Notes from London

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After collecting our father’s ashes from the Islington Crematorium, my brother Tom and I went to the British Library. We carried our father in a backpack through the exhibition, Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900-1937.

We imagined his approval!

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We saw:

Diagonal Symphony (1924), a film by Viking Eggling. Improvised, black and white lines and shapes – a seemingly endless play on the diagonal.

Berlin Still Life (1931), a film by Maholy Nagy. Slices of everyday life in a city are framed for their abstract qualities. People and their environment are seen as one, integrated through line, tone, and movement.

Film, Ballet Mechanique, by Fernand Leger.

Artist’s book about a journey, La prose du transiberien (1913), “the first ‘livre sultane’, a picture-poem conceived by poet Blaise Cendras and painter Sonia Delauny, as a dialogue between text and image.”

Artist’s book, Plants and Animals (Paris 1929) written by Ilarie Voronca, and illustrated by Brancusi (1876-1957). “Brancusi’s illustrations are clearly responsive to Veronca’s lyrics about birds ‘springing like foutains into the sky’.”

Visual poem of the flight of a swallow dipping over water, “whose waves are implicitly compared with radio waves.”, by Carles Sindreu i Pons (1900-1974).

Books by Karel Teige (1900-1951), who “aimed to create a ‘universal speech without words’ that would transcend national boundaries.” See his ReD and Pictorial Poems.

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Earlier this week I saw:

At the Tate Modern (September 2007-January 2008):

Film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1942), by Maya Deren (1917-1916)
Poetry and Dream: Surrealist art

Film, Dome (2005), by Lina Abdul (1973-)
Reminiscent of Viking Eggling’s Symphony on a diagonal, this was a symphony on the sphere.

Illuminations, an installation of films, “…bringing together five film and video works that explore gestures, objects and spaces that shape or express belief.”

Installation, Shibboleth, by Doris Salcedo:

…a long, snaking crack across the vast length of the Turbine Hall…

A shibboleth, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is ‘a word used as a test for detecting people from another district or country by their pronunciation; a word or sound very difficult for foreigners ot pronounce correctly.’ It is, therefore, a way of separating one people from another.

At the Freud Museum – works from Freud’s collection:

Mount Fuji (1929), by Kiyoshi Yoshida
Egyptian figurines
The Gravida bas relief
Photo of the Acroplolis
Freud’s chair
Freud’s couch
Freud family home movies, narrated by Anna Freud
Portrait of Freud (1938) by Salvador Dali