Gili Good Show
One half of Splinters made his first intrepid visit to Tate Modern yesterday. London was dense, crowded and uncannily familiar. As I tried to find my way from Blackfriars Underground station to the new, and infamous, Millennium footbridge, I realised why: it was like I�d stumbled, Tron-like, into a new level of GTA3. Unfortunately, this time, without my flame-thrower.
I rushed around the galleries unable to slow down, because, in part, art galleries don�t do anything for me. My feelings reminded me of Georges Bataille when he said that in churches he wanted to laugh and in brothels he wanted to pray. Here, I was somewhere in between. If I say I was impressed by the Bonnard�s, the Giacometti�s, the Rothko�s, it shouldn�t indicate that I was anything more than nonplussed. But I like to think that this is the necessary provocation of art - its separateness - rather than its beauty or shock value.
As I�ve worked in a museum in the past - and I class this as a museum - I was more taken with the working lives of the people who run it. The same questions every day, the terrible silence of the artefacts themselves, out-of-place like bloody hearts ripped out of bodies and placed on a white sheet. How do they cope in such sterility?
My reason for going to the metropolis was to attend the opening of my artist-friend Oliver Gili�s exhibition at Gallery 286 on Earl�s Court Road. The main room has his normal paintings � digital images printed out. Downstairs, in a whitewashed basement reminiscent of the bowels of an 18th Century warship, there are a number of works placed in lightboxes. I think a good many of the bloodless displays at Tate Modern could do with lightboxes, although I guess Kandinsky didn�t have the lecky on tap then. The exhibition runs until the end of September, but, from what the website tells me, viewing is by appointment only.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Bollocks We’re All Angry Looks like I’m going t…
- Last Chance To See - Hogarth,Proesch and Passmore
- Safe Sex I recently went to the surrealism exhi…
- Out of Town part 1 Call me a nancy Southerner b…
- Fame thrower The new Warhol exhibition coming t…
