Art This morning I attended Tate Liverpool for the press viewing of their new paid exhibition, JMW Turner and Lamina Fifana: Dark Waters. I could pretend that I was in completely the right mind for this. As you'll probably gather from the scarcity of writing here this past few months, I've not been in the best places mentally. The grief of losing Mum last year still lingers and I've never quiet felt the same since catching COVID earlier in this year. Plus anxiety continues to thrum away in the background every now and then turning to into a full blown rock concert but sadly more Woodstock '99 than Glastonbury '99 (which at least had REM headlining)
All of which made me rather nervous about a press day at Tate, something I've really enjoyed in the past, but having not put my name down since before the pandemic or indeed been to many exhibitions in general, it felt like it was going to be a lot. Pre-pandemic, one of these events involved reception desks and noise, lots of bodies in the space, a curator led tour at certain time making me feel need to rush around the show beforehand, followed by a meal with all the inherent low self esteem issues of being sat at a table with professional journalists when you're a blogger who's mainly doing this sort of thing as a lark.
But the format has changed, or at least it had for Turner and Fifana. The space was just open for a couple of hours this morning. On entering I was offered some brief directions by the press person pointing to some notable items and then I was left to fend for myself. Perfect. It's also not a huge show. The fourth floor is currently being prepared for this year's Turner Prize exhibition, so T&F are inhabiting one side of the fourth floor, quality rather than quality, large oil paintings punctuated by watercolours and drawings, a conscious decision, perhaps, to recreate the feel of the Turner rooms at Tate Britain.
Well, I relaxed. I becalmed. I began to enjoy myself. I also had questions. Why was Tate Liverpool, which has generally been on the cutting edge of contemporary art hosting a Turner show? That should not be seen a complaint. Over the years, I've hoped they would diversify the types of work they display to before the 1900 cut off which seems to have been the general rule and cheered on the occasions when they have, for Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings (ten years ago folks) and Alice in Wonderland (even longer). It's also interesting that this is a paid exhibition when it's entirely sourced from Tate's own collection.
The most numerous selection of Turners are of his Whaling Scenes, depictions of one of the industries which developed in the 1700s out of the same docks which can be seen from the windows of this Tate (see above). However abhorrent we might find the practice now, when these were originally painted it was a way for the public to envision how many household items such as oil for lamps. soap and lubricants were provided in the years before fossil fuels were properly harnessed. Almost everything here was accepted by the nation at part of the Turner bequest in 1856.
Not that Turner's work doesn't take some creative license with Whalers Entangled in Flaw Ice, Endeavouring to Extricate Themselves (1846) showing the boiling of whale blubber on board ship, something which would usually have happened back in port but allows the artist to contrast the deep red of the flames against the muted grey backdrop. In many of these later works, the objects become less important than Turner's experimentation with colour leading to near abstraction and how light interacts with the canvas to the point that the image almost "shimmers".
The centrepiece of the exhibition is A Disaster at Sea (1835) which was inspired by the loss of the Amphitrite, a slave ship which left Liverpool in 1799 and capsized off Nigeria the following January. Unlike other depictions of sea tragedies, like The Raft of the Medusa (painted a few decades earlier) which show the anguish and fear of the sea farers against an otherwise quite static background, Turner loses the sense of individuality amid the hellish swirl of the ocean and chaotic skies with the pieces of ship and fragments of people almost indistinguishable.
Lamina Fofana's sound installations are inspired by another tragedy at sea in which the crew of the Zong massacred over a hundred and thirty slaves and threw them overboard near the Caribbean (by doing so the ship's owners could make an insurance claim). Of the three, the most prominent and certainly the most recognisable is Life and Death by Water (2021) which mainly consists of the hummed section of Boney M's Rivers of Babylon repeated on a loop for twenty minutes like an ancient chant.
Originally recorded by the Jamaican Reggae group The Melodians for the 1972 film The Harder They Come, the lyrics, based on Psalm 137, although originally about the Jewish exile following the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem, could equally be applied to the souls lost on board the Zong, "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion ... They carried us away in captivity requiring of us a song ... Now how shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?"
For about five or ten minutes at the end of my visit I sat listening to Fofana's piece. Potentially it's a distraction from the Turner paintings, especially as your ears twig a familiarity with the melody in the other room and then try to identify it like a human version of the Shazam app. The repetition does make it inherently irritating and I fear for the invigilators who're going to have to be in the space and will collectively develop it as an earwig on mass. But just sat listening, once again I relaxed, I becalmed and I began to enjoy myself.
On reflection the opening paragraph to this was a bit gloomy so I wanted to say I am fine, really, and in this past week I've been on an overnight city break to Birmingham and Stratford-Upon-Avon (more on that in the next couple of days) and a day trip for Blackpool for my Dad's 80th birthday (and that) (maybe) so it's not like I've been a complete emotional wreck. I just wanted to show that you can't approach any exhibition with a clear, neutral mind. And at least I didn't try to make some tenuous connection between my mental state and the chaos of Turner's paintings. I'd never have forgiven myself.
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