SARAH URIST GREEN: This
episode is supported by the Great Courses Plus. London is a big city-- a crowded
and lively global metropolis. It holds an embarrassment
of cultural riches, and we had only a few days
to take advantage of them. Our timing aligned with what a
handful of art and media people call Frieze Week
in early October, when the Frieze London
Art Fair pitches its tents in Regent's Park. All of the galleries
and art venues put forward some of their
best shows of the year, and fancy art
collectors descend. We were there too. We began our art trip in
Trafalgar Square, whose fourth plinth was intended to
hold a statue of William IV, but instead stood empty due
to lack of funds for over 150 years. In 1999, the plinth
became a site for temporary art
commissions, and has since featured an inverted
replica of itself in resin, an architectural
model for a hotel, a platform for members of the
public to say and do anything they wish, a replica
of Horatio Nelson's ship in a bottle with sails
made of African batik fabric, a boy on a rocking horse,
a big blue rooster, and the skeleton
of a horse around whose front leg is tied a live
ticker of the London Stock Exchange. And it's now host to a
very large thumbs up forged in bronze by David Shrigley,
and it's titled Really Good, which doesn't sound right
unless you have a Brit say it. WOMAN: (BRITISH
ACCENT) Really good. SARAH URIST GREEN: Our
mistrust of this symbol of positivity creeps
in almost immediately. The unnaturally elongated
thumb makes us notice not only how phallic the
sculpture is, but also how phallic Nelson's
Column is, and how grandiose architectural
expressions of confidence in general can be. So here, we have this
monumental expression of confidence in London's
locus of protest-- and just post-Brexit. Despite uncertainty and
unrest at home and abroad, we're still really
good, everybody, right? We then took a short walk to
the National Portrait Gallery, which is filled with a great
many painted portraits of kings and queens and generals
and wealthy people throughout British
history walking through the galleries I kept
thinking about the stories not told through these pictures--
contemporaneous events not reflected in these highly
staged portraits-- even, or perhaps especially, in
the more recent portraits, which made me think about how
and why portrait painting kept being a thing after the
invention of photography. And then, as if the curators
could hear my thoughts, I came across a display of truly
stunning photographic portraits highlighting black presence
in Britain before 1948. The humanity and intimacy
of these pictures was in stark contrast to those
in the previous galleries, telling more compelling,
nuanced stories, and showing off a rich collection, only
a fraction of which can be on display at any time. They also had a temporary
exhibition of photographs by American photographer William
Eggleston, a pioneer and master of color photography. These photographs were printed
using a dye transfer process that yields brilliantly
saturated colors and brings Eggleston's subjects
from the '60s and '70s to startling life. It's not just the
people in the pictures. It's the frame, the
time, the place, and the light that make
me feel like I was there, taking complete strangers and
causing them to feel familiar, sympathetic, and dimensional. We moved on to the
Royal Academy of Art, which is hosting a big,
bold, celebratory exhibition about abstract expressionism. It has all the heavy
hitters-- Still, Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko,
Newman, Kline, Rhinehardt, a woman artist, Smith. To be fair, there are
more women in the show than the magnificent
Joan Mitchell. And there are efforts
throughout the show to complicate the usual
story about this time in the mid 20th century
when a number of artists, mostly in America,
mostly white men, started making big,
expressive paintings. Of course, they weren't all big
and they weren't all expressive and they weren't all
made by serious macho dudes in New York. But in general, it reinforces
the usual heroic narrative about this time in art. And I couldn't help
but think about how it's as much about
the stories we choose to tell as how we tell them. OK, it is impressive. You will like it. But what if all the effort of
bringing these works together in one place had been
devoted to another subject? A new subject? One that hadn't yet been told? We made a final stop at
the Courtauld Gallery to check out a few paintings
that might look familiar, like van Gogh's Self-Portrait
with Bandaged Ear, Manet's A Bar at
the Folies-Bergere, and incredible works by
Monet, Cezanne, Gauguin. And then I just short circuited
because of masterpiece overload, and we escaped
back to East London for beers and fries and delicious
food at Blixen and reveled in the sundry
joys of not looking at art. The next day, we
spent the morning with the truly delightful
Peter Liversidge, who charmed us with his studio
full of unusual collections and sent us off with numerous
album recommendations, our own mix CDs,
and an assignment that you're going
to very much enjoy. Then it was onto
Whitechapel Gallery, where along with saluting
the Guerrilla Girls exterior banner, we took our time delving
into the interior display of their recent research into
diversity in European art organizations. We also had the extreme
pleasure of seeing Whitechapel's exhibition of six
large scale video installations by South African artist
William Kentridge. Each is an exquisitely
thoughtful arrangement of materials and moving
images and light and sound, animating Kentridge's
distinctive charcoal drawings and synthesizing
the creative talents of a number of collaborators. The works delve into a
deep pool of subjects, particular and
universal, from apartheid and histories of colonialism
to his own artistic process and to the nature of time. We made our way west to Hauser
& Wirth, a commercial gallery running two shows that
the time, one of which is a multi-room installation
by Mike Kelly, which recreates the Seven Star Cavern, a
landmark in LA's Chinatown, which he positioned adjacent to
an inaccessible enclosure that is part security fence, part
traditional Chinese gate. They also had a show up of works
by renowned Brazilian artists Lygia Pape, including two of her
remarkable Tteia installations. Pape diverged from
the harsh geometries of Brazil's concrete art
movement in the 1950s, and evolved her own
approach to abstraction that is simultaneously
geometric and expressive. This installation, originally
constructed in 1976, is made of metallic thread
strung across the room to create volumes
that transform as you move throughout the space. Here with her work, I
was able to appreciate the softness, the subtlety,
and the delicate beauty that is possible in abstraction--
how these lines slip in and out of legibility, as if by magic. It was transportive,
immersive, and meditative, and I did not want to leave. But eventually, we had
to, and we found our way to the Serpentine Galleries
to see their outdoor pavilions during the final
weeks of their run. The series was conceived
in 2000 as a way to introduce you to
contemporary architecture by commissioning some of the
world's greatest architects who had not yet completed a
permanent building in the UK to make a temporary structure
on the gallery's lawn, taking a maximum of six months
from invitation to completion. This year's pavilion is
designed by Bjarke Ingels Group, and is a play on one of
the most basic elements of architecture--
the brick wall. Ingels' wall, however, has
been unzipped and expanded into space, forming a cavity
beneath it that houses a cafe and hosts activities. The program is a clever
way to address and move beyond the strictures of a more
traditional exhibition space. But the Serpentine
has those as well. We took in their Marc Camille
Chaimowicz exhibition, which probes the territory
between art and design, public and private space,
and the tenuous divisions between the everyday object,
decoration, and so-called fine art. We also checked out
the exhibition of works by Helen Marten in
the Sackler Galleries, a truly confounding amalgam
of materials and textures and images that caused me to
walk round and round the space, trying and failing
to pin them down. That's not to say I
didn't enjoy them. I did, but it's precisely
because I couldn't quite determine what I
was seeing and what I might conclude from them. On our last day in London,
we made our pilgrimage to Tate Modern to film with
the legendary Guerrilla Girls, and also to check out the
newly opened Switch House building, which houses a number
of impressive, new, and light filled spaces that give
the museum even more room to show off their enormous
and magnificent collection. What you're seeing here is a
display of works from the 1960s forward that respond
in various ways to the architecture
of the space. I love many things
about this institution, but near the top
of my list is how they elegantly and
non-braggingly bring together works by a wide
variety of artists from all over the world, with
near equitable representation of works by men and women,
making meaningful efforts to tell wider and less expected
stories about art today and in the past. They allow us as visitors
to consider these works side by side, room by room,
and give us ample space and encouragement
to make connections across time and geography. We also got to see
the just opened installation in the Turbine
Hall by Philippe Parreno. Titled Anywhen, it was conceived
as a giant automaton that changes throughout the day and
throughout the exhibition's six-month duration. Here, you might
experience a sequence of flashing lights,
moving panels, video, and sound environments, as
well as floating inflatable fishies, all of whose movements
are triggered by software informed by microorganisms,
which react to and activate parts
of the commission through a bioreactor at
the far end of the hall. How much of this is
evident to the large crowd that gathers here? We'll never know. But what we do know and
what is palpable regardless is the sensation
that the building is behaving unpredictably-- that
we must pause or even lay down to observe its workings, to try
to determine what is the heart and what is the building, and to
stay attuned to an environment where anything, small
or large, might happen. We then spilled out
into a glorious fall afternoon and headed
toward Regent's Park for the week's main event. This tent and another
tent not too far from here is Frieze Art Fair. Now, this is not the
democratic kind of art fair where anyone can
sign up for a booth and display their handmade
wares to kindly passersby. This is a highly
competitive enterprise that galleries from
around the world apply to and pay considerable
sums to be part of. They do this because
many wealthy collectors and influencers in
the field come here. And galleries can make
a significant portion of their annual
income in a few days. I like to think of this kind of
fair as more of a sociological experience than an art
experience, per se. And it's often as fascinating
to people watch and eavesdrop as it is to take in the art. And there is a ton of art. A lot of it is good. But it's truly challenging to
appreciate in such a space. You get distracted
by everything-- the people, the
camera operators, the way the wind whips
at the tent around you. And yet, you still stumble
upon works and environments that surprise and intrigue--
like Celia Hempton's occupation of Southern Reid's booth, which
she painted in its entirety and presented within her series
called Chat Random, where she connects with men online
and paints her interactions. I and many others were
drawn to Hauser & Wirth's striking space,
which was curated with a collection of works
from the 1940s and '50, many from estates, presented as
a fictional artist's bohemian studio. I enjoyed a curated section
of the fair, where galleries revisited exhibitions
from the '90s, highlighting moments
and works that had an impact then and now. I also found refuge
within the project room that presented the artistic
activities that take place at Operndorf Afrika
in Burkina Faso. I welcome this access
to a dynamic world of art and artists seemingly
far away, and yet functionally the same as that which
surrounded us here at the fair. It costs 52 pounds to visit
all of Frieze London-- not a small sum. But what it lacks in calm it
makes up for inefficiency, allowing you a chance to see
the works of more than 160 of the world's, quote,
leading galleries, all in the span of a few hours. It also gives you a
window into a world that is largely
inaccessible, but which fuels the art world, or the
web of gallerists, collectors, curators, museum board
members, and directors-- oh, and artists, who decide which
works belong in our museums and public collections. We saw an exhausting amount
of art in London-- no, really. Too much. But what London gives
us is the opportunity to see art in a huge
span of context. You can see it in public
spaces and private spaces, in historical spaces
and brand new spaces, in intimate and
highly social spaces. You can see it in
non-commercial spaces and super commercial spaces. And you can see an
enormous variety of art, arranged
in such ways that confirm prevailing narratives
and those that subvert them. And this is the glory
of art in London. It's all here. And you have the good fortune
to decide which way you like it or whether you like it at all. Thanks to the Great Courses Plus
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