Risk in Margate, at Turner Contemporary? The Pratchett artwork and so on, more stumbling toward a review.

I arrived at Margate around eleven feeling like a light breakfast I noticed the table in Turner Contemporary Café, where I started painting my Risk watercolour was vacant, so I plonked my stuff on it and went to the counter to order tea, toast and marmalade.

They don’t do toast and marmalade so I settled for a cup of PG.

For me risk in art is where the artist takes some sort of risk and the nearest I can get to this is painting a view that everyone can see, in public with watercolour. There is so much that can go wrong that just the act of painting it creates a frission all of its own.

So I got on with my own Risk and having used adhesive to mitigate the risk of my dentchewers becoming detached I ordered a ploughman’s lunch, (for any Americans reading this, a typical English Barbarian’s snack) cheese is the biggest risk to a watercolour, apart from the PG.

Back to the exhibition, (you may need to see last weeks post to follow this http://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/risk-at-turner-contemporary-groping.html [please see brackets as footnotes]) photography is still not allowed, so all of this will have to be from memory as there is no exhibition catalogue.

I started with the Egress, as unlike Tiff I didn’t know what it was, which sort of explains why the trampoline which has glass instead of rubber, doesn’t have a mirror instead of glass. I contemplated the photos taken where the patrician doesn’t allow photography, which I concede is an exhibit where the photographer has taken a risk.  

I guess that the very nature of illicit photography diminishes the artistic content if photographs count as art. (To me, rather in the way that the invention of photography made a lot of art redundant, the internet and large screens at home cast doubt on the validity of displaying lots of photographs and videos in an art gallery. Without some sort of Hex, or do I mean with some sort of Hex, it could be difficult to remember what one viewed on ones tablet in the gallery’s café and what one viewed in the exhibition.)

Was The Mona Ogg on the other wall? I can’t remember.

Onto the room with the bomb and the bomb and the maze, and you can imagine my shock when I realised the bomb had gone, a Johnny without the Bomb. (No footnote needed for Americans here.)

The bomb had been moved to the corner because of the Risk, not of it exploding but of people tripping over it, what a good thing its placement wasn’t of artistic significance.

This time like Theseus I entered the Maze, this is in the form of a partly burnt shed, although without a catalogue I can’t remember the exact significance, but probably related to war and the risk of being burnt alive.

Xeno has a paradox here, not the tortoise one, however an art gallery riddle and one that appeals to me. There is a gallery assistant at the entrance to the maze who tells you that despite all the signs telling you not to touch anything, if you don’t touch the red button concealed amongst lots of stuff, you may or may not be allowed to touch, you are unlikely to egress, sorry, ever get out of the maze.

Look if you don’t know why my next thought is +++Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++ you really shouldn’t be reading this, anyway I metaphorically inserted more cheese, pressed the button and went on.

Into the long gallery, not called this because it is long, in fact not long, negotiated around lots of people watching Moving Pictures, passed a balanced ball (risk of falling on the floor?) and into the next gallery.

Here you come to the Duchamp, this is like the Granny Wetherwax's pink elephant test, she can pass this because she has never actually seen an elepant and you can pass this if you don’t know much about contemporary art, we will make it harder here so you can also pass it if you don’t read a lot, so can you pass Duchamp’s wiggly lines without thinking of W. C. Lavatory? Bet you can’t.

If like me, my excuse is running the bookshop in Ramsgate, which if you read, like the edge of the world, you will eventually come to, you can’t, then carry on without, or is it within.

So what do you call it if there is something (Chinese and seismologists excepted) that very few people know about, that is the real life version of something different millions of people have read about?

To make this more difficult neither thing actually exists, there are no surviving contemporary examples of one and the other is a magical figment of the authors mind.

Big pot with dragons or elephants on it that spits out pellet when people watch Moving Pictures, ring any bells?

Here is a pot to humble all of Grayson Perry’s, finally recovering from the previous exhibition, like Brutha on the road Tsort (well not like) I have an aesthetic catharsis, I can remember, with out catalogue, the next exhibit, a page from The Journal of Edward Barlow 1659 – 1703 (The Librarian has already dealt with the unfortunate who tore the page out.)

My Risk painting was nearly finished and all was going well, I should have realised that something bad was going to happen on the next page.

I got back to the café to finish the picture at 3.01 only to be told that it had closed early at 3.00 and that I wasn’t allowed to buy my cup of PG or finish my painting, an event had occurred.

I wouldn’t be able to sit in the ambience of the café, the background chatter equates to that during the interval in a London theatre, while on the other side of the double glazed door Bruv and Geys talk about Mate and Darlin. The Opera House had arrive in The Shades.

I fled to the alternative, back into the gallery, which was now full of wedding guests and they weren’t discussing what our Zhang Heng said to our Riktor.

My state of mind when I left the gallery was not what it ought to be, I stood by the sea wall looking over the ocean where I suffered a bad case of tides, in fact standing under the wave made me so wet, I had to go home and put on dry clothes, one risk too far.