London is a mercurial lover.
She seduced me for a week with her spring sunlight, her yellow flowers and bright streets. She tickled me into skirts and scarves. I stepped along her the pavements in a wash of colour.
I visited her museums and her largest theatre, I saw her majesty. She might have wooed me with her buildings, her antiquity and her power. But, instead, she gave me a glimpse of her silk petticoats, offered to dance with me, smiled.
London can be, has often been, a cold hearted bitch. When she is cruel, the North Wind can tear at your face and whip out your eyelashes. It can cripple your fingers into defenceless claws. I have felt lonely, in a population of more than one million, as I have turned my coat up to shield my neck, put my head down rather than look about me and hurried home to an apartment which is grey and light-less.
But, in this April, she laughed with me. Her voices trilled with the leaves of Battersea Park. She waved in the bunting. She hugged me in bookshops.
I met up with Dan and Ollie at the Science Museum where Ollie goes when he needs to leave his office and think. We sat for more than half an hour at The Listening Post, an electronic installation that is a giant curved stand made up of little electronic text screens. The screens display text fragments - extracts from online chats drawn randomly from the internet (uncensored and unedited) accompanied by the rhythm of computer- synthesized voices reading - or 'singing' - the words that surge and flicker over the screens. The sound artist programmed a voice synthesiser to create tones and sound effects which respond to shifts in the data-streams, building a musical score of online activity. It was incredible.
We then crossed Exhibition Road to the Victoria & Albert where we met Amy and she showed us around two exhibits of South African photography currently showing. One was David Goldenblatt, Life Under Apartheid: a series of prints he sent to the V&A for safe keeping in the 1980s. It was interesting to see how someone else (someone not South African) would display Goldenblatt. He is an interesting animal because he was one of SA's most successful photographers largely because his photographs weren't particularly confronting. They were more remarkable for their technique or style than for their political relevance and, although they still held political relevance, they were let through the censors net (largely).
Goldblatt is less often exhibited and more often published in a book with an essay (eg by Nadine Gordimer). He usually has a strong interplay of text and the image and it is often important to his work. Yet the V&A have policies about how much text may accompany an image and I really felt the poverty of statements such as "Man returning from the mines in Johannesburg, the mines were the economic driver of the economy". The man in this photo was black, indeed everyone in the photo is black, there is a winter mist hanging over the shacks in the distance in the dawn sun, he is driving a car, other people are walking, it is the 1950s rather than the 1970s... I really felt that many of those viewing the exhibition would just see black person and miss out on the incredible textual detail contained within the images without a bit more information.
There was, however, a set of images not usually exhibited (a set the censor's knife had previously come down upon )- Goldblatt took a series of shots of bodies and, in this case, crotches of people seated on benches. The range was wonderful, from an old boere with that familiar bulge to the left, a Xhosa person in a blanket and hands carefully folded in his lap, two old women in little shorts and platform heels (thighs which are sagging and cellulite-d but still thin with a hand holding a cigarette on one knee), a demure woman in a skirt.
This was photography exhibit No. 1
No 2 was Figures and Fictions - Contemporary South African Photography
It was a collection of people who are big in SA photography today; Zanele Maholi, Pieter Hugo, Sabelo Mlangeni, Hasan & Husein Essop. All of them quite different and even in the limits of the tiny room there was so much to take in. This exhibition was much better curated, you came away with a stronger impression of the complexity of South African society and the multi-textual layers were really brought out (even within V&A text limits). Although, it might also be said that the new SA is allowed (indeed encouraged) to have more multi-textual layers than the old one was. It is, for example, quite interesting that photography in SA shifted to colour from black and white with the Transition.
Because there was so much more there, I am finding it so much more difficult to put it across here.
All photographied out, we then had a brief sojourn to this delightful little sun-filled bookshop-come-bar that stocks an eclectic collection of books that are an interesting find but not something you'd necessarily buy. For example: a collection of the blue plaques in London which tell you that a famous person lived here from this time to this time. We had an engrossing few minutes seeking Oscar Wilde's house, Captain Cook's, Evelyn Waugh's. Yet, in the end, did not buy it.
We met Si for dinner in Covent Garden and then crossed the Thames and fell upon the second hand book sellers on the Southbank before the National Theatre. We had tickets to see the Holy Rosenburgs at the National Theatre. It's about a Jewish family in Edgeware (West London) who's son has just died in Israel and who's daughter is a lawyer on a commission investigating human rights abuses in Gaza. The set is their living room and it was theatre-in-the-round. So you were a fly on the wall in a family conversation one evening as they prepared to sit shivas for their son and as their daughter returns home for the funeral. It is a deliberate echo on the current saga around the Jewish Community in South Africa and Goldstone (Ruth, the daughter, is being convinced not to attend the funeral because pro-Israel protesters will be there outside and will cause a scene).
Tired and bracing ourselves against the chill wind from the river, we crossed back and took the tube west from Embankment. Rocking, silently companionable in sleepiness, I watched the four of us reflected in the glass of the carriage in the neon lights.
