A Slow Mimic

Since we were in the same neighbourhood again this afternoon, I couldn't resist another peek at the statue we saw two days ago; without telling Bob the reason we were back, I tried to make the statue move by striking poses in front of the tiny cameras that we hadn't noticed on our last visit. The statue was very slow to react and I think that Bob (and the long line of traffic that was at a standstill next to the statue) thought that I had gone a bit crazy, but we finally witnessed the sculpture's anticlimactic movement:

We also stopped in at a few nearby exhibitions. Richard Learoyd's photos are made "without any interposing film negative, transparency or intermediate material. Instead the apparatus of light is directly focussed by the camera and translated onto a sheet of positive photographic paper. With no means of reproduction, once created, ultimately every image is entirely unique in its existence. The photographs are created and conceived as a whole, not as fragments or miniaturisations of objects and people." The life-size images were eerily lifeless, the slightest bit "off," highlighting the photographic standards that we become used to without really thinking about them, and perhaps commenting on the widespread reproduction and mediation of contemporary experience along the way. The next exhibit was excitingly promising, but disappointing in its actual realisation. Patrick Keiller's The City of the Future, currently showing at BFI Southbank, "began by suggesting that many of the spaces glimpsed in historic footage look unexpectedly familiar, and asked why this might be so." Landscapes featured in 68 films from 1896-1909 are layered with maps of the same era, and the entire installation spans several screens, with each screen's content determined by gallery goers who sit at consoles equipped with DVD-style controls. While the premise sounded fascinating, I found the controls confusing and difficult to manipulate away from a very few scenes--something that the other people seemed to experience as well, since the different screens tended to show the same images, rather than the layered variety that the artist was perhaps hoping to contrast. Our last exhibition stop of the day was at The Hayward Project Space, where four strange videos by Klara Liden were screening: a journey through the clutter left by previous residents of Liden's new apartment, her frantic dance through Stockholm subway cars, Liden's snakelike burrowing under the wall-to-wall carpet in a gallery that would soon show her art, and her destruction of a bicycle. The last video was surprisingly disturbing as Liden circled the standing bicycle in an empty, claustrophobic room, teasing it with playful taps before smashing it into pieces. When I thought about it afterwards, I realised that what made the video especially uncomfortable (beyond the oppressive, screaming soundtrack, without which I think the video would have been even more effective) was the fact that the destruction took place indoors, in a room made more for interrogation than domestic storage. After our little art walk, we decided to end the evening on a completely different note, finding ourselves in the centre of Christmas shopping, walking past Regent Street's lights (and crowds)

on our way to Carnaby Street with its hefty crowds, here for the street's Christmas shopping event: 20% off at most area shops, with plenty of free food and drink to keep you in the area. It was a good excuse for Bob to get another of his favourite shirts from American Apparel (at a price even cheaper than in Vancouver, which in London is no small feat), and we were glad we'd arrived at the early end of the shopping event when we left American Apparel to find there was now a thirty-person queue just to get into the shop.

We walked around a bit more, but quickly tired of dodging all the people carrying cups and bottles of freebies from various shops, and decided to head home while the shops were still open and every person still pounding the pavement meant one less person crammed into the tube!