Category: Sculpture

Another perceptual flip to add to the collection – and why I find such things to be interesting

Yes, I do like these optical tricks that computer graphics makes it so easy for computer graphicists to play on the world.

Says Steve Stewart-Williams of his latest discovery in this genre:

If you cover the bottom of the ring, the top is closest to you; if you cover the top, it flips around.

Indeed. I clocked what was going on simply by scrolling, which I did because I wanted to see the whole thing, not because I had read what SS-W had said about it yet. But instead of seeing it all, I stopped seeing only the top and started seeing only the bottom, and … what he said.

A big part of the core curriculum of this blog, and of its predecessor, was and is something like: “How I see things and how other people seem to see things”. What do I particularly notice? What do you notice? Do you ignore what I notice?

Sculpture draws elaborate attention to itself. So does advertising. I notice both. Roof clutter and cranes don’t care how I or anyone thinks they look. They are just getting on with their jobs. Millions do not notice roof clutter and cranes, but I do, partly because of their unselfconsciously sculptural qualities. Do you ignore or notice some or all of such things? Chances are you do notice and enjoy noticing several if not all of these things, or you’d not be bothering with this blog. But if you ignore, I’m not complaining, just noticing. People vary, a lot.

See also, which is a generalised version of the above paragraph: Art.

But optical illusions are interesting, because, aside from being interesting for the usual fun reasons that people like them, we most of us tend to experience them in the exact same way. It would, for instance, be bizarre if you looked at the above-linked snatch of video and then wondered what the hell SS-W and I were both talking about. Sharing the same sorts of brains, I see most optical illusions in just the same way you see them. Assuming you share my interest in them at all and you see them at all.

Optical illusions thus celebrate what we all have in common. (Except those of us who don’t. Guess: Optical illusions, in addition to being fun, are also a tool to identify people with brain oddities or brain damage. ?)

Here is the previous one of these things that SS-W pointed me to.

The first two photos on the old blog

I have resumed copying old postings over from the old blog to the New Blog. The situation with linking to the old blog has got worse. It used to be that it merely said “Dangerous” in scary red lettering, at the beginning of the link. Now the entire destination is turning bright red. You can still find your way to the old blog if you really want to, but the red screen is decidedly offputting. All the more reason for me to shovel stuff over to here.

This time around, instead of just picking postings at random, or because I wanted to link back to them, I simply started at the beginning. Mostly it is highly unrecommendable housekeeping babble, although don’t let me stop you looking at it if you really want to. But, the first two photos on the old blog struck me as really good and worth another look.

First, this photo, of a photoer, photoing away in Parliament Square, featured in this posting:

What’s so good about this is that (a) the camera is now so antiquated, but that also (b) we can observe a now obsolete tourist habit, that of staggering around London with a camera in one hand and a big old map in the other. Now, all of the above is done, and done much better, with a tiny little thing smaller than the camera she’s using.

There’s even a Parliament Square statue in the background.

I’m pretty sure I chose this photo quite carefully, for the honour of being the first photo on the new blog, as it then was. But even if your opinion of this photo differs from mine, then and now, you’ve got to agree that this second one is pretty cool:

The bridge of the century so far, and no sign of anything better coming any time soon.

Sadly, the third photo is pretty crap.

Boadicea and Her Daughters with and without Things in the background

One of my favourite statues in all of London is Boadicea, with daughters, chariot and horses. Until lately, I have been in the habit of photoing her in this sort of silhouetted way, with the Wheel behind her, and cranes, like this, from October 2018:

But today, looking for other Other creatures stuff in the photo-archives, I encountered this photo of her:

No messing about, no clever linings up with other Things. No cranes. And no clue that we are even in the middle of London, across the road from Big Ben, next to Westminster Bridge, and surrounded by tourists. Well not tourists now, but usually.

I love that thing all the real sculptors know how to do with skimpy but wrinkly clothing on a body. Amazing. They make it look translucent, but with a totally solid object that they’ve made. There must be special classes for that in sculpture school.

And with cloudy weather to light her properly.

She dates from the late nineteenth century, so she’s Boadicea rather than Boudicca so she’s a quarter of a century bigger than these ladies, and over a century bigger than action heroines nowadays.

Love the NHS or die!

And speaking of photos by other people, as I just was, what of Michael Jennings? I linked to a photo of his not long ago, and do so quite often.

Well, on the first day of this month, Mchael was, he said on Facebook, in the Old Kent Road, and he photoed this:

The worship of the NHS is now so over the top that soon mainstream columnists are going to start trashing it, just to be different. Perhaps they already have and I just didn’t notice.

That’s a Soviet T-34, by the way.

Out east – one year ago today

I looked at what I was doing a year ago today, and came across these photos, of a great little expedition I had out east:

My wanderings began at West Silvertown DLR, from which there is a great view of the Tate & Lyle factory or refinery or whatever it is, the one with the giant can of Golden Syrup attached to it. Other local landmarks included: that cruise ship next to the footbridge, which is actually a hotel; a superb crane cluster off to the north; the Dome; that skilift Thing that goes across the River; and the Optic Cloak. (Where the Eastern God (Buddha?) was, I don’t recall, but I like him a lot.)

This is the area I was exploring:

It’s a place that is palpably in transition. Go back today, and it’ll be different. A year from now, it’ll be different again. In ten years, unrecognisably different. The landmarks in the distance will still be there, but the foreground will be transformed.

The weather that day (unlike the weather today) was a bit grim and grey, but I remember really enjoying this expedition.

I also, that day, photoed nesting birds, cranes, and a book of the week. That last posting having been done as soon as I got home.

By the way, behind the cruise ship is the ExCel Centre, now in the news because it was turned into a hospital. A hospital which had remained mostly empty, and now seems like it will soon shut. Which is good.

The Merlin and the man who made it fly

Sadly, Patrick and I were unable to record our intended WW2 bombing conversation this afternoon. Patrick has done his bit, but it turns out that my mere phone won’t suffice and I need to get Skype working at my end too, which is the sort of thing I am not good at and which will take me time.

But, the delay does mean I can do a bit more homework. Homework like pondering this question: What was the most impressive air war machine of WW2? The Spitfire, maybe? The Avro Lancaster? How about the de Havilland Mosquito? The North American P-51 Mustang, mentioned in yesterday’s posting?

Well, maybe none of the above. But, how about the aero-engine, also mentioned in passing yesterday, which powered all of the above? (Also the Halifax and the Hurricane.) Wikipedia has this resplendent photo, “Taken by JAW 19th November 2005 Pearce Air Force Base Western Australia”, of the engine in question:

Yes, it’s the Rolls-Royce Merlin. I doubt many of them looked like that, when they were fighting WW2. The one in this photo looks more like something we’d now see in Tate Modern. Well, we wouldn’t. But we should.

The Merlin was named, not after the noted wizard, but, like all the Rolls-Royce engines of the WW2 era, after a bird of prey.

I have long possessed and am now reading a book about the man (his name was Hives) who, more than anyone else, ensured the Merlin’s development and mass production in sufficiently war-winning numbers. The number in question being, according to Wikipedia: 149,659.

The Wikipedia entry on Hives is also worth a read, especially the bit about how Hives met, and won over, the “highly irascible but utterly pivotal” Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the USA’s nuclear submarine boss during the Cold War, and got him to cooperate with the British nuclear submarine programme.

Statues in Parliament Square

Being unable to use public transport, but still allowed to venture out of doors on foot, I have been concentrating my photographic attention on nearby places. And I have become especially fixated on the statues in Parliament Square.

Here are a couple of photos of one of these statues, a recently installed one, of Millicent Garrett Fawcett:

I show you the one on the left because it shows when not to try photoing some of these statues, namely those on the opposite side of Parliament Square from Parliament itself. I photoed that one on April 6th, in the quite late afternoon. Don’t try to photo these statues late in the afternoon, when the light is behind them to the west, unless all you want is silhouettes.

On the right is a photo I took this morning, when the light was coming from the east.

But the light coming from the east needed to be of a particular sort, which at first I got rather wrong, as the next two photos illustrate:

That’s Nelson Mandela, as I am sure you realise. The one on the left is a photo I took on the morning of April 26th, a morning I chose because it was so sunny. However, it was too sunny. By then, there were leaves (I constantly find leaves to be the enemy of successful photoing) casting random shadows over everything, and making it hard to discern the patterns on the surface of the statue,and totally messing up his face.

So, when I returned today, in the morning, I had chosen a less sunny morning, to see if that made things better. It did. Instead of the light crashing like a searchlight upon everything, and remembering all the things that had got in its way on the way to its destination, the light this morning wasn’t crashing anywhere. It was merely flowing gently, everywhere, in all directions, like a set of blurry lamps instead of one brutal searchlight. Hence the relative success of the photo on the right.

Until now, I have not tried very hard to photo statues. I have tried, but not very hard. I just photoed and hoped for the best, without wondering why it worked sometimes rather than at other times. But, I had begun to think that the sort of light I normally most enjoy for photoing, bright sunshine, might not be the best sort of light for statues. This morning, I paid attention to this notion, and it seemed to work very well.

So, here are several more photos that I took this morning, this next lot showing facial details of a sort I have never managed to get before, from these particular statues. These ones are close-ups of six of the statues that are at the west end of the square – Mandela (again), Disraeli, Gandhi, Fawcett (again), Lincoln, and Canning:

I forgot Peel and Derby, this morning. Or I think I did. I got in a bit of a muddle, forgetting that “Lord Beaconsfield” was really Disraeli. Maybe I have photos of Peel and Derby from earlier expeditions. If not, I might go back and do them too. Easy to do, what with all these Things being a walk away. (Photo rule: try to photo-obsess only about things within easy reach.)

Anyway, I’ll end this with three more photos I photoed this morning, two of them of one of my favourite statues in this square, Jan Smuts. I don’t know much about the man himself, but I really like this statue of him. I like that it’s green. And leaning forwards, like he’s skating:

I have photoed Smuts a lot, because he doesn’t always look like a mere silhouette in the afternoon. In these photos he has scaffolding behind him, and regulars here know how I feel about scaffolding. Also behind Smuts in the left hand photo of him there are the statues of Lloyd George and Churchill, which are properly photoed in the middle photo, again with scaffolding in the mix. Again, favourite subjects of mine, even though I don’t much like the statue of Lloyd George. To be exact, I don’t like his coat, which doesn’t look like a coat at all. More like metal. Which might be because it is metal.

Shame about all the birdshit.

Prague should build this shipwreck!

What do you reckon on this?:

It’s a big Shipwreck Thing that some people are trying to build in Prague. My first reaction, when I first set eyes on the above fake photo last night, was horror. But now that I have had time to live with this notion, I find myself quite liking it, in fact liking it a lot. It’s supposedly something to do with the havoc that climate change will unleash upon the world, in the form of vertical ships getting wrecked up against big city Things. But despite all that hysterical nonsense, I now very much like the idea of this particular, as yet only fantasised, Thing.

I’ve actually been to Prague a couple of times, and Prague, architecturally, has a problem, which is that its centre is not so much a city centre, more like an outdoor museum. It’s wall-to-wall Architectural History. Try to add so much as a tiny office extension and you are violating History itself.

World War 2 bombing and Communism have in common that, in addition to killing lots of innocent people, they often either totally flattened great swathes of historic architecture, or they left great swathes of historic architecture totally unscathed. Maybe a bit the worse for wear, drab, falling apart, seriously in need of a torrent of paint. But basically, some ancient European architectural wonderlands have managed to survive these twin scourges of mid-twentieth century Europe utterly unscathed. World War 2 bombing flattened the cities of Germany, and scattered destruction upon London, especially in the vicinity of the London docks. But it never laid a finger on Paris. Or, Prague. And although Communism did terrible things to all the poor bastards trying to live in Prague, Communism left the mere buildings of Prague untouched, as if in a time warp. Just because Communism wrecks the economy, it can sometimes then unleash zero in the way of economic development, which translated into architecture means: Nothing. Nothing built. Nothing destroyed to make way for anything built, because nothing is built. Weird but true. Hence: The centre of the City of Prague.

Or some cretin like Ceausescu would send in the bulldozers and destroy the place completely. But, with Communism, those are the chances you take.

But, as I say, the buildings in the middle of Prague survived the twentieth century totally. but meanwhile, the architectural outskirts of Prague got done over by Communism at its crassest. Concrete block after concrete block. You could be anywhere, and wherever you were, although it may have been your home and therefore nice for other reasons, but looked at in an unbiased way it was bloody horrible. I’m guessing it is still pretty dreary.

So, what’s to be done, in a place like Prague, short of someone hiring a gang of terrorists to scatter quite a few bombs around the place but not too many? Well, a logical answer is to leave the centre of Prague untouched, obviously, but also to do some very extreme architectural Things in the boring Communist hinterland, outside the centre. (Like La Défense in Paris, only more so.) And that would appear to be the idea of this scheme. Will many people consider it extremely ugly? Undoubtedly. But all must now agree that what would have happened instead would merely have been extremely boring.

“The project under preparation will be outside the protected zone of the urban conservation area and outside the area prohibiting high-rise buildings,” explained Trigema.

“At the same time, it is located far enough away from the Prague, so that it will not be visible from the vast majority of places in the centre of the metropolis and will not disturb the historical city skyline.”

There you go. I am totally for it. The fact that it is so totally bonkers is all part of why I am so totally for it. If anything, it sounds like it may be disappointingly far from the centre of the City, but it’s a good start.

At first, I thought they were going to erect a real shipwreck. But actually, if they do build it, the actual shipwreck bit will be a cunningly post-modernistical sculpture that merely looks like a shipwreck and which will actually be tremendous fun for tourists to wander about in and photo. Call it the Bilbao effect. Remember, when Frank Gehry first proposed that amazing Bilbao Thing, nobody had ever done anything like this before. The horror of typical first reactions was all part of why it became such a huge success.

So I say to Prague: Build this shipwreck!

I especially like how they want greenery to grow up from the top of the boring bit below, in and among the shipwreck. Nice touch.

Why are two horses wading in a playground?

A lot of my postings are puzzles. What’s this about? That kind of thing.

Well, what’s this about?:

That’s another photo I took last Sunday, the day I also photoed that reflection, and all those cyclists. A single photo-expedition, supplying me with many days worth of reflection, of the in-your-brain kind. Suddenly, in these strange times when venturing out of doors is so discouraged, my normal modus operandi is making more sense than usual.

Photoing children’s playgrounds is not a habit of mine. Single old man, of eccentric demeanour and dress, taking photos. Of a children’s playground. Not a good look these days. But this playground is now locked shut and empty of humans, so I reckon having photoed these two horses won’t ruin my life. We’ll see.

But what are these horses doing? The playground in question is at the far end of Victoria Tower Gardens, just upstream from the Houses of Parliament, so I had plenty of search words to stuff into The Internet. And it became clear that these horses refer to a nearby horse ferry, the one that Horseferry Road is named after. The playground is Horseferry Playground. But this creation is not grand enough to be easily learnable about. The Internet kept wanting to tell me about these two horses. But not the ones I was looking for.

As for Horseferry Road, let Wikipedia explain:

The road takes its name from the ferry which existed on the site of what is now Lambeth Bridge. Owned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the ferry was an important crossing over the Thames, from Westminster Palace to Lambeth Palace.

Presumably the horses dragged the ferry across, at a spot where there was also a ford, i.e. a part of the river where you could walk across at low tide. Or, horses could. Something like that. But why can’t you just row a boat across, anywhere on the River? Or did people ride the horses?

The spot where these horses are to found is next to the northern end of Lambeth Bridge, which is of course also the southern end of Horseferry Road.

Horseferry Road does its right angle kink very near to where I live, but it never occurred to me to wonder why it’s called that. This is London. Things have strange names. If you spent your time wondering about every strange name of everything strange sounding in London, you’d never be able to do anything else with your life. In France, all the street names are explained, on the spot, with elaborate explanatory signs. Not here.

Colourful Modernism

Google sends me emails about “new london architecture”. As you can imagine, there’s not a lot of news of this sort just now. But today, I received a link to a report about this, or maybe that’s these:

I smelled a young designer trying to get noticed, and I was not wrong. The thing is, the email said something about “colourful city benches”, and that intrigued me in all sorts of ways. I like public sculpture, especially if you can sit on it. I am interested in how designers are doing a lot of colour these days. And before the link even materialised, I placed a mental bet along the lines described in the first sentence of this paragraph.

Sure enough, Irene Astrain is indeed young. Well, thirties, which is young by architect standards. She only got started with her own enterprise in 2016.

(Starchitects often have to be seventy before they get to be starchitects. (Which was why Zaha Hadid’s recent death in her mere sixties was such a shock. (She should have had another thirty years of shape shifting ahead of her.)))

But back to these benches. What they say to me is that here’s a young architect, doing the old attract-maximum-attention-with-whatever-piddling-little-job-they’ll-let-me-do trick, and making two very strong statements. One: Modernism ain’t going anywhere. Two: but it is going to get much more colourful.

Time was when black and white, and what you get when you mix black and white (grey), were the most modern colours there were (I strongly recommend that link), and photography could also only do black-and-white. And for that mid-twentieth century generation of architects, colour was vulgar and trashy, even Victorian, the Victorian era having been, architecturally speaking, a very colourful and garish time. So, for the Modernists, coloured architecture was the superimposition of mere surface effect. Colour did not ooze out of the inner essence of whatever it was, the way Modernist shapes did, or were claimed to. So, black-and-white architecture was de rigueur and colour was an abomination.

(Interestingly, Le Corbusier deviated from this norm. More recently, Renzo Piano is now very old, but has still done some very colourful buildings, right here in London.)

And now, black-and-white-only is itself what a bygone era looked like. Colour is now done a lot better, in cities that are getting a lot less polluted than they used to be. Colour photography is something everyone can now do and now wants to do.

There’s more blog postings to be done about why Modernism ain’t going anywhere, and it damn well ain’t whatever you maybe might wish. But those will have to wait. Meanwhile, I promise nothing.

There are also lots of blog postings to be done, or discovered having been done by others, about how modernism is caused by, among other things, the fondness that adults have for the kind of things they played with when very young, and when very small compared to these things.