Saturday found the Theme Of My Curation and I off to see some of that there ART, in the company of Ms H Arnold. We were off to The Whitechapel Gallery ("I did a gig here once" I said, as i seem to do EVERYWHERE) to see the Eduardo Paolozzi retrospective. Short review: it was BLOODY GRATE.
Living in That London I like Paolozzi mainly because you keep bumping into his WORKZ all over the place, like the murals at Tottenham Court Road, or the big Newton outside the British Library, or the Self Portrait With Banjo that used to be on High Holborn. ALSO, his sculptures 'Piscator' and 'Head Of INvention' feature pretty heavily in MY NOVEL, and ALSO he did the cover to Macca's 'Red Rose Speedway', so he is compliant with my interests on MANY levels.
Despite all this the exhibition was packed with LOADS of things I didn't know and loads of ART I'd not seen before, and the way it was laid out in vaguely chronological order made it weirdly EXCITING. "Ooh look, he's started doing collages!" I said to myself, when they popped up, and you could see his LINES starting to appear and then mutate into sculptures and SO ON. It was also full of HUMANITY e.g. the sculptures of people that look like calcified cyborgs are a) weird and strange b) weirdly TOUCHING. AND there was a sense of humour throughout, especially when he got DEAD SARCASTIC around the early 1970s.
It was the best ART thing I have been to in AGES and has stuck in my BRANE ever since. Even better, we bumped into that nice Mr Dec Munro, Hero Of Edinburgh, on the way round, and it turned out he's one of the people behind The Bill Murray pub where ALL comedy gigs seem to happen now, including the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppets that me and Mr S Hewitt are off to see next week.
It was, all told, a pretty flipping great afternoon out. ART! It's GOOD!
