There is a bit of a sense of the god being contemporary art, and this shrine to that god is in a different geographical area to the one indigenous to the worshipers of that god.
Discussions about the Turner Contemporary are likely to very odd, I often find myself having them with people in my bookshop, partly I think because of the books I sell about the local area. One way or another if you develop an interest in this area you eventually wind up in my bookshop trying to find out a bit more about the aspect of the Isle of Thanet you are interested in. My bookshop is on the local tourist loop, to an extent. Hence strange conversations about local landmarks.
One sort of conversation goes a bit like this:
Customer: “That Turner Centre is a waste of money.”
Me: “Well it does seem to have brought some more visitors to the area.”
Customer: “It would have been better if it has some Turners in it.”
Me (wondering a bit about the pronunciation of Souffrier): “Well what did you think of, The Eruption of the Souffrier Mountains?
Customer: What?
Me: The painting by Turner that is in display in the gallery.
Customer: I haven’t actually been inside the gallery.
Another sort of conservation goes a bit like this.
Customer: I’ve just been to the Turner Contemporary and though it was a load of rubbish.
Me: What all of it? There are several artists of international standing exhibiting there, what did you think of the Daniel Burrell?
Customer: Which one was that?
Me: The stripes and the mirrors, on and by the window in foyer?
Customer: Oh I thought that was part of the building.
Then there are the people who say they like the exhibition, in a way these are even more difficult to understand.
I perhaps would say something like, don’t you think the Burrell is a bit dated to feature in a contemporary art exhibition, when the statement was more a 60s reactionary one. The customer is just as likely to say, what Burrell?
Anyway all that aside for the moment, I still haven’t got anywhere with the design faults and the other problems that I highlighted recently, see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2011/05/fine-tuning-turner-contemporary-margate.html
As you can see from the picture above the floor is still a bit of a mess.
Where one goes when so much money has been spent from local tax contributions and there seems to be no real desire to solve fairly minor errors, I just don’t know. I am fairly certain that if the local council had commissioned some fairly ordinary and utilitarian building with these problems, then there would have been some effort to put them right. Any other public building that had had its floor all hacked up like that would have had the floor put right by now. Little things like positioning seats too low to see over the adjacent wall, surely with a multimillion pound project shouldn’t just be allowed to pass muster.
On to yesterdays pictures, here
and here
Anyway apart from the relatively minor faults I have mentioned the gallery does seem to be helping to bring Margate back to life, so onto the pictures.
For anyone new to this, I always publish the whole lot on my camera card, not just the ones that came out ok, this isn’t much work and some people like to see them all.
When I turned up it was low tide and a bit smelly because of the seaweed, the compensation was there were some good reflections that help the photography.
I soon flagged though and had a cup of tea at BeBeached on the harbour arm. There was very little wind and some sort of dingy race going on, very nearly in the get out and swim bracket, the dingys in the photos look like toys, not a cleaver photographic trick, just something that happened.
Not many pictures of the inside of the gallery as I have already done it see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2011/04/turner-contemporary-revisited-some-more.html where there enough links to my pictures of inside the gallery to put you to sleep.
The ones of the Droit House through the windows were because there is a distortion in the window glass that alters the shape of the side of the clock tower.
On to the second page of yesterday’s pictures, a few of the lifeboat manoeuvring on land.
Lunch at The Puffin Café on the harbour arm, I had a ploughman’s lunch and a pot of tea, they really understand this sort of thing, the pot of tea was served with civilised china and the ploughman’s cheddar, stilton and brie. My wife had Coke (the real thing cool from the fridge) and a toasted sandwich, all of it came out at about £8.50 which I consider to be very good value.
The rest of the pictures on the camera card are at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/711/id7.htm some sort of peculiar roadworks here in King Street Ramsgate, where the resurfaced some of the road and left the rest full of problems.
The snails pace on the Pleasurama development, between 2 and six people working at any one time, it looks like it will take about twenty years to complete at the present pace.
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