I started the New Year with no internet connection. Let's hope it's not a foretaste of the year ahead.
The connection is thankfully back, but what its absence did was left me free to visit Tate Modern and what a brilliant way to start the New Year. I'd never heard of Brazilian artist, Cildo Meireles, but I'm now one of his biggest fans. I hate to be an art bore, but there were three installations there that really affected me and I'd like to share them with you.
All three of them seemed relevant to my New Year mood and New Year thoughts.
The first installation was simply a tiny 9mm cube of wood in the corner of a totally empty room. There was just a spotlight on the cube of wood. Meireles is very political, but I'm not even going to attempt to express the thoughts behind his actions. To me, this was a wonderful perspective for the year ahead. I felt that I am that totally tiny little cube in the middle of all that space, and how wonderfully insignificant I and all my problems are. So, my first 'lightbulb moment' of the year was that I am going to keep remembering that space and me as that tiny little cube of wood and keep all my worries in proportion.
The second was a red room. These photos sadly do not do it justice. Yes, I know the walls were white and the ceiling was white too with a diffuse light coming through it, but everything (yes, everything) else in the room was bright red, or as near to bright red as you can get. I have never craved for the colour blue as much. That room was so incredibly suffocating, so intense, so dead it was uncanny. I would never have believed it. It felt surreal starting a New Year like that. In a red prison, longing for colour.
The third was the final installation - again, forgive the picture, the best the Tate provides. Two rooms, ankle deep in talcum powder which felt damp underfoot. One room totally dark, the other long with a burning candle at one end. A magical, 'in the bleak mid-winter' scene of fog, mystery, poetry and hope. I loved it.
Go if you can - don't wait for your internet connection to fail.
Happy New Year,
Nina
Founder Life Clubs
PS This week at Life Clubs we're going to be thinking about our Best Life Ever. More trips to the Tate feature high on mine. What makes you happy?
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