At the Summer show at the Tate Saint Ives, there are no straight lines. It's a wonder the modernist concrete sandcastle can stand up straight out of the tangle of streets so vertiginous you think your car won't be able to cling on. It does. Like a ladybird on a watermelon. In this country, which way is up?
In the Tate's lobby, we're scattered like so much lopsided human jestsam against its perfect late 20th century curves. Upstairs, in the white galleries' minimalism, just like when the Habitat phenomenon, when you wander around the white space, everyone looks perfect; their quirks showing like the subtle inventions of stylists.
Katy Moran, the Tate's current artist in residence works in tideswept curves, serendipitiously washed in layers of paint over collage. Alfred Wallis's vertical sea and townscapes are more realistic than the non-Cornish eye would allow. Lucie Rie's pots are glazed with a froth of sea-spume textured glaze. Bojan Sarcevic's filmed sculpture turns you upside-down and Carol Bove collects flotsam from the 20th Century washed up in Brooklyn.
Barbara Hepworth is the acknowledged master: her skewed perspectives winking from every angle. No one gets the asymmetry of the peninsula like she can, in every finish from yachtboard to marble furnished from a neighbor's mantelpiece.
As for me, without Paris's Hausmannian straight lines, I'm lost. But I'm enjoying it...
What a viewpoint. I almost feel as if I'm there with you. Thanks for the birds eye.
Posted by: Lenox Ave | September 08, 2009 at 04:56 AM