- Wellcome Collection people watching
- Death: A Self Portrait, and particularly
- Argentinian Collective Mondongo
- Subversive Spanish painter, Francisco Goya
Sitting in the Wellcome Collection cafe was an experience itself with its impressively diverse clientele. I sat with a coffee watching the raised eyebrows and smirks of the middle-aged woman opposite me clearly discovering the S&M delights of 50 Shades of Gray; the old guy to my left peering through his glasses at his touch screen phone whilst adjusting the cord that held them around his neck; two modern vikings with woolly coats walking past talking in a Scandinavian language and finally a 20-something guy dressed like a backpacking Crocodile Dundee. It was the finest visitor crowd that a European museum could offer.
The glasses cord old guy next to me had a friend who was clearly a journalist. After discussing how newspapers should be bound by the shit-loads of stalker legislation currently in existence, he told a story about an article he'd recently written about a man who had called the police to report that his neighbour had stolen all of his plant pots. The police arrived at the neighbour's house later that afternoon and said if the plant pots weren't returned in 24 hours, they'd have to arrest him. So the guy returned the plant pots. Probably like you, I admit I was expecting a twist in this story and so was a little disappointed to find out that the whole purpose of the story was that sometimes police are good, quick to respond and use common sense. I suppose his point was just an extension of his criticism of media and the ridiculous sensationalism of modern journalism. I openly eavesdropped until they stood up, put on almost matching Canadian Mountain hats (like this), and left.
Abbie arrived a little later and after she’d eaten we lurked in the foyer waiting for her speech therapy mates; Canadian Kira and Chaotic Clare*. I picked up the Wellcome Trust guide and on the first page I opened, slap bang in the middle was new Dodgeball team mate and friend Ben Thompson, sporting the stylish cardigan/exposed socks and brogues look:
I mean, we knew he worked at the Wellcome Trust, but we presumed his science writing work kept him desk bound rather than allowing him time to pursue his museum brochure modelling career. Abbie sent him a ‘who’s this handsome devil?’ email and we sacked off waiting for her mates and just went into the exhibition.
We’d seen adverts over London for the past few months, but didn’t know a great deal about the actual exhibition other than that it was entitled ‘Death’ and we’d liked how that looked in our diaries (“Oh Thursday evening? No, I’m sorry, I’ve got an appointment with Death then”). But I impressed even myself when literally the first piece we examined, a photo of a skull-topped cane, I already knew the entire biography of the photographer. Complete fluke, but a few years ago when I was on a wave of reading musician biographies, I read Just Kids by Patti Smith, an account of her first serious relationship, which happened to be with tortured artist Robert Mapplethorne. He and Patti broke up owing to his commitment to being homosexual, though remained emotionally connected until he died of AIDS in 1989. I imagine the inevitability of his death at that time was the reason for the move away from BDSM art to photos like this skull cane, and his inclusion in the room titled ‘Contemplating Death’.
The exhibition was nicely curated, with each room presenting a different stage of approaching, experiencing or coming to terms with death. We were examining a painting of the Good Man and the Bad Man, which indicated how the level of purity in your life will dictate the manner of your death (basically, don’t drink or have wild sex, kids. You’ll die like the baddie in Patrick Swayze’s ‘Ghost’) when Dodgeball Dr Ben turned up. He gave us a useful express tour of the good stuff in the exhibition (or at the least the stuff he knew a little about) and with his Wellcome Trust staff identity pass, we felt like we were hanging with a VIP. In the next room, the highlight was this incredible plasticine skull made by Argentinian Collective ‘Mondongo’. It’s so intricate and made up of such a large number of popular culture references, there’s no way any photos online do it any justice. You really should go see it yourselves. We’re talking Pacman meets A Clockwork Orange.
The next room was called ‘Violent Death’ and mainly consisted of art about war, by Jacques Callot, Otto Dix and Francisco Goya. I’m mentioning these names in a way that suggests I knew who they were. I really didn’t. I’d completely peaked at Robert Mapplethorne. But later that evening, attempting to be a proper socially-aware grown-up, I was downloading some Radio 4 podcasts and stumbled across ‘Great Lives’ and a podcast specifically about Goya. Using the selection process of what to learn that I’d developed on my trip around Europe (whereby if the same thing coincidentally appears twice or more in a short space of time, I’ll read up on it) I figured I should have a listen. So turns out Goya was a Spanish painter whose works were pretty subversive and at times risque (he painted a nude woman with pubes. Goya, you ruddy devil). The podcast explained his progression through royal and noble courts, and his reliance on his wife Josefa as a sometimes muse and as a carer after he went deaf and suffered a mental breakdown. Over his lifetime, his non-commissioned work became pretty macabre, and it was some images from his series entitled ‘The Disasters of War’ that were in the Wellcome Collection. These were relatively miserable, though Otto Dix was probably a bit more disturbing and this was presumably because he’d actually been a soldier during WW1 and so all of his paintings were versions of his memories on the battlefield. Pretty dark.
In later rooms there were some clever paintings with scenes that could also be viewed as skulls if you looked at them the right way (called ‘metamorphic postcards’, apparently. See here), and some sculptures, models and mexican puppets as well as some random photos of people holding skulls (and I use random in the correct sense; the curator Richard Harris had just found a selection of photos of unknown people who were holding skulls in their holiday snaps). Abbie liked the Victorian photograph of some science students standing next to a skeleton on a table, all typically unsmiling even as the guy on the end turns the skull to look at the camera.
The last room contained an infographic about death and the causes of death during 20th century. Those Chinese have got a lot to answer to apparently. Two civil wars and then all that communism? Rotters. We were discussing non-communicable diseases when Chaotic Clare, Canadian Kira and Toe-Shoe Matt turned up. After briefly looking at the bone chandelier (see the timelapse installation of that here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TioV1BWjiyM) Abbie and I went to the permanent collection upstairs as they looked around, though called it a day after looking at the mummified man and the extracted, preserved tattooed skin of some 19th century LADS (minging).
I figure if I end this post with the following, I’ll look look a prop-ah writer:
Death: A Self Portrait, curated by Richard Harris, is displaying at the Wellcome Collection in London until Sunday 24th February.
*A week doesn’t pass without Abbie coming home with a story about how Clare has lost something important, forgotten about an exam or locked herself INSIDE her own flat. I’m impressed how she happily functions in such chaos.
