London is always a few degrees warmer. Snow might fall, but it doesn't linger. I am recovering from dental surgery, stuffed with painkillers. But there are daffodils in the green walls, and in the trees in the art installation, the birds are singing.
The installation is called Library for the Birds of London, but the birds are not one of our natives (could you use Goldfinches?) but the art-installation-friendly Zebra Finch, twenty-two of them, all sociable and sentimental, allopreening and softly twittering and not quite settled in enough to be perching on rucksacks and handbags yet, but one of them is building a nest in a dangling hat. Hold your installation for long enough and you get zebra finch chicks, born to the art and habituated to the gallery environment from birth.
Whitechapel gallery is unfamiliar but I've seen Dion before; most notably his siftings from the Thames, scadalous in its day for being good art and bad archaeology, or possibly vice versa. Here the presentation includes the ethnographic shots and gathered accoutrements of the volunteer diggers, which I had not seen before, which are lovely. There's also a lot of stuff about hunting (elaborate hunting lodges, an essay entitled "On the inevitability of hunting," trophies, flags) which makes me nervous, even though when I'm running my repeat-to-myself is pretty much always "Chase the deer, catch the deer, you don't have to out-run it, you just have to outlast it," while I imagine I'm endurance hunting a Mutjac.
We want to stay and explore more of Whitechapel Gallery but we're hungry and there is more planned for the day, and the cafe contains only cake. We find a place and eat and dive back into the underground and then out into the Southbank. The concrete is warming in the sunshine; spring
comes earlier to London. The warmth of the walls and the traffic warms every pocket and fragment of soil, and green oozes from everywhere. It's too earlier for the municipal hoes and scorchers to have come out. Tiny flecks of green are appearing everywhere. The trees stretch out their shadows on the ground, beaded with swelling buds. Spring is coming.
In Soho, someone is trying to save a mulberry. In Trafalgar Square, tourists are dancing with the pigeons, shooting selfies in the waterspray from the fountains, under the watchful eyes of the invisible enemy should not exist on the fourth plinth. We decide to walk back to the bus across the park, even though it's late and the light is failing. The park is full of daffodils and birds billing and cooing and being a bit fancy. Then hunger strikes, and we end up bolting bowls in the glass canyons of Nova Victoria under the the smoky gaze of the Rubens Hotel Living Wall where the daffodils gleam in the darkness like living stars.
The installation is called Library for the Birds of London, but the birds are not one of our natives (could you use Goldfinches?) but the art-installation-friendly Zebra Finch, twenty-two of them, all sociable and sentimental, allopreening and softly twittering and not quite settled in enough to be perching on rucksacks and handbags yet, but one of them is building a nest in a dangling hat. Hold your installation for long enough and you get zebra finch chicks, born to the art and habituated to the gallery environment from birth.
Whitechapel gallery is unfamiliar but I've seen Dion before; most notably his siftings from the Thames, scadalous in its day for being good art and bad archaeology, or possibly vice versa. Here the presentation includes the ethnographic shots and gathered accoutrements of the volunteer diggers, which I had not seen before, which are lovely. There's also a lot of stuff about hunting (elaborate hunting lodges, an essay entitled "On the inevitability of hunting," trophies, flags) which makes me nervous, even though when I'm running my repeat-to-myself is pretty much always "Chase the deer, catch the deer, you don't have to out-run it, you just have to outlast it," while I imagine I'm endurance hunting a Mutjac.
We want to stay and explore more of Whitechapel Gallery but we're hungry and there is more planned for the day, and the cafe contains only cake. We find a place and eat and dive back into the underground and then out into the Southbank. The concrete is warming in the sunshine; spring
comes earlier to London. The warmth of the walls and the traffic warms every pocket and fragment of soil, and green oozes from everywhere. It's too earlier for the municipal hoes and scorchers to have come out. Tiny flecks of green are appearing everywhere. The trees stretch out their shadows on the ground, beaded with swelling buds. Spring is coming.
In Soho, someone is trying to save a mulberry. In Trafalgar Square, tourists are dancing with the pigeons, shooting selfies in the waterspray from the fountains, under the watchful eyes of the invisible enemy should not exist on the fourth plinth. We decide to walk back to the bus across the park, even though it's late and the light is failing. The park is full of daffodils and birds billing and cooing and being a bit fancy. Then hunger strikes, and we end up bolting bowls in the glass canyons of Nova Victoria under the the smoky gaze of the Rubens Hotel Living Wall where the daffodils gleam in the darkness like living stars.
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