YOUR bank holiday weekend events
Li Kim Lee
Friday, 04 May 2007 10:45 UTC
Just wondering… no doubt pints-at-the-pub will feature quite heavily in your schedule this upcoming weekend but what other events are you planning to attend (or organise) this May Day Bank Holiday?
And if you are reading this next week, do you have any opinions on what made the event such an enjoyable one? Or conversely, if you could not wait to leave, why so and perhaps you could offer suggestions for improvement?
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The thought of sitting sedentarily for 1 or 3 hours for a talk or a play sounded really unappealing to me so I decided to visit several exhibitions last weekend.
My first stop was the Design Museum. It is just not what it used to be although the black-clad wireframe-bespectacled museumgoer crowd is still predominant. The main exhibition, Translating Nature by Luigi Colani, felt strangely surreal (but not in the same way as the V & A Surreal Things exhibition). It was somehow “static”—I know, of course most exhibits are stationary—and did not seem to reach to the audience (or at least to me). There were many life-size prototypes of designs by Colgani scattered (i.e carefully arranged) around the darkened exhibition room to admire but the most interesting item was a big screen onto which an an underwater scene with fishes and coral was projected… very good for throwing shadows. Another exhibition, 25:25, featuring 25 well-designed items characteristic of the past 25 years and chosen by a panel of design leaders was fairly interesting. The accompanying giant booklet that accompanied this exhibition may be better than the exhibition itself… and you can take home 7 copies to justify the £7 entry fee.
The next day I felt a need to contrast my Design Museum experience and so went off to the Geffrye Museum for a dose of traditional domestic English interiors (1600 to the present day). The museum, housed in 18th century almshouses with its own herb garden, was really lovely, with lots of charming room displays and sociological facts about how and why house interiors in England have evolved to the current setup. It was really enjoyable. Perhaps the many formats of the Geffrye Museum—room mockups, artefacts in glass cabinets, textiles to touch, old and new chairs to test, experiences through the decades encapsulated in audio recordings, gardens to wander through, two reading rooms to peruse the Geffrye Museum archive—made for a better experience. I also learnt that housewiferie used to be considered a science so this museum sort of fits into the “scientific” category of Nature Network.
And on Bank Holiday Monday, which was typically rainy, I stopped by Riflemaker to view works by the computer artist John Maeda but the Soho gallery was shut.
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