In London Again

After a sleepy train journey from Cardiff, and a spectacular frosty walk in the sun across Hyde Park, I spent an enjoyable Saturday touring the galleries of London, beginning with Tate Modern's new installation of Carsten Höller's work. The installation consists of a number of umbilical structures which are actually artist-designed slides, offering a speedy descent from the very top of the turbine hall to the bottom in a small number of short, bumpy seconds. I had a go at the highest of these, and found it to be noisy, uncomfortable, slightly stressful and a little painful at the end. The acceleration was huge, and my flapping cheeks reminded me of movies of NASA test pilots as I was ejected into a mass of waiting spectators, with their cameras at the ready to capture my undignified disorientation.

Others in the party took on the Level 4 slide, which was by all accounts the most severe of them all, with speeds reportedly reaching 35mph. This was quite a physical, elbow-bruising experience for many, but as I waited a the bottom for the participants to plummet out into stasis, I couldn't help wondering where the art was in all this fun. There are many persuasive arguments for a participatory art of experience, and even I don't think that art has to be serious all the time. That said, I think that there is a big difference between this and the work of, say, Rirkrit Tiravanija, which foregrounds the relations between participants. While I enjoyed the experience, I am still struggling to extract meaning from it.

From the Tate, via an excellent and very cheap lunch in a cafe behind Southwark tube, to White Cube to see Gabriel Oruzco's latest. This graphite-drawn whale skeleton reminded me of sonar waves, but aside from the superlative quality of the hanging, left me cold. The paintings on the ground floor were constructed mathematically using the 'knights move' in Chess, and while interesting from a systems design perspective, had very little warmth and didn't give me much to hang on to, despite the medieval resonances of the gold leaf and egg tempera. I couldn't help thinking of John F Simon's Every Icon, perhaps the superlative 'combinations' piece in existence. Nothing matches its utter brutality.

Interestingly, I had a wander around the back of the new White Cube building, and met a huge rat on my explorations. When peeking at the goods entrance, it was revealed that the heavy-looking stones that comprise the facade were actually made of rendered fibreboard.

We also visited Anish Kapoor's exhibition at the Lisson, and Runa Islam's Conditional Probability at the Serpentine, but I am too tired to write about these properly except to say that neither really blew my socks off. Parts of the Anish Kapoor were interestingly visceral, but much of the work relies on distortions of the viewer's image, a strategy that feels to me to be a bit tired and lacking in originality, regardless of how seductively it might be carried out.