Picasso at the Tate Modern, travelling through time
This summer, Bobby made his second trip to the Tate Modern. The occasion was to view a biographical exhibit of Picasso's works from 1932. Bobby, in this year, Picasso was painting to stay relevant after having already achieved fame but also dealing with the dissolution of his marriage (caused, of course, by his infidelity) -- why is this not resonating more with you?! Turns out, the day became not so much about a series of paintings as the timeline of life, including Picasso's and our own, as well as everyday lessons in parenting.
Successful adventures with our young boy require us to get right the timings of naps, meals, and snacks. This particular Sunday, we messed it up. The ideal museum trip -- at least when you want to meaningfully observe the works and read the descriptions -- requires the boy to sleep in the Ergo Baby carrier while Baba soaks in the museum. Otherwise, the boy would prefer to run through the museum, or if he's super tired and irritable, just throw a tantrum whenever and wherever possible. (previous post describing last winter's museum adventures).
Bobby will nap in the Ergo Baby, but getting him to take a second nap is very hard. He slept on the taxi ride to the museum. He woke up when we arrived, having slept for about 15 minutes. In the museum's lobby, with Bob in the carrier, I did my deep knee squats, bouncing the boy to lull him asleep again. I've bounced him like that until my legs burnt (see this post about our time in Rome), and I usually end up winning. Alas, I lost at the Tate Modern, and Bobby was not too impressed with Picasso.
The exhibit was crowded, so Bobby couldn't be turned loose to run. We had to hold him. He squirmed, and eventually he threw a fit; so, like a nightclub bouncer to a drunken fistfighter, I dragged the boy out of the room flailing and bawling. I held him and soothed him on a terrace that overlooked the City, St. Paul's, the Millenium Bridge, and the Thames, while Mum finished with the exhibit. We then went to the cafe, sat on another outdoor terrace, and had some snacks (including, for Baba at least, some Tate own-brand beer). The boy played with his trucks, and he was happy again.
I learned something about parenting this day. While I am interested in biographical art exhibits, describing the place and time of the artist's creations, I thought to myself, it's a good thing I've already been indulging such interests as long as I have. The time for my interests is not now -- or, at least, my interests outside of those I can share well with my boy. It doesn't matter whether I learned a bit more about Picasso; what matters is that we spend the time with each other, learning how to live together as a family, particularly as a family with parents wanting to find adventures away from home.
If you're not familiar with the Tate Modern, it is possibly most famous as a building, rather than a museum. It is a giant, red-brick cube with a square smokestack. It was formerly a coal-fired power plant just across the Thames from the City. No doubt it was terrible back in the day spewing soot right downtown as it was. In the 1990s the building was remade into a modern art museum.
Tate Modern fits well with the London aesthetic. London is a city where layers of history are set on top of and overlapping with each other. Set across the river from St. Paul's, a 17th century church that pre-dates industrialization, the Tate Modern building dates from the 1940s, the tail-end of London's manufacturing heyday. Now, the building has been decommissioned from its coal-fired use and is now part of the service industry, which is increasingly supplanting the local manufacturing economy. And this is London: pre-industrial buildings and institutions, scattered amongst the ruins of heavy industrialization, with new buildings and institutions growing through the cracks, and all now populated by places to produce and consume services (e.g., banks, consulting firms, law firms, restaurants, shops, museums).
When we first arrived to London in May 2017, the boy was just becoming an athletic crawler. We knew the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, with its vast expanse of smooth floor, would be an exciting place for him to exercise his athletic prowess. The boy was much easier to manage in public in those days. He was much more apt to nap and go with the family flow. Now that he's older, he has stronger opinions about how he wants to spend his time; he's more vocal with them, too, even if those opinions are not often articulated in a way that anyone can understand.
Maybe here I can pull together the themes of family development through the layers of setting. Interest in place and time are already a documented fascination of mine (see these rarely read entries here: Portland in the 90s, Pinot in the Willammette, and arguably the entire blog).
Perhaps this experience has taught us something and gives us a worthy idea. The Picasso exhibit describes the setting of an artist's output at a specific point on the timeline. The Tate Modern is a place bound by its setting, with its evolution through time being arguably its most famous part. Every place, at the moment you view it, represents an intersection of place and time. When you view the same place at differing points in time, you observe changes by comparing the place to its setting at the other times you viewed.
Already we have marked the passage of our family's evolution with visits to this place. If we return here regularly (keeping the pace of once every 15 months?), we would naturally be marking the progression of our family adventure. Of course, at each subsequent visit, we will all look older. We would hopefully be wiser. The museum is unlikely to leave in our lifetime, but the Thames bankside is likely to change; I bet the museum will also expand. Hopefully our family will similarly expand but not our waistlines. Time will tell.
Successful adventures with our young boy require us to get right the timings of naps, meals, and snacks. This particular Sunday, we messed it up. The ideal museum trip -- at least when you want to meaningfully observe the works and read the descriptions -- requires the boy to sleep in the Ergo Baby carrier while Baba soaks in the museum. Otherwise, the boy would prefer to run through the museum, or if he's super tired and irritable, just throw a tantrum whenever and wherever possible. (previous post describing last winter's museum adventures).
Bobby will nap in the Ergo Baby, but getting him to take a second nap is very hard. He slept on the taxi ride to the museum. He woke up when we arrived, having slept for about 15 minutes. In the museum's lobby, with Bob in the carrier, I did my deep knee squats, bouncing the boy to lull him asleep again. I've bounced him like that until my legs burnt (see this post about our time in Rome), and I usually end up winning. Alas, I lost at the Tate Modern, and Bobby was not too impressed with Picasso.
The exhibit was crowded, so Bobby couldn't be turned loose to run. We had to hold him. He squirmed, and eventually he threw a fit; so, like a nightclub bouncer to a drunken fistfighter, I dragged the boy out of the room flailing and bawling. I held him and soothed him on a terrace that overlooked the City, St. Paul's, the Millenium Bridge, and the Thames, while Mum finished with the exhibit. We then went to the cafe, sat on another outdoor terrace, and had some snacks (including, for Baba at least, some Tate own-brand beer). The boy played with his trucks, and he was happy again.
I learned something about parenting this day. While I am interested in biographical art exhibits, describing the place and time of the artist's creations, I thought to myself, it's a good thing I've already been indulging such interests as long as I have. The time for my interests is not now -- or, at least, my interests outside of those I can share well with my boy. It doesn't matter whether I learned a bit more about Picasso; what matters is that we spend the time with each other, learning how to live together as a family, particularly as a family with parents wanting to find adventures away from home.
If you're not familiar with the Tate Modern, it is possibly most famous as a building, rather than a museum. It is a giant, red-brick cube with a square smokestack. It was formerly a coal-fired power plant just across the Thames from the City. No doubt it was terrible back in the day spewing soot right downtown as it was. In the 1990s the building was remade into a modern art museum.
Tate Modern fits well with the London aesthetic. London is a city where layers of history are set on top of and overlapping with each other. Set across the river from St. Paul's, a 17th century church that pre-dates industrialization, the Tate Modern building dates from the 1940s, the tail-end of London's manufacturing heyday. Now, the building has been decommissioned from its coal-fired use and is now part of the service industry, which is increasingly supplanting the local manufacturing economy. And this is London: pre-industrial buildings and institutions, scattered amongst the ruins of heavy industrialization, with new buildings and institutions growing through the cracks, and all now populated by places to produce and consume services (e.g., banks, consulting firms, law firms, restaurants, shops, museums).
When we first arrived to London in May 2017, the boy was just becoming an athletic crawler. We knew the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, with its vast expanse of smooth floor, would be an exciting place for him to exercise his athletic prowess. The boy was much easier to manage in public in those days. He was much more apt to nap and go with the family flow. Now that he's older, he has stronger opinions about how he wants to spend his time; he's more vocal with them, too, even if those opinions are not often articulated in a way that anyone can understand.
Maybe here I can pull together the themes of family development through the layers of setting. Interest in place and time are already a documented fascination of mine (see these rarely read entries here: Portland in the 90s, Pinot in the Willammette, and arguably the entire blog).
Perhaps this experience has taught us something and gives us a worthy idea. The Picasso exhibit describes the setting of an artist's output at a specific point on the timeline. The Tate Modern is a place bound by its setting, with its evolution through time being arguably its most famous part. Every place, at the moment you view it, represents an intersection of place and time. When you view the same place at differing points in time, you observe changes by comparing the place to its setting at the other times you viewed.
Already we have marked the passage of our family's evolution with visits to this place. If we return here regularly (keeping the pace of once every 15 months?), we would naturally be marking the progression of our family adventure. Of course, at each subsequent visit, we will all look older. We would hopefully be wiser. The museum is unlikely to leave in our lifetime, but the Thames bankside is likely to change; I bet the museum will also expand. Hopefully our family will similarly expand but not our waistlines. Time will tell.
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| Exhibit publicity on the Tube. Does that picture show up elsewhere on this blog? |
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| Picasso, Girl before a Mirror. This was about the last painting the boy viewed before he had to be removed. The exhibit, documenting the artist's production from 1932, was laid out chronologically; the boy made it to early March. |
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| The boy on the floor of the Turbine Room in May 2017. He indeed did engage in some athletic crawling in this room. We didn't anticipate -- but surely should have -- how dirty his knees would become on this public floor. |
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