London 9

The ninth and latest installment in Matthew's Trips to London was brief yet action-packed, motivated by an overwhelming desire to make the most of my life before it slips away from me, day by precious day. After a quick morning meeting at the office - yeah, that's right, on a Saturday, pretty dedicated, aren't I? - i jumped on the train and made a beeline for the British Museum. It, along with the V+A, is one of my few as-yet-unrealised touristic aims in London, and i felt the situation ought to be redressed.

Unfortunately in my excitement to get into the office for a meeting, i neglected to pack my camera, so I will have to resort to long, tedious descriptions of everything I saw (along with copywright-infringing images from other people's websites) in order to properly document my activities for the day. Here's a photo i prepared earlier when i walked past the museum one time.

It was closed then, but fortuitously open when i went this time; the empty forecourt pictured was in fact teeming with tourists. The British Museum, as many will know, has an incredibly profilic collection so that one would struggle to see all the pieces on display (a small subset of the total collection) in one visit. I did the obligatory ones: the Rosetta Stone, the Egyptian mummies and the Elgin (Parthenon) marbles. The last of these is a great source of controversy as Greece feels that they should be returned. Several arguments against this are usually given: the artifacts have been looked after better at BM (though there are claims that this isn't necessarily the case), that it is better to present these works alongside others from other cultures, etc. Furthermore, the BM itself states ,"the restitutionist premise, that whatever was made in a country must return to an original geographical site, would empty both the British Museum and the other great museums of the world". The marbles are nice but they are not nearly as spectacular (and accordingly represent a less significant act of looting) as, for example, the Zeus Altar taken from Pergamon in Turkey to Berlin in the 1880s, which is also a source of contention.

For my two cents worth: Sorry but bad luck. Greece wasn't even a country when Lord Elgin took the marbles. The Ottomans, who were in power there at the time (until Britain, France and Russia stepped in to help Greece gain independence), were happy to let them go. Empires have looted each other like crazy for millenia, taking whatever they could get their hands on. Just as the Pergamon Altar and the museums built in Berlin to accomodate it and other such artifacts became a monument to Prussian then German nationalism, the Pergamon marbles have been in, and become a part of, Britain for two centuries. At what point in history should the line be drawn between actions that are part of history and cannot be reversed, and those which should be reversed ie. revised?

Controversy aside, my favourites at the British Museum were the Assyrian gates, the marbles from Halicarnassus, the Andean costumes in the special exhibition on Living and Dying and the Enlightenment exhibition. Definitely worth a return visit.

Having done the ancient thing, i went to get a bit of the modern, at the Dan Flavin retrospective at the Hayward Gallery.

Went to the Tate Modern to make the most of my membership by sitting in the Member's Room, drinking lattes, eating olives and feeling really special and exclusive. Also had a look at the Martin Kippenberger exhibition but was flagging by this stage so will have to go back again before i can make any judgements. Wandered through the main collection and sat through a film by Markus Schinwald entitled dictio pii that, despite the haunting ambient soundtrack music that i really liked, was a touch disturbing, especially once the narrated monologue ("We are the perfume of corridors, unfamiliarized with isolated activity, ... blahblahblah for another two and a half minutes,... tortured geometries, unsyncopated energies, blahblah... , we are deranged") had been repeated five times. Remarkably spooky characters.

Back to Cam for a few quiet ones and called it a day. A busy and tiring yet ultimately satisfying day.