On a very dank morning, that graduated to rain - seen first from the window of my hotel - it was off to Pimlico, passing a surreal large sign in someone's basement area that read "Disasters are just another star falling in my yard," which I thought was a true piece of surreal lyricism until I googled it and found that it's a line from the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "This Velvet Glove." Sometimes I'm sorry that one can tame things through Google.
The Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990 show was excellent - a condensed view not just of art and activism, but of women and politics more broadly during that time - and even though I'd been directly or tangentially involved with, or at least very aware of, so much of the politics, it very directly brought home what a comfortable, privileged take I was able to hold in relation to very much of it. Not that it felt like that at the time, of course. There was a superb amount of notes, and ephemera, and xeroxed and stapled little journals (one forgets how amateur things looked, from today's computerized perspective). There was also a great deal of nakedness and barbed wire and very wide apart legs, that would probably get me thrown off Facebook etc if I posted it. But it was great to (re)see posters,
and banners,
and Janis Jefferies' woven sisal piece, "Double Labia,"
and Kate Walker's "Art of Survival: A Living Monument,"
and a full couple of rooms of Black and South Asian art - including possibly my favourite piece, Sutapa Biswas' Housewives with Steak Knives - Kali in the kitchen, with lots of decapitated men,
including a tiny little flag with Artemisia Gentileschi's image of Judith slaying Holofernes.
And if you can't get to see it (it goes from Tate Britain to Edinburgh to Manchester), the catalogue is beautifully produced, and full, and of course - it now being 2023 - now renders everything sleek and glossy.
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