sustainable materials! It doesn’t all have to look gross and futuristic, just saying.

  

I complained about “Undressed” not being worth £12, and because “Fashioned from Nature” was in the same gallery, it wasn’t any bigger, so I also don’t feel this was worth paying full price, but £6 was OK. I did think all the information downstairs about historical clothing manufacture was fascinating, and I read some of the labels twice to make sure I understood everything, but I kind of skimmed over the upstairs gallery because it bored me. I am just way more interested in the past than the future and I would have been much happier with more historical fashions, but then I guess it wouldn’t have fit the exhibition’s brief of showing fashion to the present day (though a lot of it was about the future, something not mentioned in that blurb I quoted earlier). 3/5, but those more interested in fabric technology or science might get more out of it.

London: “Hope to Nope” @ the Design Museum

When fishing around for things to do, I came across “Hope to Nope: Graphics and Politics 2008-2018” at the Design Museum.  I’m normally not the biggest fan of graphic design (see my review of the graphic design exhibition at the Wellcome), but if there’s one thing I love, it is looking at unflattering caricatures of Trump, so I was intrigued.

  

Admission to the exhibition is normally £12, but National Art Pass holders get half off (ignore what the website says; they claim you only get £3 off, so just wait til you get to the museum to buy your tickets!). It’s even cheaper if you turn down the voluntary donation, but then you get the shame of having declined to donate printed across your ticket. “Hope to Nope” was in the same basement gallery where we saw “Imagine Moscow”, although the configuration of the space was slightly different, as it was split into three main areas rather than a bunch of smaller rooms – one each for power, protest, and personality.

  

As you can probably see, this was a very bold display, and the first thing that caught my eye was The Sun‘s Brexit version of the Bayeaux Tapestry. The Sun was decidedly pro-Brexit, and I am decidedly not, but it was still amusing, not least for its caricatures of leading Tories at the time. I was also quite taken (if that’s the right way to put it, considering how terribly they treat their citizens) with North Korea’s anti-American propaganda, some of which was quite Soviet in style, and even included things like stamps(!) that showed Kim Jong Un smashing the American flag (I guess I should be more offended by this, but really I just thought they were kind of funny because they were so campy). There is also an ongoing flow of balloon propaganda between North and South Korea, in which each side sends clear balloons filled with propaganda materials over the DMZ (this is not officially sanctioned by the government of South Korea). This is fairly controversial, because the South Korean government worries that North Koreans caught with these materials may be punished. At any rate, some of these balloons were here, so we could see how they worked. And there were some great Russian Pride posters that re-purposed all the old Soviet propaganda posters to great effect.

  

“Protest” was dominated by a giant rubber duck hanging from the ceiling, which was used to protest corruption in the Brazilian government and drive Dilma Rousseff out of power (I had a temp job at the Science Museum during the 2012 Olympics, and Dilma Rousseff actually came for a visit one day whilst I was attempting to sell guidebooks at the front of the museum, so I may have appeared on Brazilian (or British) TV, because there was a crew there filming everything. I’ve never seen it if so though). The centre of the room was filled with protest newspapers, and there was an entire wall re-creating the graffiti put up in the wake of the fire at Grenfell Towers. There were also sections devoted to the Women’s March following Trump’s inauguration, the “gay clown” version of Putin, and Occupy Wall Street.

  

But my favourite, favourite thing here (and the thing that made the price of admission completely worth it), was the All-Seeing Trump, located in the “Personality” room. In fact, I could hear him talking before I got there, and skipped past part of “Protest” initially in my haste to reach him (I knew he would be there, and watched a video of him before arriving, so I knew what joys awaited me). All-Seeing Trump is a Zoltar-style fortune telling machine that makes pronouncements (only slightly exaggerated for comic effect) on his proposals (you can watch one I filmed (poorly) here, or a better version here), or insults whoever pressed the button in classic Trumpian style. The machine totally nailed his voice and mannerisms, and I loved the MAGA-hatted eagle perched on his shoulder. The whole damn thing was hilarious perfection, and I pressed the button about ten times (and heard a different speech every time, so he clearly has quite a few of them. Probably more than the actual Trump, to be honest).

  

“Personality” had a lot of great things in it though, other than just All-Seeing Trump. There was an iPad game where you were Jeremy Corbyn trying to collect “donations” from bankers whilst avoiding Boris on a zipline, Theresa May hurling flags from a helicopter, and the ghost of Margaret Thatcher. There was a whole wall of magazine covers depicting Trump, including the fake TIME cover he had framed for his office. And there were cartoons of British political figures as well, though the voice of All-Seeing Trump did tend to pervade, as you might expect.

  

It was a rather small exhibition if you paid the full £12 (being just the three rooms), but for £6, I think it was well-worth my while (again, mainly because of the fabulous All-Seeing Trump). I can’t really say I learned very much, but I was entertained and I laughed a lot (admittedly in a kind of rueful way), and sometimes that’s all you need. 3.5/5.

London: Teeth @ the Wellcome Collection

I was both excited and apprehensive about seeing the Wellcome Collection’s latest exhibition: “Teeth.” Excited, because the publicity material they released before the exhibition made it look great; apprehensive, because despite my general love for all things gory and medical, historic dentistry creeps me out (even though I’m not really afraid of dentists. Orthodontists, yes (my orthodontist’s awfulness had to be experienced to be believed), but not really dentists. But if you are afraid of dentists, this may not be the post for you). But in the end excitement won out, and I strolled on over to the Wellcome after I visited Cook at the BL.

  

“Teeth” is in the same first floor gallery that “Ayurvedic Man” was in (“Somewhere in Between” is still in the main gallery), and was a big, open, inviting space, with display cases mainly along the walls to make room for historic dental equipment in the middle of the room. I seem to have a knack for finding George Washington’s dentures in various museums (really, more pairs of dentures than you would think the man would have owned), so of course I was immediately on the lookout for some here, and I wasn’t disappointed. Poor old George and his omnipresent dentures. The exhibition theorised that George may have always looked rather stern in portraits because he was straining to keep his mouth closed – upper and lower dentures used to be held together with springs, which would have required some powerful jaw muscles to close!

  

He wasn’t the only famous person whose dental apparatuses were here either. There was also Napoleon’s toothbrush, which is interesting, because there are widely conflicting reports of Napoleon’s dental hygiene out there. His biographer claimed he was fastidious about brushing his teeth and had a beautiful white smile, whereas his contemporaries said his teeth were black and rotting. The pristine state of his toothbrush leads me to believe that his contemporaries probably were correct. Even more intriguing than Napoleon’s toothbrush was the upper plate belonging to Edmund Burke, politician and philosopher. It seemed to indicate that he had a cleft palate, as there was an extra piece on top to fill in a gap in the mouth. Burke famously wrote an essay on beauty in which he claimed that imperfection could add to the beauty of something – perhaps this was something he had firsthand experience of?

  

Because the subject matter was teeth, which is something many people have anxieties about (the exhibition also discussed why this was, and a lot of it did probably have to do with the horrors of pre-20th century dentistry, but some of it is also just the nature of teeth. After all, they are the only part of the skeleton that is exposed during your lifetime (barring any horrific accidents)), obviously some of the objects here were going to be a bit, well, creepy. The creepiest by far were the phantom heads that dentistry students used for practice. I think they would have been less scary if they were actually just a skull, because something about the wooden block with real teeth in it is the stuff of nightmares (as is the even scarier face with metal jaws filled with real teeth, which you’ll see at the bottom of this post, if you’re brave enough!). The display about dentures was less overtly disturbing, but it explained how when cheaper, better looking dentures made of porcelain became available, they were so popular that some people used to get all their teeth pulled in their twenties to avoid the hassle and expense of dental care in their adult lives, which really gives me the willies (Roald Dahl was one of those, and though I dearly love his books, his dentures are always one of the first things to cross my mind when I think of him (much like with George Washington)).

  

Fortunately, my pal Binaca squirrel was there to lighten the mood (I’ve never used Binaca, but it makes me think of that episode of Seinfeld where Elaine sprays Joe Davola in the eyes with cherry Binaca to escape his apartment), as were the letters both to and from the tooth fairy. I must have had quite a good tooth fairy, because there was usually some kind of small gift to accompany the two shiny new 50 cent pieces (I seem to remember it usually being a Disney VHS when I was a kid, but I didn’t lose my last baby tooth until I was 13 and though the tooth fairy still came, it felt more half-assed, not that I blame her) and a note carefully written on heart-shaped construction paper that was folded up small enough to fit inside the little plastic treasure chest that held my tooth. Some of the other tooth fairies were slightly more droll than mine, and their letters had me cracking up (even though the thought of a tooth fairy accidentally removing all the teeth from children who slept with their heads under the pillow would have given me nightmares when I was a kid, so probably for the best my tooth fairy was of a kinder, gentler variety).

   

Other objects of note included an aluminum pair of dentures made by a WWII POW who’d had his good dentures smashed by a Japanese guard (I was relieved that he’d already had dentures, because I know they often just smashed out your actual teeth), a horrible wooden chair for strapping reluctant patients to (which, before anesthesia, was pretty much everyone (shown second photo in the post)), and a number of hilarious historic ads for dentists, toothpaste, etc.

  

And I have to say, I don’t know if the main intention of this exhibition was to promote modern dentistry, but it definitely made me want to make a preventative visit to the dentist (especially the poster describing in great detail exactly how decay takes your teeth if you don’t visit the dentist often enough), so much so that I booked an overdue appointment (only by six months or so, but still) a few days after seeing this. Some of the objects on display were pretty freaky, and if you’re already scared of dentists, this exhibition might not help (though surely at least seeing how much worse it used to be would give you some perspective), but I thought it was fascinating, even though I ended up compulsively running my tongue over my teeth the whole time I was in there (and I don’t think I was the only one doing it either). 4/5.

London: “James Cook: The Voyages” @ the British Library

Many’s the time I’ve spoken of my fascination with Captain Cook and his voyages, so I’m sure you can all guess that I was pretty excited to learn that Cook would be the subject of the BL’s latest exhibition. It’s the rare sort of exhibition I would have rushed out to see, but I was back in the States when it opened at the end of April, so I went to check it out on my first day off work after I got back (I don’t know why I always fly back the day before I need to go back to work; well, actually I do, because obviously I’m trying to maximise my time back home, but my first week back in London is always a big pile of jet lag, ennui, and homesickness).

Cook’s map of New Zealand, from          Wikipedia.

Admission is £14, but National Art Pass holders get 50% off. Although there were other visitors, it was pretty quiet by British Library standards and I didn’t have to queue to look at anything (huzzah!). The exhibit opened with a large map showing Cook’s voyages, and a small room about the Georgian age of exploration, and from there moved pretty quickly into Cook’s first, and most famous voyage, aboard the Endeavour (as always, no photos were allowed in here, so I’ve endeavoured (see what I did there?) to find some of the images online and available for reuse).  This is of course my personal favourite voyage, because of a certain dishy Joseph Banks, naturalist, botanist (more like hotanist, am I right?), rich guy, casanova, etc (I know I talk about Joseph Banks every time I talk about Cook, but I just love that Joshua Reynolds painting so much. And guess what? It was in the exhibition, so now I finally have an excuse to include it in a post, instead of just sneakily hiding the link somewhere).

Joseph Banks by Sir Joshua Reynolds, oil on canvas, 1771-1773.

As always, the BL excelled with the choice of objects – whilst some pieces were on loan from other London museums, a great deal of it was handwritten objects like diaries, letters, and maps that I had never seen before. I never realised Joseph Banks had such messy handwriting, whereas Cook’s, whilst lacking flourish like the man himself, was very neat and legible (which makes sense, when you think about it, since Cook attended a local school where the boys would have been trained to be clerks, where neat handwriting was an imperative, whereas wealthy Banks could have gotten away with any old messy scrawl).

Tupaia’s drawing of Joseph Banks bartering for a crawfish, c. 1769. Wikimedia Commons.

I’m also kind of in love with Tupaia’s drawings, many of which were included in this exhibition. Tupaia was a priest and navigator that the Endeavour voyagers befriended in Tahiti, and he agreed to travel onward with them and act as their interpreter (which worked well in Polynesia, as the languages all share a root, but was less successful in Australia because the Aboriginal language was completely different, though he still managed to communicate through hand signals). Sadly, Tupaia picked up a fever in Batavia which killed him and his servant as well as two dozen crew members. Honestly, I liked his drawings better than the ones by Sydney Parkinson (who also died en route home, and he only took over as artist after the expedition’s original artist, Alexander Buchan, died in Tahiti (but the expedition actually had a low mortality rate by 18th century standards!)) – they were way more full of character than Parkinson’s work (though I do love his sketches of kangaroos).

Tierra del Fuego by Alexander Buchan, Wikimedia Commons.

The exhibition definitely devoted the most time to the first voyage, which is fair enough, since it was the most iconic one, and the second and third ones got even more ethically murky and depressing, but the second and third voyages did each get a gallery, albeit smaller ones than Endeavour. I was particularly intrigued by a small display before the second voyage that explained why Joseph Banks didn’t end up going as intended (there was an argument about accommodation), and talked about how he went to Scotland and Iceland instead. This included a display of paintings from that trip, which was interesting because those are the artists that would have accompanied the Resolution if Banks had gone, so you could see how very different the images produced on the second voyage would have looked if things had gone just a bit differently (as it was, Banks’s artists did make some cracking paintings of geysers, which is pretty cool).

Drawing of a New Zealand War Canoe by Sydney Parkinson, Wikimedia Commons.

The second voyage was mostly Antarctic in nature, as Cook carried on with the futile search for the great southern continent that was meant to be hiding somewhere down there, and he did make it further south than any man had gone before, but obviously paintings of ice and snow are not as exciting as ones of previously unknown (to Europeans) people and places (though I’m not knocking polar exploration, because I love that too). They did visit Tahiti on this trip too, but it was more of a pick up provisions/reward the men for the awful time in the Antarctic type of thing than a trip of exploration.

Sea Horses by John Webber, David Rumsey Collection.

Of course, the third voyage is the most depressing of all, because this is when Cook’s personality began to change in weird ways to led to him getting killed by the Hawaiians at the end of it (he had become alarmingly hot-tempered, which led to a lot of rash decision making that pissed the Hawaiians off, and rightly so). Before that though, he did embark on another pointless search, this time for the Northwest Passage (like seriously, I’m not a fan of heat, but I would take pineapples over ice and snow any day. He should have stopped agreeing to do this shit), which resulted in some DELIGHTFUL paintings of walruses (walrii?), which they called “sea horses” and sea otters. There was a video at the end of this section that was meant to explain why Cook’s voyages are problematic today, but it seemed a little like an afterthought, which is interesting, because throughout the exhibit, I felt like the curators may have been holding back a little when writing the signage for fear of causing offence. The whole thing was just a little bland, and I think I would have preferred if they had just explained everything in more detail, and included more information from the perspective of the peoples Cook encountered to provide a fuller picture throughout, rather than dancing around cultural misunderstandings the whole time.

Sea Otter by S. Smith, after John Webber, Wikimedia Commons.

Because the start of the exhibition was just a rehash of things I already knew (which is understandable, because I know not everyone is as into Cook as I am), I was worried that it would prove a disappointment, which would have been a shame because of how excited I was to see it. In the end though, whilst I was familiar with most of the material covered here, the artefacts made it well worth my while. It’s not every day you get to see a drawing by Tupaia, or a log written in Cook’s own hand, and those things made it an enjoyable experience (I had also somehow forgotten or overlooked the fact that Botany Bay was originally called Stingray Bay due to the large number of them hanging around the ship. I am shitscared of stingrays, and never would have gone wading there had I known. Good thing (I guess) it looks pretty polluted these days, as it probably drove them all away). The Cook aficionado will find lots of fascinating artefacts here, and people who know less about him will learn something new, but not quite as much as they could have learned if the exhibition had been a bit more forthright. A large part of what makes Cook’s voyages so interesting was the clash of cultures and how Europeans reacted to the unknown (even though their reactions were often horrifically racist and contact ultimately led to governmental policies that were far more destructive than the voyages themselves); and really, by the standards of the time, Cook was a relatively enlightened man (except for on the last voyage) – without his efforts to understand the different societies he encountered, his voyages would not have been the rich source of information about the world that they were, which is worth mentioning (it seems like the exhibition dwelt more on his navigational skills, which in addition to being awesome, were also far less controversial). I’ll give the exhibition 3.5/5.

London: Crystal Palace Dinosaurs

I talked a little bit about the history of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs in my post on “Making Nature” at the Wellcome Collection, and mentioned that I would try to revisit them at some point in the future so I could blog about them. I was intending on going in nicer weather (though I only just realised I said I would try to see them over a year ago, so I don’t know what the hell my excuse was last summer, other than the fact that I was working a terrible horrible job at the time and didn’t want to do much of anything other than escape), but my friend who had never seen them kept badgering me to go with him until I finally just gave in, even though the day we picked was super cold (for April) and rainy, and to quote Gene Belcher, “I’m more of an indoor kid” even at the best of times.

   

Even though I was reluctantly going, I still always aim to be a punctual person (I think lateness is rude), so I felt like a real jerk when Marcus and I ended up meeting him there half an hour late (my fault because I wanted to get cake first, though mainly I blame the TfL website for not mentioning that a rail replacement bus service was in operation, because if the trains had been running we would have made it in time. Rail replacement my ass) and therefore tried to be more agreeable about the whole experience than I normally would, even when I was cold and wet and tired of walking around, which meant we ended up spending an hour and a half there instead of the half an hour I was planning on, and took in most of what Crystal Palace has to offer (not just dinosaurs!).

  

Crystal Palace takes its unusual name from the Crystal Palace, as in, the giant glass structure that was the centrepiece of the Great Exhibition of 1851, which was moved from Hyde Park to what was then called Penge Common in 1854 and soon joined by a number of other attractions, including the famous dinosaurs, which are the oldest dinosaur sculptures in the world. (They were made by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins under the direction of Richard Owen, who was the dinosaur expert of his day. Unfortunately, he was working with incomplete skeletons and somewhat flawed scientific knowledge, so he got a lot of things hilariously wrong, as you can probably see.)  Crystal Palace sounds like it was amazing until it fell into decline in the late 1800s, and eventually burned down in 1936.  All that you’re left with today are some statues, some (most?) of the dinosaurs, and a pretty big park, which I suppose is nothing to scoff at, but still not as great as seeing the Crystal Palace itself would have been.

  

We started with the dinosaurs, some of which have recently been restored. The collection, which also includes some prehistoric mammals, is arranged on four different “islands” which surround a lake that is apparently meant to represent primordial ooze (you can paddleboat on it these days). I loved the signage they have there now about the dinosaurs, which explains what modern palaeontologists think the Victorians got wrong (to amusing effect…please read the last sentence on the Hylaeosaurus), and also describes how Hawkins and Owen deliberately hid the dinosaurs whose reconstructions they were least confident about (yet left the Iguanodon out there loud and proud…). The Mosasaur is my personal favourite (below right) – he’s so damn derpy, but they all are really, and you have to wonder how the Victorians thought they would obtain food with those big fat bodies. Maybe just sit there with their mouths hanging open and wait for something to fly in?

  

The mammals are marginally less hilarious, though I still have to wonder about the tails on those camel-headed things, and I don’t know what they’re trying to hide on the giant sloth, because you can’t even see his face from the path. The giant elk look fine, but that’s because elk are still a thing, so they didn’t have to guess what they would look like (they originally had real antlers, but they were too heavy for the sculptures and the heads were in danger of cracking off, so they had to be replaced with fake ones). There’s also a random gorilla statue off by himself (not part of the islands), though I’m not sure why he was there, because he didn’t have a sign (other than the dinosaurs, pretty much nothing here does, which is a little frustrating when you’re trying to figure out who a headless statue was meant to be).

  

After getting our fill of laughing at the dinos, we headed off to explore the rest of the park, which meant tramping through an awful lot of mud, mainly. I was thrilled to discover there was a maze, though when we got inside, the giant puddles proved the greatest impediment to our journey, as the hedges weren’t grown in yet at this time of year and we could see right over the tops (it still took longer than I thought it would to find the centre though, so that’s something).

  

We also found a stage, so perhaps they have concerts there on occasion, though it was in such a state of disrepair that I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to stand on it. There are a couple of TV towers that loom over everything, but really the main other attractions of note are the only remaining parts of the original Crystal Palace complex, which include the aforementioned headless statues (and some with heads -still no idea who they are, though I looked it up afterwards, and apparently they’re meant to represent different countries), and those rather grand sphinxes on an Italianate wall.  They have also re-created a corner of the original structure, but it very literally is the bare minimum they could have done, and I would have loved to see more. I mean, why even bother just sticking up a couple of pieces of metal?! That’s just a tease!

  

After an hour and a half of exploring, we’d all had enough (frankly, I’d had enough after the dinosaurs, but like I said, I was trying not to complain as much as I usually do), so we headed off to a brewery in nearby Gipsy Hill (which I also didn’t complain about, even though I’m not normally very keen on drinking), passing a house that Leslie Howard used to live in on the way. The dinosaurs are a delight, and well worth seeing (in better weather, if possible), but I do wish they could rebuild more of the Crystal Palace (and restore more of the dinosaurs). There is also a tiled Victorian subway in the area that is occasionally open to the public, and a small Crystal Palace museum, which I strangely did not visit (I’m not even sure if it was open when we were there). It’s all free, and at any rate, it’s something to do of a weekend, especially if you enjoy looking at dogs in sweaters (and one with a tennis ball who followed Marcus around for quite a while, see below – I would have taken him home with us, but I think the owner might have objected).

  

London: “Somewhere in Between” and “Ayurvedic Man” @ the Wellcome Collection

I recently went to see the new special exhibition at the Wellcome Collection: “Somewhere in Between,” which runs until 27th August (my birthday!). I normally wouldn’t exactly rush out to something arty like this, but I wanted to make sure I also got to see “Ayurvedic Man: Encounters with Indian Medicine” in the first floor gallery, which ended on the 8th of April (also I had a hankering for roti canai, which was the main reason I needed an excuse to go to Euston (there’s a Malaysian restaurant near the station)).

  

Like all Wellcome exhibitions, “Somewhere in Between” is free, and was happily much less crowded than their exhibitions normally are, perhaps due in part to the open layout. The exhibition consists of four immersive installations that are the result of collaborations between artists and scientists, and are meant to be an exploration of art and science, or, I suppose, somewhere in between, hence the title.

  

The first “immersion” we ventured into was “Sire” by Maria McKinney. I don’t think I fully understood the exhibition when I was in there (I was more just like, “Ooh look, pictures of cows wearing silly sculptures. Oh, but wait, they’re being pulled by rings through their noses and they look like they might be in pain. Not great”) but after reading the exhibition catalogue, it makes more sense. Apparently the photographs are of stud bulls, wearing sculptures woven from semen straws (brightly coloured straws that are used to artificially fertilize cows with bull semen), and the sculptures themselves were inspired by genomes. So it’s a commentary on how genetic breeding has affected the modern cattle industry, but I don’t feel it was really a critique, more just that it was asking us to recognise that a lot of selective breeding has gone into creating the modern cow. As a vegetarian, I probably would have preferred more of a critique (though I don’t eat meat more because of pickiness than ethics, so I’m not really very militant about it), but it was fine, albeit not really what I would call immersive.

  

I can’t properly comment on Daria Martin’s pieces, because I didn’t get what the hell was going on. I went into two connected rooms, both of them showing videos of a woman touching a knife, but it was kind of weird (not in a good way), so I left pretty promptly. It was meant to be about synesthesia, but it wasn’t communicated very well. Martina Amati’s “Under”, whilst also a video, was a lot better; it was three video screens placed around a room showing her and others freediving, and because of the lighting and sound effects, did actually feel a bit like I was underwater, so was properly immersive.

  

But the best installation of all was John Walter’s “Alien Sex Club”, which was a maze themed around a gay sex club with a sinister side, as the threat of HIV was lurking around every corner. I loved the wallpaper in here, and Walter’s paintings (especially the tarot-esque cards on the back wall), and the cartoons, and even the creepy booths in the back with glory holes (I was the main creeper in them though – I think I’m far too good at creeping for my own good). It felt like he’d certainly put the most effort into his installation out of the artists here, and I liked that we could actually explore the maze and interact with it in a limited way. On the whole, the exhibition wasn’t as appealing to me as something history-based (rather than art-based) would have been, and I’m not sure I really got the message that most of the artists were trying to convey (the science theme seemed rather stretched), but it was free, so it was fine. 2.5/5.

  

We then headed upstairs to see “Ayurvedic Man,” based around an 18th century Nepali painting from the Wellcome’s collection, as well as many other paintings, texts, and artefacts relating to Indian medicine, specifically ayurveda, which is a branch of Indian medicine that translates as “the knowledge of long life.” This exhibition actually seemed larger than the one downstairs in the main gallery, and certainly contained much more detailed text panels than “Somewhere in Between.” I really liked the copies of all the letters exchanged between Henry Wellcome’s agent in India and Wellcome himself about the agent’s acquisitions, because they let us see colonialism in action in a way that the Wellcome normally shies away from, and were also a fascinating view into how the Wellcome Collection was initially curated (Wellcome advised against buying too much erotic art, as it was far too “common,” presumably in both senses of the word).

  

I thought the information about how British authorities attempted to deal with the plague epidemic of 1896 was extremely interesting (their public heath measures often failed due to their lack of cultural sensitivity, big surprise), and I liked the interactive cartoons about the plague measures from the Hindi Punch (though I didn’t get to explore the touch screen ones further, because a couple of guys were hogging it, and when I tentatively touched what I thought was part of a different screen (they were projected on the wall, so it was hard to tell), it turned out to be part of the one the guy was using, and he gave me such a dirty look that I just got the hell out of there).

 

Actually, everything in here was pretty interesting, not least the iPads at the end where you could explore healing recipes using one of eight healing spices in Ayurvedic medicine, and submit one of your own (I totally did, as you’ll see below, though I don’t think it was healing in quite the way they intended. It also isn’t my recipe (it’s from the excellent Taco Cleanse, but I know it by heart because I make it all the time), but I have altered it a bit to my preferences, and it is a very tasty sauce (warning, may cause stomach cramps!). And possibly TMI, but I should point out that I don’t, in fact, need a cure for constipation – I only phrased it like that because when I was writing the recipe, it had the prompt “I would use this recipe if” which I was annoyed to see didn’t turn up on the published recipe, as it completely changes the meaning!). I think this was a far more successful exhibition than “Somewhere in Between,” because it does play much more to the Wellcome’s strengths, which are of course history of medicine, and its fascinating collection of curiosities. Sorry that I’ve blogged about it too late for anyone to see it, but the upcoming exhibition on teeth in that gallery looks promising as well, if the adorable squirrel image they’re using to advertise it is anything to go by. 4/5.

  

London: Fatberg + Votes for Women @ the Museum of London

During the week of the so-called “beast from the east” (I know other places in the UK had actual dangerous levels of snow, but we only got what I would consider a dusting in London, and everyone was still treating it like such a big deal), instead of only working three days a week, per usual, and having some time off to enjoy the rare snow sighting (there wasn’t really enough to make a snowman or anything, but all I mean by enjoy the snow is that I would have cozily wrapped myself up in blankets in my flat and drank hot chocolate), I had to actually work a full week, which included a training course at the Museum of London. While I didn’t really want to have to bundle up and fight my way across the city (in a place where “leaves on the track” are enough to shut the trains down, you can probably guess how well they cope with snow), on the plus side, I was excited to go check out the infamous fatberg.

   

I was originally supposed to have an hour break for lunch, but in light of the snow we all agreed to only take half an hour so we could leave earlier, which meant my time looking around the museum was going to be somewhat rushed. Fortunately, the fatberg takes pride of place right by the museum’s entrance. For those who may not know (probably most people outside of London), the fatberg was a huge disgusting sewer blockage discovered in Whitechapel last September, which was ultimately found to weigh 130 tonnes, and was over 250 metres long (still haven’t completely wrapped my head around the metric system, but I get that that’s big). So naturally, the Museum of London was keen to get their hands on a chunk (who wouldn’t be?) and following a rather delightful social media campaign that was an homage to The Blob, it is now on display.

  

The exhibit contained some information about the fatberg, its removal, and what we can do to prevent future fatbergs (basically, don’t flush things down the toilet other than toilet paper and actual bodily waste), but of course the highlight was the fatberg itself, which they keep segregated in its own dark mysterious room bedecked with warning signs like “enter if you dare!” Given all the hype, the fatberg is admittedly underwhelming, but still pretty gross, and if you take all the fatberg promotion in the roadside attraction spirit in which it was probably intended, then the underwhelmingness is in keeping with that (and it’s nice to see a museum that doesn’t take itself too seriously!). They actually have two small lumps: one that has started to break apart, and another that is still largely intact (rumour has it that sometimes flies and maggots emerge from it, though there were none in evidence at the time of my visit). I’m not sure what else I can really say about it – it is just a big fatty lump with some wrappers sticking up out of it, and I think this exhibit could have really been enhanced with some authentic smells; obviously it would be a public health hazard if they let people smell the actual fatberg, but I’m sure they could have piped in some imitation rotting meat combined with stinky toilet smells (paraphrasing from a man quoted in the exhibit who had to remove the damn thing).

  

I also had time to pop down and see some of the suffragette stuff they’ve got on display to commemorate the centenary of the Representation of the People Act of 1918, and though this too was smaller than I was hoping, they did have a few interesting pieces. I liked seeing the grille Muriel Matters and Helen Fox chained themselves to in the Ladies’ Gallery of the House of Commons (both to draw attention to the issue of female suffrage, and to remove the grille itself, which blocked women’s view of Parliamentary proceedings), as well as the body belt they used to do it. I also loved Kitty Marshall’s silver necklace which commemorated her three terms of imprisonment (she was initially imprisoned for throwing a potato at Churchill, which I think is amazing. Potatoes are a hilarious thing to throw at someone, plus Churchill needed to be taken down a peg or two).

  

The pendant given to Louise Eates of the Kensington branch of the WSPU was really interesting too, as was Emmeline Pankhurst’s hunger strike medal, and the letters from Winefride Rix to her daughter written whilst she was in prison were quite sad. I especially liked that the caption mentioned how Winefride did not go on hunger strike with the other suffragettes, and her husband even sent her a box of apples whilst she was in prison. I can appreciate this, because I think it makes Winefride very relatable.  Sure, I can say I would have been right up there with the suffragettes, but in reality, I don’t think I’m brave enough to endure force-feeding. I’d like to think I would at least have participated in marches and things that I could have been arrested for; but to go on a hunger strike on top of it?! I think I would have chickened out big time once they brought out the tubes. So I liked that this exhibition showed that there were a range of women out there fighting the good fight to the best of their abilities, and not just the diehards, commendably brave though they were, which I think is an important lesson, because it shows that everyone can contribute to social change in some small way, and not just those at the more extreme ends of the spectrum.

  

I also of course had a wander through the shop (since I love to torture myself by looking at all the amazing stuff museum shops can buy when they have a decent budget and the visitor numbers to back it up), and they had a lot of great suffragette stuff (sadly no sash, but I was tempted by the “Votes for Women” umbrella) and even better fatberg souvenirs, so I succumbed and bought a badge and a totebag (and a t-shirt for Marcus) reading “Don’t Feed the Fatberg” which I suppose is an environmental message, but thanks to the campiness of the design, feels more like merchandise for a B-movie, which is honestly why I was drawn to it in the first place. I don’t know if I can rate these exhibitions because they’re both very small, but they are free (as is the rest of the Museum of London), and though the fatberg is not all that impressive, I’m still glad I saw it. Not as glad as I would have been to have the day off, but it was better than actually being at work.

London: “Rhythm and Reaction” @ Two Temple Place

It’s that time of year again: there’s another new exhibition at Two Temple Place, and on paper, it sounded not dissimilar to the Jazz Age exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art, so I was intrigued to see how it would compare.  “Rhythm and Reaction: The Age of Jazz in Britain,” which runs until 22 April, is described as bringing together “painting, prints, cartoons, textiles and ceramics, moving film, instruments and the all-important jazz sound, to explicitly examine the influence of jazz on British art, design and wider society.” I love much of the 1920s’ aesthetic, as I’ve well established on this blog, and at any rate, it sounded much less controversial than last year’s somewhat ill-conceived exhibition on the Sussex Modernists (featuring the work of incestuous molester Eric Gill), so I was eager to check it out. (If you count Ocean Liners at the V&A, there’s been a lot of ’20s and ’30s focused exhibitions on lately. I’m not sure why that is, since it’s still too early for the centenary.)

  

Although I said I thought this exhibition would be less controversial, I realised that wasn’t quite the case upon entering and being greeted by pictures of people in blackface (and really racist drawings of black people), but at least this time it was easy to understand where the curator was coming from – jazz was instrumental (intentional pun) in breaking down some racial barriers, and it was important to see how black people were depicted in British society in the early 20th century in order to understand the difference jazz made (although apparently performers in blackface regularly appeared on British TV until the ’70s, and you can still buy those awful “Golliwog” dolls, so maybe it didn’t make that much of a difference after all). It was also interesting to learn that even people of African descent used blackface in some cases because it was such a recognisable stylistic convention at the time for performers of ragtime music.

  

I soon realised that this exhibition wasn’t just an exploration of the Jazz Age on the other side of the Atlantic, but was in fact a very different kettle of fish to the one at the CMA. Whereas the CMA had focused mainly on material things and the joy of acquisition that in some ways led to the Great Depression, “Rhythm and Reaction” was mainly about music and the musicians themselves. Therefore, a lot of the objects in the downstairs part of the exhibition were instruments, including a wall of banjos (I still REALLY want to learn the banjo), a player piano, and some most excellent drum kits, especially the one from the Kit Kat Club, and my very favourite specimen of all: a chicken drum that laid eggs!

  

I also adored some of the cartoons that showed how people felt about jazz in Britain when it first became popular in the post-WWI era – the best one is pictured above, and shows a man being driven to insanity by hearing ragtime everywhere he goes (I don’t mind ragtime, but I can certainly symphathise by being driven mad by having to listen to other people’s music on public transport – my only consolation is that if I can hear it leaking from their headphones, I’m quite sure they must be ruining their own hearing, but whistlers are just plain obnoxious!).

  

After finishing up downstairs (which had more in it than it might seem – you could only photograph some of the objects), we headed up to a room filled mainly with books, and a handful of objects relating to this period, including a tea set and that rather wonderful TfL poster (I just checked, and copies of this design are still for sale at the London Transport Museum, because TfL doesn’t miss a chance to make a quid).

  

The room next to this (the final room of the exhibition) was both painting and text-heavy, and explained more about the impact jazz had on British society. After the First World War, travelling American bands first brought jazz over to Europe, and clearly, some people liked what they heard, and developed their own syncopation-heavy style of British jazz (which purists eventually turned against, trying to get back to the African-American roots of the music). It gradually seeped into the wider culture, and began to inspire artists and designers. It also led to African-American musicians travelling to Britain, and because of a law enacted in 1935 which banned whole American bands from performing in this country (which was itself a response to American musicians complaining about British bands performing in the States), famous band leaders like Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway travelled by themselves and hired British (often white) musicians once they got here, which helped integration, at least amongst the musical community (though its impact on wider society clearly wasn’t as great as the exhibition seemed to imply).

  

This was all well and good, and whilst I certainly enjoyed learning more about the role of jazz in 1920s and ’30s British society (at least some segments of British society), I felt that the exhibition tried to tell me about the effect it had on art and fashion rather than showing me, which I would have preferred (I realise fashion wasn’t included in the exhibition description, but I was hoping they’d sneak some in there). Sure, there were some examples of textiles, pottery, and those fabulous brogue-style heels from Liberty, which I would wear in a heartbeat, but the exhibition was mainly art and music based, and even the music aspect of it was shown more through signage or instruments than the music itself. There was jazz music playing on a CD player in most of the rooms, which did enhance the atmosphere, but I didn’t feel there was enough information about what I was hearing for me to really understand the difference between British and American jazz, since I have very little knowledge of musical terminology (this despite the fact that I played alto sax (poorly) for five years, and guitar (adequately) for seven, but I was just playing things other people had written, not composing my own music!).

  

I also felt like there was a fair bit of wasted space that could have been filled up with objects. For example, there was a very long glass case in one of the rooms stretching across half the wall, yet the only things in it were two small books plopped right in the middle of the case. Surely they could have found something interesting to fill the rest of it up with! Although it took up the same amount of space as every other exhibition I’ve seen there, for some reason the Ancient Egyptian exhibition felt bigger to me, perhaps because there was more in each room so it took longer to look around.

  

And though the text was mostly pretty interesting, some of it was hard to read!  This was partly the fault of the people in the exhibition, like one man who planted himself in front of a video and refused to move so I could read the sign his big shiny head was blocking, even though I was quite obviously trying to crane my neck around him to see it; but some of it was due to poor positioning – why was there a long sign on the wall next to a video in the first place, especially when the lighting was quite poor in that corner?

  

If there was some way that this exhibition could have been combined with the one at the CMA, then I would have been perfectly happy, as it had some of the things the CMA was lacking – a discussion of the way jazz impacted society, as well as some examples of the music itself – but lacked other things that the CMA did so well, like providing concrete examples of the way jazz affected style and architecture. Basically, I wanted all the beautiful things from the CMA, but with a bit more context and soul. There were no clothes to speak of here, except the quite racist costumes shown above, and very little in the way of other material goods, and I think when you’re talking about a period with a style as iconic as the 1920s, it would be nice to have some examples of both, particularly since they had enough space to include more. But it was a free exhibition, versus the CMA’s $15 admission fee, so I can’t complain overmuch. It was a fine way to kill half an hour or so, and I liked learning more about the jazz age in England, I just wish I could have been shown the impact of jazz in a more visual way (or in a more auditory way for that matter, since we are talking about music!). 3/5.