Hello all and apologies right away for my long-time absence from blog land – I can tell you’re just inconsolable about that… I have been uber busy moving house, attending weddings and in general being very very broke. Actually, the financial implications of cultural pursuing will now be discussed at length as this weekend I was expected to pay £14 to go and see an exhibition at the fucking Tate Britain - £14??????? Luckily, as the dirty hippy on the ticket desk pointed out I could pay £12.75 if I didn’t want to ‘make a donation’. I think £12.75 is quite enough of a fucking donation thank you very much, as I said to the slightly surprised looking meathead. It’s bloody disgusting is what I is, they know full well most people would be shamed into paying the full amount or wouldn’t read the small print – if they want to make a donation they bloody well can but they should leave their visitors out of it. Was most annoyed. The main problem is that after paying £12.75, let alone £14, you start to go round the exhibition thinking ‘was this worth it?’, which is not the way I want to be when going to see a show and, although I had been looking forward to it for ages and it was in general quite good it meant that I came away thinking, no, that probably wasn’t worth it. As we all know the Tate can’t hang for shit which usually I wouldn’t mind about, but after the major financial investment I made (and I really really need some new shoes for winter mind) it just didn’t deliver the goods. I think for £14 you really need to pull something pretty special out of your arse and let’s face it, with their incomparably shit lighting and bonkers heating system you never, ever will. Not impressed Tate, not impressed at all.The show in question was John Martin: Apocalypse. And did I mention they expect you to pay £14 to get in?? Bloody criminal. I love love love John Martin, he was so of his age. For example, something I didn’t know about until I went to see this was that he was heavily involved in designing transport and SEWEGE systems for London – transport and sewage!!! Is there any greater Victorian diversion!!?? All he needed to do was build a few grave yards and maybe exploit some parlour maids and he was the personification of the age!! = He was widely derided for bowing to popular tastes, he created hysterical visions of impending doom, he mass marketed his art work and toured his paintings around the world like a spooky carnival side show and most of all he believed in the power of SIZE. This man WAS the 19th century!!! Actually I have often had cause to ponder the question of magnitude when looking at his stuff and this exhibition really solidified my belief that, frankly, size does matter. Nudge nudge wink wink.
Martin was someone only comfortable in the Sublime, for domestic idylls go elsewhere which, when the century progressed, the Victorians clearly did. I admire that, this was a man who understood shock and awe, he was a showman, as the popularity of his touring exhibitions demonstrate, and that is why he was initially so roundly embraced, and then so quickly dropped. If you want emotional subtlety or human insight then you better wait a few years.
Saying this the text did keep harking on about the influence of Turner and Lorraine and although his airy light works for the most part made me want to vomit he made a pretty good stab at the Lorraine light trick – god I’m so obsessed with this how did he do it how did he do it?? How did he distil light like that??? No-one else has come close but snaps to John here as he did make a pretty good attempt. Turner on the other hand always makes me want to rip out my eyes with boredom.
It’s when you move into the 2nd room of the exhibition that you really start to see why he was so popular – he was the Chicken Little of his day, when you see his work on mass the sky is literally falling in. It’s for this reason surely that he was so popular? – peoples of the 19th century were obsessed with their own oblivion right?? They had a passion for all things macabre and their infatuation with death; death of themselves, death of the past, death of history, death of morals, left them living in this constant state of fearful anticipation. The world was changing, the comfortable sameness was slipping away, no wonder they were so fucking freaked out and why images like this seem to so perfectly sum up this strange window of time, this beginning of so much and end of so much more. This FEAR of the unknown!
From this point on Martin had pretty much found his feet and we start getting the massive apocalyptic style canvases with lots of lightening and the sky falling in. Architectural elements are often included, especially in the early works, along with tiny groups of harried looking figures. It’s this balance between the monumental and the micro that defines his work from this era and if I was going to be all clever I would talk about the Romantic idea of the individual here, but I can’t be bothered and would end up sounding like an ignorant ponce and I do enough of that already frankly.
A large part of the show focussed on the print work Martin did when his large scale paintings started to wane in popularity – he was broke and needed to utilise the huge popular appeal of his images. Once again he was proving himself to be the ultimate artist of the age, producing varying prices of prints in various sizes and quality of finish. He created print versions of his most successful paintings and sometimes original art works specifically for printing but he also received the highly lucrative commission to illustrate Milton’s Paradise Lost. He was active in both mezzotint and lithograph and my god he was good. The Paradise Lost series are particularly beautiful, and really capitalises on his use of darkness and light to great effect. Once again the lighter images are markedly less successful but it was in general a real revelation.
Throughout the exhibition I kept hearing insanely loud squealing and crashing noises which were intensely annoying. Especially in the room nearest. I couldn’t work out what all the commotion was about but it turns out the Tate were ‘trying something new’ and had decided to recreate, in a trendy new context, the touring exhibitions of The Last Judgement Triptych. To quote the Tate website:
“From the time of Martin’s death in 1854 until the 1870s the pictures were continually on tour in a paying exhibition that travelled to galleries, theatres, music halls and commercial and civic spaces all over the country. They were promoted relentlessly, with special ticket offers, accompanying lectures, evening viewings by gaslight, and breathlessly excited advertising campaigns. In 1856-7 the paintings were on display in New York, and in 1878-9 they travelled as far as Australia. It was claimed that as many as eight million people had seen the pictures around the world”
For a laugh they have commissioned some trendy lighting company to recreate one of the events that promoted the touring show with gas lights and spooky music to dramatise the images. Taking it one step further in this new version they have projected things like lightning onto the canvases or highlighting certain parts in red to make them look more dramatic and scary etc – it was all very good fun actually, I approve, maybe made up for the insane entrance price and nice to see them contextualising the pieces.
That’s about all I can remember of the show although I was impressed with the little pamphlet you get on admission – usually it’s just the wall text regurgitated and a map but they had tried out something new, again, which was to show the influence of Martin on later artists, poets and film makers. Although I have to say that I don’t think all disaster movies can be said to be directly influenced by Martins work – I mean god if you’re going to visualise the end of the world or alien invasions or whatever wouldn’t you come up with similar images? I don’t think you can say that Martin defined disaster imagery forever more, but maybe he did and his images are just so deeply ingrained on my subconscious that I find it impossible to visualise hell in any other way? Anyway, good fun had by all and probably very appropriate viewing for a Halloween weekend. Stay classy xxx