art overdose

Decided that I was neglecting my responsibilities as a Friend of the Tate and went to three art exhibitions in one weekend. Friday dad and I took one of our Fridays off and went to Tate Britain to see

Gothic Nightmares

There appears to be two main sorts of Gothic Nightmare
1) demon sitting on semi naked-woman leering suggestively and/ or
2) ancient god getting liver torn out (they def had a thing against old Prometheus)
There were several hundred versions of these two themes in every possible shade of grey and brown plus the occasional sculpture and some mild erotica behind a tasteful muslin curtain. It makes me think I have very tame nightmares (they mostly revolve around failing my maths a-level and being unable to find a ladies loo). Not one of the Tate's best.

Sunday I went to Tate Modern for some much livelier shows: From the Bauhaus to the New World followed the fortunes of a couple of modernist artists( Albers and Moholy-Nagy) from Nazi Germany to America. . They appear to have tried everything: stained glass, painting, printing, furniture, sculpture and had a whale of a time doing it. Bauhaus to New World

Exhibition three was my favourite however. Martin Kippenberger according to the blurb was 'a master appropriator who consistently absorbed, challenged and transformed the world around him' I think he was also slightly nuts. He got signpainters to paint for him, painted white on white pictures, did life size casts of himself, painted gondolas and did an installation of a load of his paintings in a skip. The major work in this exhibition was a tennis court full of madly built tables and chairs which is supposed to be an illustration of a Kafka novel. I did really enjoy this exhibition I thought it was very witty and funny but why do they have to be so reverential about it? How much nicer if you could have actually explored the
happy End of Kafka's Amerika and sat in the chairs and dug around in the skip.