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| Join us (me and my mate Pete) on the fourth and last page of our tour of central London, 27 July 2000. On the previous page we visited the Tate Modern gallery of ART. Now we are leaving and walking the south bank of the Thames. |
R E T R O s p e c t i v e
 | We continue eastward by the Globe Theatre, inspecting the
centuries of garbage visible at low tide. Sometimes amazing archaeological discoveries come to light. Peter does a lot of voluntary work for the local Southwark community and parks and tells me all about how Southwark council originally resisted these modern cultural developments on its riverside walk. |
| Well, I'm not like that, I say... I have nothing against the Modern. But the Tate Modern is not modern enough. The concepts in this conceptual art are trivial. And old. | |
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Challenging, intelligent? Make you think about space? You cannot be serious. A hundred years ago, modern art had some parallel with modern mathematics: it was challenging everyone by asking, what is representation? |
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But even a hundred years ago, mathematicians were asking far more challenging questions than anything aroused by these installations and sculptures.
Try figuring out the one-sided Klein bottle or Boy's surface
(also here), a realisation in Euclidean space of the real projective plane... Or take the topology of the space of rotations in three dimensions: a REAL challenge. And that's just three-dimensional geometry. |
| In the real four-dimensional world of space and time, (i.e. relativity, now a hundred years old), questions of inside and outside, before and after, left and right, are far more complex again. I work in something genuinely modern: twistor geometry. How can I pretend to be 'challenged' by rectangular boxes, or think there is something 'modern' about them? I have a similar comment about a monumental statement in Trafalgar Square. | |
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SO: does art see a human dimension that is lacking in science and scientists? Not from what we saw in the 'modern' works at the Tate! People's relations and aspirations have been transformed since 1970, but art seems to have taken timid little steps on a tiny planet of its own. |
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 | A challenging installation raising sensitive issues of homoeroticism? That sort of weaselly talk might have been appropriate for describing Jean Genet's films in the 1950s, at a time when you could be jailed for taking pictures of boys' surfaces. Times have changed! |
| There are so many issues of the present and future which could make a genuine challenge for visualisation and presentation. At the root of so many conflicts is the difficulty of seeing the world through other people's eyes. Animals' eyes too. And finding new means of expression to go beyond eyesight, which not everyone has. | |
| We walk from Hays Wharf to Bermondsey station on the new Jubilee Line, then take the train to Southwark station, admiring the design. We walk through Waterloo, by the National Film Theatre, and across Hungerford Bridge to the north side of the river. Peter shows me RETRO bar, and we stay there till closing time in the ambience of the 1970s. That tugs at my long memories of London life, and arouses more feeling than all the art of the Tate Modern. |
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more COMBATS:Simon Rattle calls British Art as 'bullshit' and is called 'a twat' in return.Wait till I visit the Science Museum! |  |
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