Maison Martin Margiela at Somerset House

Entry: £6 adults / £5 concessions / under 12s free

When I post an exhibition entry I give it the date that I visited the exhibition, even if I wrote the entry a few days after the visit, (which is usually the case). This time it took me an entire week to sit down and write something about the Maison Martin Margiela exhibition because I just didn't know what to say about it.

I suspected I'd have this problem. Fashion has never interested me and high fashion is downright alien to me. I think my main difficulty is with accepting that a fashion designer can be an artist and can create clothes that are purely aesthetic and utterly impractical for day-to-day wear. In the same way that architects should make houses that can be lived in and chefs should make food that is edible, so clothing designers should make clothes that are actually wearable. However, I am quite happy to accept that this is entirely my own prejudice and that plenty of people admire what Maison Martin Margiela do, but it will also be impossible for me to put this bias aside while writing this review.

Maison Martin Margiela was established in 1988 by Martin Margiela. This exhibition celebrates the house's 20^th anniversary, which actually took place in October 2008. It's a substantial exhibition with 30 exhibits of varying size, (most of the exhibits collect several items of clothing from particularly notable collection or line). There are certain themes that recur in MMM's work, most notably the deconstruction and recycling of existing garments, as exemplified by fake fur coats constructed from wigs and well-tailored jackets with the seams on the outside. In keeping with this interest in transformation is an entire collection based on visual trickery:

The 1996 Spring-Summer collection was made up of printed articles of clothing with a very simple cut and produced in fine flowing fabric. […] Each piece is printed with a photograph of another garment, of which both the cut and the material differ strongly from the skirt, jacket or dress on which the photograph is printed.*

These are really well-done. While they don't quite trick the eye, they do demand a second, closer look. MMM have continued playing with such effects, (with mixed results), and the 1996 garments are accompanied by a selection of accessories and clothes from throughout the company's history.

Of course, this unexpected high point was accompanied by plenty that didn't work for me. Further on in the exhibition are two sections (29. 'A Doll's Wardrobe' and 30. XXXL) that downright annoyed me. 'A Doll's Wardrobe' is a collection of “clothing inspired by dolls' wardrobes, such as those of Barbie, Ken and G.I. Joe”. It's not entirely clear if these clothes are simply inspired by dolls' wardrobes or if they are exact, albeit enlarged, replicas of specific doll clothes, (the exhibition guide is a bit vague on this point), but apparently “the theme is the standard, idealised body”. Which would be fine except for the fact that these clothes don't look any weirder than anything else in the exhibition.

Yes, there are some details that are a bit off – uncut threads suggesting hasty, unskilled construction, oversized buttons and zips – but these don't look very outlandish in terms of shape. If the intent was to show the distorted physiques of the dolls it completely fails, though it might have had more of an impact if the clothes had been displayed on mannequins rather than spread flat against a wall.

The XXXL exhibit has a slightly different problem. To quote the exhibition guide again:

In several of their collections, Maison Martin Margiela has deviated significantly from the standardised body as presented by fashion. Various collections explored the idea of oversized clothing by wrapping the body like a gigantic artificial cocoon.

I don't have a problem with either of these sentences on their own, but together they don't seem to make sense. How exactly is swaddling your usual rail-thin models in acres of excess cloth and shoes that are clownishly too big for them transgressive?

In the end I left feeling cross that anybody would think that any of this was remotely daring and provocative, and even less convinced than ever of the point of high fashion.

*All quotes taken from the free guide to the exhibition.

Life Drawing at Candid Arts, Islington

Not much to say about the class this evening. I must have been in a bad mood about something - I seemed to be unable to stop myself from grinding the charcoal into the paper all evening.

top left = 15 minute sketch; remainder = 5 minute sketches

10 minute sketches

20 minute sketches

1to1 Architects Build Small Spaces at the V & A

Entry: Free

I like to bring other people to the free exhibitions, partly because I just like company, but partly because I like to hear the other person's reaction. I don't bring people to the paying exhibitions because it seems unfair to ask others to pay so I can do my homework. I had two people join me for the 1:1 exhibition at the V&A, and not only was this exhibition the most fun to attend I think it's definitely one that's best visited with other people.

Ratatosk by Helen & Hard Architects

The V&A are apparently concerned about architecture exhibitions, specifically that “their emphasis on drawings, models and photographs, sometimes deny their audience an engagement with actual buildings”.* Some people might point out that this is because buildings are usually too big to exhibit, but the V&A went ahead and asked nineteen architects to present concepts for “structures that examine notions of refuge and retreat”.They then displayed all nineteen proposals in the Architecture gallery. Oh, and they picked seven to build in the V&A.

Ark by Rintala Eggertsson Architects

That's right. Within the V&A museum are seven smaller buildings, all of which are open to the public, though you may have to queue to get into them when the museum's busy. Each structure has a video playing next to it in which the architects talk about its design and construction, but these really take a back seat to physically exploring the structures themselves. And these structures really do need to be explored. You want to get inside them, to touch them, to climb up them or through them. It always seems like a missed opportunity to me when I go to textiles exhibitions only to find “do not touch” signs up. While I understand that this helps preserve the artworks I think that it doesn't allow the artist to fully exploit the media that they use. Surely an artist working with any sort of textiles is drawn as much to their tactility as to their appearance, so why wouldn't you want to incorporate that tactility into your audience's experience?

Beetle's House by Terunobu Fujimori

This has gone off topic a little, (in to one of my favourite areas – textile art, not just as something to look at, but as something to touch, to wear, to engage with as the audience engages with textiles in their everyday lives), so getting back to practicalities I should point out that one of the structures is only accessible by a ladder, while there are two others that have stairs inside. The seven buildings are also spread throughout the V&A, so there's a fair amount of walking if you want to see them all. If you're prepared for that though it's loads of fun – one of the people who accompanied me described it as a treasure hunt afterwards, which is pretty accurate. A treasure hunt through the V&A with seven fantastical houses to find!

Inside/Outside Tree by Sou Fujimoto

(I've just looked over the exhibition list and I've been to five of the eleven exhibitions now. I've missed two - the Henry Moore exhibition at Tate Britain and the Textiles Advanced Workshop show at the Morley College Gallery – so there's just four left. Unfortunately, I'm pretty busy over the next few weeks so I'm not sure I'll have time to get to any of them before the course starts, which means I may end up missing two more – Maison Martin Margiela at Somerset House and Sustainable Futures at the Design Museum.)

*All quotes come from the free exhibition guide to 1:1. This exhibition guide includes a map of the V&A showing the location of all the structures.

Wolfgang Tillmans at the Serpentine Gallery

Entry: Free

I didn't know anything about Wolfgang Tillmans going into this exhibition. Reading about him on Wikipedia afterwards I learnt that he was the first photographer and the first non-English artist to be awarded the Turner Prize. He won in 2000 with a photograph of Concorde and while I'm not impressed by the photograph, (I think it's fairly bland to be honest), the Guardian have an article written by Tillmans all about the process of taking the picture that's very interesting. Given how controversial the Turner Prize has become in recent years it seems like winning it might be something of a poisoned chalice though. Certainly, people will have very clear opinions about what sort of an artist you are based on that information alone.

Of course, I went in not knowing any of this, and I'm glad this was the case. I knew that it would include Tillmans' figurative and abstract work from the last 10 years, but that was all. (I didn't even realise that he was a photographer until I was working out how to get to the Serpentine.) I'd expected to enjoy the figurative stuff more than the abstract, however, it turns out that most of Tillmans' figurative work is like his Turner Prize winner – bland and not actually that memorable. A number of his photographs were reproduced in the standard 5”x3.75” format normally used for holiday snaps, giving me the weird feeling that some visitor had stuck their own pictures all over the gallery walls.

The abstract work on the other hand was beautiful. Tillmans has taken two different approaches to his abstract photography, one is to zoom right in on an image to remove all contextual clues from it, and the other involves playing with the colours and textures that can be achieved with photographic paper. The first approach yields images like “Paper Drop”, where a piece of paper curled up on itself becomes something else entirely, while the second creates images such as “Ostgut Freischwimmer” and “Lighter AC1”. The latter category includes images that are not images, but pieces of photographic paper that have been coloured, folded and creased, and are more akin to sculptural objects than photographs.

It's a substantial show and there's a huge range of work here, but to me the figurative stuff doesn't really justify its place in a gallery. Surely if I'm supposed to be admiring it then it has to be worthy of admiration? Or is there a Duchamp-esque belief behind it that it's worthy of admiration purely because of its place in a gallery? (You see, this is why the Turner Prize has so many detractors.) However, Tillmans' experiments with colour and texture made the journey to west London a worthwhile one for me.

A book based on a journey, part 2

So, armed with 60 photographs documenting my journey to work, I sat down to develop a new plan for the book. I started by writing down the bare structure of my journey – the roads and tube stations that I use. Giving each of these a page, and the tube journey two pages, gave me a much more manageable 14 pages.

Then I looked through my photographs and made notes about which images could potentially be used on each page. This exercise quickly revealed that I was missing images for five pages entirely and there were two pages that I really needed more images for. Almost half of my photos were taken on one street, which could easily have a spread to itself. However, I decided to spread its images into the street that follows it, rather than extend that page. I wanted an even number of pages so that the book's contents didn't spill out onto its cover, but I couldn't see anywhere else that could be expanded or contracted. The two roads do merge in real life, (i.e. there's no sharp turn from one into the other), and significant portion of the images are taken from the point where they merge so it seemed to make more sense to do it this way. I now had a flat-plan for the book, a rough layout of what should go where.

With a new general layout worked out I put together a mock version of the book using some plain A4 paper I had on hand.

I now needed to figure out the layout for the individual pages. (One idea that crossed my mind while working on this was possibly returning to the idea of the same journey repeated five times, but having the journeys running parallel to each other rather than consecutively, differentiating them by using different techniques. I scrapped that idea as I couldn't come up with five different mediums that I'd be comfortable using.) I sat down and started sketching out rough layouts of some of the pages. At the moment I'm envisioning a comic book layout using the photographs I've taken. Visually similar to the webcomic A Softer World, (though probably without the dark and absurdist humour), but with more varied panel layouts.

Though for this to work I still need to take more photographs!