A fortnight or so now to the Anselm Keifer Finnegans Wake flavoured exhibition at the White Cube at Bermondsey, a gallery I had only visited once before, as it happens at a time when nothing was on, as noticed at reference 4. No less than six years ago now; it has taken us that long to get back.
So off we go to Epsom Station, armed with our copy of the great work. A good quality hardback copy, quite old, pretty much unread.
Passing on the way a gentleman carrying what appeared to be a lot of sliced bread, apparently the daily ration for the local ducks. Clearly a gentleman who has not read the notices about not overfeeding water birds with the wrong sort of food. But maybe he likes birds more than he likes people.
Trains not terribly well, but we could get to Waterloo OK, and from there to London Bridge on a crowded tube. Walked down the side of the arches to Bermondsey Street, down there as far as Fel Fel where we took tea (for him), coffee (for her) and baklava. Paid for on a flashy, new-to-me machine made by a company called Poynt, to be found at reference 5. Apparently I was not the first customer to have noticed the thing.
On the way taking in this piece of street art. Better than a lot of the stuff one sees about, certainly better than the stuff that finds its way into the gardens at Hampton Court Palace and Wisley.
And a car which is presumably the property of someone who does not think that being disabled disqualifies one from owning a flashy car. Perhaps even driving it.
The first exhibit we took a proper look at was the heap of shopping trolleys snapped at the head of the post, with a closer snap included here. We thought that a man who could make a living out of putting derelict shopping trolleys in and on a heap of sand could not be all bad. The picture to the right is said to be inspired by Finnegans Wake, but I could not comment on that. Nor could I say which of the decorative scribbles were taken from the text, but I think that some of them were.
While I thought this exhibit was rather funny, if perhaps not very woke. From where I associate to the story of the tribe from the same part of world in which one acquired status for oneself and showed respect for some dear departed by tossing high denomination bank notes into the lake from a canoe on same. With a more homely version of the same sort of thing involving breeding very special pigs for ritual slaughter and consumption, I think in New Guinea, as told by Tom Harrisson at reference 6 - the rule there being that there was no merit in owning such a pig, the merit came from killing one. Not that different really to the antics of many of our own very rich people.
Or, indeed, exhibitors of prize bulls at the Smithfield Show where the rule used to be that the Supreme Champion - if not all the entrants - had to go for slaughter afterwards. The glory was very short-lived.
I also wondered about all the steel and glass cases housing many of the exhibits. One of the young people keeping an eye on things thought that the artist made them himself. Whatever the case, an odd business. There was no entry charge to this large show, which must have cost a huge amount of money to put on, in removal and installation costs if nothing else. No collection boxes either. So who was paying? Did Keifer charge enough, get enough, that one or two corporate sales would pay for the whole venture?
More shopping trolleys.
And thinking of expense, Kiefer must have got through a great deal of paint. Some of it gold in colour and appearance, some of it said to be real gold leaf.
And quite effective as paintings, if rather greedy of space.
The companion piece to the trolleys. From which I associated to a story I once heard in Dorset about Dame Trace and her unmade bed. To the effect than when the unmade bed went on its travels, the good dame was meticulous about recreating the unmade bed at each new location, presumably using photographs and perhaps labels and catalogues of parts. The story was that it mattered to her, even if the punters mostly neither cared nor noticed.
The three - or possibly four - main characters in Finnegans Wake.
Not only does the man do trolleys, he also does bricks. He has even gone to the bother of sourcing used bricks, rather than just calling up some new ones from Travis Perkins. What a star!
The back door, through which the show must have been wheeled in. Or possibly fork lift trucked in.
Not really knowing what to make of it all ourselves, we were left wondering what our late lamented expert on all matters Joyce would have made of it all. He probably knew the text of Finnegans Wake as well as anyone else in the country; he worshiped at the shrine, as it were. But I remember that one St. Patrick's day, I took him to a theatrical version put on in a shed then just outside the National Theatre by a French mime artiste. He was not at all impressed, but I had the feeling that the offence was more one of trespass than anything else. See reference 8 for my notice at the time.
More mundanely, we turned the pages of the great book in a public house on the way to lunch (to be reported in due course) and I was reminded how much is lost when you hear the words rather than read them. My impression, for what it is worth, is that you lose a great deal. The words are designed to be read; taken in through the eyes off the page, rather than through the ears off the aether. This despite the help to understanding that can be given by a sympathetic reading out loud - provided, that is, that the reader does not intrude too much of his own (or any other) personality into the reading. Which I, for one, find very irritating.
I close with a reminder of our important visit to a place important in annals of the Wake, noticed at reference 7. To wit, the graveyard housing the gravestone of one Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, HCF for short.
PS 1: the version of the first of the snaps above which appears in reference 1 in the new-to-me AVIF format, said to be a newish format, superior in various ways to the ubiquitous JPG format. Which may be the case, but it is not supported by this laptop, despite the claims for Windows 10 at reference 3. The alternative version used above was turned up by Bing.
PS 2: following the recently reported troubles with my PCs, the laptop on which I was preparing this post lost its Internet connection. I was reduced to some patch of some driver (or something) and rebooting, not having been able to save my work. The patch did not seem to have worked. But coming back to it the following morning (Tuesday), I found that restarting the laptop yet again did the trick and that I had lost little if anything of my work: the Google/Blogger auto-save feature had done what it said on the tin. I must have noticed the loss of the connection more or less as soon as it happened - and stopped working to go on the hunt for a repair, a successful hunt on this occasion.
References
Reference 1: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/jun/08/anselm-kiefer-finnegans-wake-bombed.
Reference 2: https://cassecroute.co.uk/. The lunch to come. Bumped to part two.
Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVIF.
Reference 4: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/06/cube.html.
Reference 5: https://www.poynt.com/.
Reference 6: Savage Civilisation - Tom Harrisson - 1937.
Reference 7: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/08/earwig-redux.html.
Reference 8: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/03/awake-in-shed.html.
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