I don't know about you, but most of the art I did at school wasn't very good. A few charcoal sketchings, a couple of badly misfired clay objects and several posterpaint daubings. It came as some surprise, therefore, when my secondary school art teacher saw fit to place one of my not terribly good paintings on the art room wall. And even more of a surprise when that same painting (of a plate of food) was still there on the same wall four years later. School art doesn't usually have longevity, and isn't usually great. But one of my contemporaries from school moved on from art lesson brushwork to exhibit in galleries worldwide. Simon was a couple of years below me, but I was at least in the same class as his brother. And yesterday I went to Greenwich to see a proper exhibition of his work. This time with no double-mounted sugar paper anywhere in sight.
You probably know some of Simon Patterson's work. He was the mastermind behind the first tube map mashup - The Great Bear - in which the names of all the stations were replaced by famous people. Engineers on the Bakerloo line, philosophers on the Circle and Footballers on the Jubilee, etc etc. It doesn't sound terribly original now but the trick, as with all wonderfully simple ideas, was to come up with it before anyone else. The Great Bear is the first thing you'll see as you enter this exhibition. It's based on the 1992 tube map so it still looks like a proper work of art - no accessibility blobs or excess information overload here. And no obtrusive IKEA advert either (but there is a station rather prophetically called Boris). Stand and admire - you'll not see the tube map this clean and clever again.
And there's more (though, to be honest, not a huge amount more) as the exhibition continues. A quartet of giant abaci, each inscribed with the name of a famous ship. A liner's cross section marked out with geological timelines. A pair of slide rules depicting biblical, scientific and psychological evolution. Three fully rigged racing sails, each labelled with the biographical details of a famous writer. All perfectly in tune with the National Maritime Museum's historical obsession with time and the sea. But someone really ought to have gagged the art critic whose gushing prose appears in the show's catalogue. I mean, really, who writes this sortof stuff...
"Patterson's artistic practice uses wry humour to question the ways language is used and misused in a flawed network of knowledge, power, doubt and affirmation. Language is built on consensus, yet in Patterson's hands the register shifts to one of dissensus as he negotiates between universal solutions and failures that are, paradoxically, essential for language to do its work."
Ah, I've not heard him called "Patterson" since the early 80s. Further inside there are two exhibits on a rather grander scale. Cosmic Wallpaper is a giant starchartmural with stellar names replaced by a Deep Purple discography. Strange, I didn't have the Patterson family down as a prog rock stronghold. And there's the NMM's new commission, Cousteau in the Underworld. At first sight it looks like a room hung with vintage Mediterranean sea charts, but look closer and you'll see that not everything in sepia text is a genuine place name. Some are more definitely linked to Greek mythology, while whole sentences appear to have been lifted from a Wikipedia biography of France's finest undersea explorer. Yeah, very clever. Sometimes I feel Simon's a one trick pony, but it's a mighty fine trick.
Outside, above the museum's Neptune Court, there's one further physical installation. A giant white kite, emblazoned with the name "Yuri Gagarin", has been lodged against the glass ceiling. This is an "itinerant sculpture" and has been travelling the world since 1999 (up an E3 tree, between Australian town hall pillars, in a Japanese tea garden, etc) before it eventually reaches its final destination at the Moscow airfield where Gagarin lost his life. Very deep, very symbolic. And finally, if you can find your way to the rear parlour of the Queen's House nextdoor, a rare venture into video. Simon's filmed two 18th century pocket watches and added a one minute soundtrack of a man and woman exercising. It sounded like shagging to me, but the guidebook assured me they were instead "pushing their bodies to physical limits, intertwining mechanical and experiential time".
The exhibition won't detain you for long, but it's well worth a look at some point over the next six months. Especially the legendary tube map. And once the doors have shut and Simon's work has been cleared away, I wonder if they'd be interested in a commission from one of his artistic contemporaries. I must have that painting of a dinnerplate somewhere...
You probably know some of Simon Patterson's work. He was the mastermind behind the first tube map mashup - The Great Bear - in which the names of all the stations were replaced by famous people. Engineers on the Bakerloo line, philosophers on the Circle and Footballers on the Jubilee, etc etc. It doesn't sound terribly original now but the trick, as with all wonderfully simple ideas, was to come up with it before anyone else. The Great Bear is the first thing you'll see as you enter this exhibition. It's based on the 1992 tube map so it still looks like a proper work of art - no accessibility blobs or excess information overload here. And no obtrusive IKEA advert either (but there is a station rather prophetically called Boris). Stand and admire - you'll not see the tube map this clean and clever again.
Outside, above the museum's Neptune Court, there's one further physical installation. A giant white kite, emblazoned with the name "Yuri Gagarin", has been lodged against the glass ceiling. This is an "itinerant sculpture" and has been travelling the world since 1999 (up an E3 tree, between Australian town hall pillars, in a Japanese tea garden, etc) before it eventually reaches its final destination at the Moscow airfield where Gagarin lost his life. Very deep, very symbolic. And finally, if you can find your way to the rear parlour of the Queen's House nextdoor, a rare venture into video. Simon's filmed two 18th century pocket watches and added a one minute soundtrack of a man and woman exercising. It sounded like shagging to me, but the guidebook assured me they were instead "pushing their bodies to physical limits, intertwining mechanical and experiential time".
