Weeds, vegetation and dense undergrowth

We've always had conflicting feelings about the V and A. It's particularly loved by so many people, probably because it has such a wide variety of exhibits that there's something there to please everyone. However, the museum's lack of focus and its inability to properly define just what it is a museum of exactly, can sometimes grate. Nevertheless, we quite like the attitude of simply saying "Here's a load of cool stuff. Enjoy.".

So yesterday, we travelled over to South Kensington to give the place the once over. It's always a pleasure to visit any of the museums in that area of London. It's a beautiful part of the world and there's a certain grandeur to its attractions which have a suitably regal air that fits in well with the classy neighbourhood.

Anyway, the main reason behind our visit was to check out their current exhibition Out Of The Ordinary: Spectacular Craft. The exhibition consists of eight installation pieces, all of which use unusual forms and techniques. This brings a degree of novelty to the proceedings which isn't necessarily a good thing but our unease was offset by the quality of the pieces on display.

Perhaps most impressive was the piece by Chicago based artist Anne Wilson (below). Using lace, thread and netting, Wilson has created a landscape from thousands of tiny, carefully pinned pieces. It's all laid out on a table to resemble a sort of military map. The sheer scale of it and the intricate detail of the work is quite overwhelming. Meanwhile, in the background she has created a video piece showing the pieces in animated action which is so convincingly put together that they assume an animal like presence.

Elsewhere, we were impressed by Lu Shengzhong whose piece consisted of hundreds of thousands of tiny red figurines falling waterfall-like to the floor from a book. And throughout the museum, Yoshihiro Suda (top) has planted weeds, flowers and orchids in unexpected places. For its unusual nature and because it was so well executed, we were also impressed by Naomi Filmer's holographic bodies which turn as you walk across them, fully exposing you to their faults and flaws. And we have no idea how Annie Cattrell managed to give the appearance of having trapped clouds inside glass boxes, but the effect was very pretty.

This is the kind of thing which the V and A does well and every piece was both technically interesting and had something interesting to say. Our visit was followed by a general wander through the museum which often resembles that big warehouse in Indiana Jones where they store all the ancient artifacts under lock and key. There were so many things to enjoy and it made for a perfect Sunday afternoon.

The exhibition is free and runs until 17 February 2008.

Late Night Pretentiousness

Going to galleries in the evening always seems a more enjoyable experience than heading there on the traditional Sunday afternoon. Many galleries now have late night openings and special events in the evenings, but one of the most enjoyable is at Tate Britain.

The Late at Tate nights occur on the first Friday of each month. The gallery stays open until ten and entry to all the special exhibitions is half price. They create a bar area in the main hall which is lit up beautifully with projections everywhere and a range of special events going on. This usually includes DJs, bands and various types of performance, usually of the cabaret variety. On 4th January, the website says: "In collaboration with International Project Space, Birmingham, expect an evening of performance and music, including interventions from !WOWOW!, the creative collective of artists, fashion designers, writers and musicians, and Chymical Wedding, a performance from the future-past-fiction guerrilla group Plastique Fantastique". Hmm.

Well we tried looking at !WOWOW!'s myspace site but it was, frankly, too hard to read (go there and you'll see what we mean). Also, and we don't mean to sound like grumpy old gits, but when somebody talks about "recreating the New York warehouse party scene" we tend to roll our eyes a little bit. Which isn't to say it won't be great-it's just that we've found many of the cabaret/musical acts which they've put on in the past to be piss poor. So keep expectations low and you won't be disappointed.

Meanwhile, the philosophy of this site is to be as unpretentious as possible. Which is a problem here, since we've always found the Late at Tate crowd to be pretentious as fuck. Never have we seen so many posers in one room together. To make matters worse, we're not overly keen on the Millais exhibition which is currently running. It's all very well presented and certainly provided an insight into how his painting changed as he grew older, but we couldn't get away from the fact that it was all a bit, well, boring. He just seemed like a rather opportunistic man, chasing the money of his sponsors by painting dull but technically brilliant portraits. We haven't seen the Turner Prize retrospective that's running there but it sounds either tremendously annoying or great fun, depending on how cynical you are.

The chance to get into these exhibitions for half price is certainly alluring but be warned that it does tend to get crowded in the paid exhibitions so if you want to see them slowly and without stress, it may be better to pay the full whack and come another time.

All the criticisms above don't really give a great impression of the night and it's true that we have our problems with both the logistics of the events and the seemingly random choice of bands and theatre collectives whom they put on. However, we've always had a good time when we've gone. The permanent collections are as impressive as always and the atmosphere in the hall/ bar area, though pretentious, is at least lively and a change from the normal gallery visit experience. Also, you get a strange feeling from watching a band play in a room surrounded by invaluable works of art. An odd experience then, but probably worth trying once and don't blame us if you get trampled on and want to strangle the entertainment.

More Photos To Make You Swoon

Following on from the storming time which we had at the Whitechapel Gallery's Nick Waplington exhibition, we felt in the mood for even more photography. So when we read some more than positive reviews of Jeff Wall's new show at White Cube we knew we had to go and have a look.

Jeff Wall is a photographic artist who is primarily known for his blown up, back lit photos to which he applies some super complicated digital jiggery pokery to make them into highly arranged situations. In 2005 he had an all encompassing retrospective at Tate Modern which we attended and enjoyed very much. So we were very excited to see the new pieces which were on display.

White Cube's new West End gallery is approached down an alleyway off an extremely posh street between Pall Mall and Fortnum and Mason in one of the most well heeled areas of London. The exhibition contains three large scale back lit works, a smaller back lit piece and some of Wall's black and white photography which he has been doing since the early 1990s.

It's the full scale, back lit pieces which inevitably form the centrepiece of the exhibition. The way in which they are displayed makes them appear like billboard adverts, even if the subject matter is far from that of a Marlboro ad. The amount of work which Wall does to his photos always tends to give them a too good to be true shimmer where everything is just a little bit too high definition and perfectly lit.

The White Cube website has thumbnails of some of the photos on display so you can see what we're talking about. "Hotels" shows the gutting of an apartment building and is essentially a highly worked landscape of an urban building project. Like many of his photos, the view is intersected by the electricity cables which are recurrent in Wall's work and which divide his photos in much the same way as a viewfinder.

"Dressing Poultry" is a rather grim view of the inside of a poultry processing factory. Feathers lie everywhere as pasty American farmers perform icky acts to birds for human consumption. A pool of animal juices lies on the floor and the surroundings look far from sanitary. Each worker's pose is highly constructed and it's easy to see how Wall may have had to take hundreds of photographs of the scenario to come up with this final, far from improvised version. Effectively, this has the same level of artifice as a painting. Wall is not an artist who attempts to capture a unique moment in time.

Elsewhere in the exhibition he explores some desolate landscapes, particularly downstairs in his black and white works which are equally as impressive as the blockbuster technicolour photos upstairs. All his work just seems so bloody cold that it gave us the shivers. It's imperative for the GDP of Canada that he should never be signed up by the Vancouver tourist board.

A hugely impressive exhibition, perfect in length. It's enough to satisfy any existing fans of Wall and act as a good taster for anyone who hasn't seen his work before. Stretched over a full length exhibition in the Tate Modern, Wall couldn't quite justify the sheer quantity of his work on display. However, in a small gallery like this, his photos each get the level of scrutiny they need and the results are excellent. We also recommend Chequers, the tiny pub next door which is a great place to go afterwards. The exhibition runs until 19th January 2008.

N.B. The photos shown in this article are not the photos on display in the exhibition.

Beautiful Things In Whitechapel

Last night artslondon went to the Whitechapel Art Gallery for the preview of a new exhibition by photographer Nick Waplington which runs until 20 January 2008. We were very impressed with what we saw and it's always nice when the highlight of these things is the art itself rather than the free booze.

Waplington has released much of his work in book form and has always taken a particular interest in documenting his patch of East London where he lives. But this exhibition is something rather different. It's actually more of an installation than a straightforward photography exhibition.The main part takes place in the gallery's cinema/auditorium. A slide projector shows a range of 1000 photographs. Each is displayed for about ten seconds before the projector progresses to the next one. In the background there is an audio feed from a US radio station where they discuss business issues and economic theory from a pro-capitalist perspective. Meanwhile we see a collection of photos which Waplington has sourced from the internet.

All the photos are taken by soldiers and predominantly focus on the Middle East. We see Russian soldiers making brotherly poses in Afghanistan and then American soldiers doing the same thing twenty years later. Meanwhile, many of the images are mundane in their focus. They veer from friend to friend, relative to relative, with nothing to link each image to the next apart from the sheer human factor that they were taken by hired killers.

What's interesting is that despite the seemingly random, fractured nature of the images, your brain naturally orders them into some kind of logic. Patterns emerge, agendas reveal themselves but what those agendas are is very much left to you, the viewer. It's quite an experience but really needs to be viewed without distractions and with time to spare.

Meanwhile, in the foyer, a number of books of Waplington's work are also laid out. We didn't have time to examine these in as much detail as they deserve but we're told that they have more of a suggested narrative than the projected images. Those we saw focused more deeply on war and the different landscapes of the Middle East as well as the more common day to day reality of small town America which so many US soldiers call home.

The exhibition is also spread out all around this corner of East London. Images can be found displayed in a range of East End venues from the Rough Trade East shop to the Brick Lane Beigel Bakery.

Meanwhile, it's probably worth mentioning that we love Whitechapel Gallery. Sure it contains the predictable hordes of East London tossers, there to pose and not much more, but enthusiasm and personality just ooze from every slab. They display posters of successful past exhibitions in the same way that say, the Dublin Castle shows photos of Blur playing in their youth. And the gallery has a flexibility that allows a true variety of exhibitions and an exciting range of talks and events which we will be bringing you more information about in the coming months.

Oh-and if you're wondering why this entry is formatted so badly, it's because Blogger is rubbish and we can't be bothered to learn html. Sorry.

Not All The Good Art In Southwark Is At The Tate Modern

Last night we headed down to the Nolias Gallery in Southwark for The Power of Three, an exhibition of three artists which we previewed here.

The Nolias gallery is located just round the corner from Tate Modern and is hidden away amongst railway arches and council estates. On entering we were slightly thrown by the layout of the place with a glass partition rather annoyingly separating off one half of the gallery. We grabbed a drink and went for a wander, pausing only to read the press release for the exhibition.

The exhibition is based around a survey carried out by one of the artists, Philippa Beale in the early 1980s. She asked members of the public what type of art they liked and were prepared to buy, what size they liked the pieces to be and a number of other questions about their tastes. It turned out that "bright, primary colours" and "ships and the sea" were the most liked styles and themes. The exhibition is an attempt to both update and respond to that survey.

So Philippa Beale's work mostly consisted of sea landscapes and birds with very dense colours and evocative images. Her work is full of life, the only problem being that we wanted to see it on a larger scale than the small canvases she had on display. Meanwhile, Jane Humphrey's work was a study of texture and much of it seemed very much based on observing nature and wildlife, but truth be told we were underwhelmed by it, mainly due to the repetitive nature of what she had on display.

Finally, there was Alice White (see inset) who we were too shy to approach in person but whose work was both the most engaging and had more personality to it than any of the other pieces present. Her main portion of the show consisted of a series of monoprints (see above). They were of variable quality: Some we adored and some less so, but hers was the only work to truly grab us and make us want to see more. She made herself the subject of the works in a lot of ways, which is no bad thing, but she avoided falling into a pit of self obsession.

The only criticism we have of the exhibition is that the concept wasn't clear enough throughout and that only Philippa Beale's work seemed to have any link to the blurb explaining what the exhibition was about. But we may have missed something and understand that it's part of an ongoing project and that there will be an updated survey in the next few weeks.

Anyway, we had fun and deeply wished we had deeper pockets so we could have purchased one or two particular pieces we liked. The exhibition runs until 10th December at the Nolias Gallery, 60 Great Suffolk Street and is well worth a peek.