exhibition – Mark In London

A Visit to the Whitechapel Gallery

My friend Tom who is bravely living with Parkinson’s has often urged me to visit this small but interesting gallery in the Aldgate area of London. The current exhibit was titled “Hamad Butt: Apprehensions.” The exhibit included three installations Butt created, as well as a series of drawings and paintings he created during his short career. He died at 32 in 1994 from complications of AIDS.

As the exhibit began, it included a discussion of the AIDs crisis as a historical evevent of the 1980s and 90s. It was strange for me to read of the events as a part of history that many alive today cannot recall. Butt, chose a conceptual rather than an activist approach to respond to the crisis.

The exhibit began with three istallations pictured below.

These three sculptures are called “Familiars.” They take three hallogens: bromine as liquid, iodine as solid crystals and chlorine as gas. They threaten the environment if released, symbolicly representing AIDS as it was perceived in the early days.

Much of his later work was untitled. Below are some examples.

I guess that I can say I left the exhibit saddened that so much artistic talent was lost to a disease that seemed to come out of nowhere and caused so much human destruction. In the artists work one can see so much passion, so much possibility

I am also reminded of the activism of those affected either directly or indirectly by HIV and AIDS. I wonder where that kind of courage has gone in our current world. We need to remember that the way to stop a scourge is to fight, to stick together and to work to save what is important as those who crusaded to find a cure for AIDS did.

Doggy Day Afternoon

After such a poignant topic, I turn now to a joyful one. Each September, the Brunswick Centre, a brutalist monument to the architecture of the 1960s that includes apartments and a shopping centre, holds “Doggy Day” where dogs and their people come in droves to see and be seen and to win prizes. This is one of my favorite events of my time in London. I have collected photos of some of my favorites. Indulge me.

Italian Greyound I fell in love with this one.

September in Bloomsbury

I took a stroll through two local parks today, the ones in Russell Square and neighboring Brunswick Square. There were so many late blooming flowers that I thought I should capture them.

With the London Underground on strike most of this week, I shall be looking for different kinds of adventures. I’ll let you all know if I find some.

The Tate Modern

The Tate Modern Gallery can always be counted on for unusual displays of art. Mire Lee envisioned the vast cavern that is the Turbine Hall of the museum as an “Open Wound.”

One of the major exhibits on at the Tate Modern is “Mike Kelley Ghost and Spirit.” This is a hard one for me to explain. Remember that guy in college who you were never sure if he was an Yippie, a stoner, or just a weird Art student? Well, this is his ouvre. Personally, I found some of it interesting, but quite a bit of it seemed sort of dated and “70’s not very successful experimentation.” I must not have been in the right mood for it, though, because it is a very important exhibition.

After Mike Kelley, I treated myself to a “visit with old friends,” favorite works from the Tate Modern permanent collection.

Art in the Park

As part of a project to put more public art in its parks, Camden Council, the local government responsible for maintaining the park at Russell Square in Bloomsbury erected this piece, Echo 2024 by Joe Duggan.

Finally, just across the road from Russell Square is the Weiner Holocaust Library. Its current exhibit, to quote the library’s description, “surveys the life and career of Jewish émigré sculptor Fred Kormis and reunites some of the most important of his diverse works, from the woodcut prints he produced in a Prisoner of War camp, to the medallions he made of leading figures in British life, and the first memorial in Britain to the victims of Nazi concentration camps.” At this particularly difficult moment in the history of the world and of the Middle East, the exhibit is particularly important in reminding us of why Israel was created as a homeland for the Jews who survived the Holocaust. Mr. Kormis, a veteran of the Austrian army from World War I, was lucky to escape from Nazi occupied Europe and find a new home in the United Kingdom.