Saturday Wanderings, Part Two

(Monday update: bank account opened after one more visit to the International Office at school. The poor girl at the bank tried to tell me that the information I had wasn't going to work again, but I think scary Ms Johnson showed up and intimidated her into opening my account anyway. She looked decidedly shaken for the rest of our interaction. Oops.)

After the surprising encounter with the "Occupy London" protest, I crossed the Millenium Bridge (the one the Death Eaters destroyed in the movie version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) toward the Globe Theatre and Tate Modern. The Globe's season ended at the beginning of October, but it's available for tours and the gift shop is delightful. I'm glad to have seen two productions at the Globe previously (a very memorable--for most of us (ahem)--"Titus Andronicus" and a somewhat sleep-inducing "Henry VIII"), so I didn't do a tour, but I always like to visit the theatre.

I've always wanted to visit Tate Modern, but it's never fit into a tour schedule when I'm with students. The perception is always that modern art will scare high school students away from museums, but I've found the opposite to be true. The one time I've convinced a tour company to take us to the MOMA in New York, it provided the best opportunities for discussions and opened the door for more discoveries of what art can mean. I was really excited to have an entire afternoon to poke around the Tate Modern by myself, so that if I ever do have the chance to bring students back I'll have some things to say.

Sunny likes Matisse

Every time I have the opportunity to encounter works by artists such as Picasso, Monet, Matisse, Pollock, Warhol, or Lichtenstein in person, I'm thrilled. While seeing them in books can be informative, it's nothing compared to experiencing them in person. The Mark Rothko room took my breath away, and sculptures by Claes Oldenburg simultaneously make me feel happy and a little sad. All of that said, the star of the day for me was an extraordinary exhibition by American artist Taryn Simon.

From a description of the artist's work, partially available on Tate's website:
Tate Modern premieres an important new body of work by the American artist Taryn Simon. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters was produced over a four-year period (2008-11), during which Simon travelled around the world researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the eighteen ‘chapters’ that make up the work, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects documented by Simon include feuding families in Brazil, victims of genocide in Bosnia, the body double of Saddam Hussein’s son Uday, and the living dead in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate.


Each work in A Living Man Declared Dead is comprised of three segments. On the left of each chapter are one or more large portrait panels systematically ordering a number of individuals directly related by blood. The sequence of portraits is structured to include the living ascendants and descendants of a single individual. The portraits are followed by a central text panel in which the artist constructs narratives and collects details. On the right are Simon's "footnote images" representing fragmented pieces of the established narratives and providing photographic evidence.


The empty portraits represent living members of a bloodline who could not be photographed. The reasons for these absences are included in the text panels and include imprisonment, military service, dengue fever, and women not granted permission to be photographed for religious and social reasons. 


Simon's presentation explores the struggle to determine codes and patterns embedded in the narratives she documents, making them recognisable as variations (versions, renderings, adaptations) of archetypal episodes from the present, past and future. In contrast to the methodical ordering of a bloodline, the central elements of the stories - violence, resilience, corruption and survival - disorient the highly structured appearance of the work. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters highlights the space between text and image, absence and presence, and order and disorder.

In almost all of the portrait panels, there were several empty spaces for people who could not be included for the reasons listed above. In each of these cases, I found myself returning to these absences as the most important of the family line - particularly when the reason given was "abducted" or "missing, presumed dead." Many of the stories included longer family narratives, like those imprisoned under Francisco Franco's regime for homosexuality, or long-standing feuds between members of a family. One portrait panel included pictures of rabbits in a lab in Australia that had each been injected with a different fatal disease to see the effects - the rabbit is considered an undesirable animal in Australia, to the point where it's no longer an Easter Bunny delivering chocolate eggs to children, it's an Easter Bilby (see this website for the Australian Bilby Appreciation Society, highlighting the Foundation for Rabbit-Free Australia). The "footnote image" for this work was the mass grave of these rabbits who had all died between the time the original portraits were taken and the exhibition.

After so much emphasis on "absence" in the family lines, a very arresting portrait panel for me was one of a family in China where every single member was present. In the family's narrative, the artist noted that she had to appeal to the Chinese government for permission to photograph a family for inclusion and she was told that this was the family she would use. She could not get any details about why this family was chosen and no member of the family had anything to say to her about their lives or personal experiences. In many of the portraits, the absence was the most telling feature about a family and their life. For this portrait, the government-mandated presence of all members seemed somehow more ominous.

The view from the terrace of the cafe.

I couldn't find it in me to write about this part of the Saturday wanderings sooner - there was too much processing I needed to do. I'm still not sure I've done it justice, and I'm not certain I can; this is the type of work one needs to experience on their own and I'm certain I'll head back to this exhibition before it closes at the beginning of January 2012. When I finished with Taryn Simon I bought myself an espresso and sat on the terrace outside the cafe for awhile, because my brain was too saturated to take in anything else.

Because I'm a bit of a glutton for punishment, when I got back to my neighborhood, I - once again - began reading James Joyce's Ulysses. I own two copies of this book, though I've never managed to get through the whole thing. The second copy I bought because I had literally thrown the first copy against the wall in frustration so many times and the binding couldn't hold up to much more; that copy is at school and I read from it as an example of stream-of-consciousness for my students when we cover the Moderns (they always get really mad at it - it's cute). I need to have read a few chunks of this novel by the first week in December for class and, knowing my unsuccessful track record with it, I figured I should start early. Thus far I'm not tempted to throw it against the wall, but I would not be surprised if there's an angry blog post about James Joyce in my future. Regardless, I did my reading in Tavistock Square Garden, the garden in the middle of the square where I live. It's really a lovely spot and I enjoy watching all the people who take the long way around to cut through a garden almost every time they pass one. In the States, I often look at parks as I go by (usually in a car), but I wouldn't go out of my way to walk through one unless I had some extra time. Here, every day I see busy commuters with briefcases, rushing toward the nearest Underground station, who nevertheless take the extra minutes to cut through the garden on their way. Londoners have a special place in their hearts for these gardens - which occur quite often - and it's really lovely to see. I think more city dwellers could use the reminder to take advantage of the green spaces where they find them, and personally, I need the reminder to get out of my car. I glance wistfully when I see a Prius pass me, but I'm very much enjoying the freedom from driving. Regardless, I'm convinced I would fail at driving here - if crossing streets as a pedestrian is difficult, doing it in a car is much more so. I'll leave you with some pictures of Tavistock Square Gardens now. I'm heading out for another bout with Mr. Joyce.

Statue of Ghandi in Tavistock Square Garden

Connaught Hall, where I live.