Complaints Department

We had big plans for the day. First on our list was another trip to the Photographers gallery to see the new exhibition on The Feminist Avant-garde of the 1970’s. We should have been there in plenty of time too, but London buses had other ideas. 

I’m to put it bluntly, "pure ragin’’ about the Buses down here. We were on route to the Photographers gallery, when they bus stopped and threw everyone off. There was no announcement as to why, they just chucked everyone off and said there’s another one in a minute. The next one arrived and dumped all it’s passengers off too. The boy driving was incapable of giving a reason for this termination of service, or perhaps suggesting where we could catch a bus that was actually running. What a chopper. It wouldn’t be so bad, but we’d had the exact same chat last night on the way home. Bus terminates and randomly throws everyone off. What a farce. Make me nostalgic for the old LRT I tell you.

So we had to put the boots to the street and get walking at pace to make it to the gallery in time for free entry (yes, we’re that tight). The bus had dumped us just afore Westminster bridge. Now as you might imagine, this was basically chocka block with Tourists trying to jam Big Ben into the background of their holiday snaps. You had to keep limboing under selfie sticks and dodging outstretched iPads.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, there seems to be some kind of moron jogger epidemic in Westminster. Lycra-d up to the max, looking like their going for the world record attempt, steaming along full speed on what was frankly more of an obstacle course than a public footpath. The first one shoulder checked me as she tried to dodge around an elderly couple going for a selfie. I was still raging from the first hit when a second sweaty roaster came from out of nowhere and ran flat into me. This time, I went full Scottish on the bam “Hoy, s’no a race track ya f**cking fanny, watch wur yer going ya f’king rocket!!” But he was off, his lank wee pony tail trailing behind him like goldfish pooh.

At the other end of the bridge in Parliament square, the reason for the bus termination became apparent. There was a half marathon on. Ah, of course. Why run somewhere out of the way when you can shut down the centre of a major city eh?

We made it to the Photographers gallery with ten minutes to spare. Fortunately, it was entirely worth the speed walk needed to get there. The exhibition included work by some fairly well know artist/photographers like Cindy Sherman, Martha Rosler, and Francesca Woodman. But it also included a lot of work I wasn’t familiar with. Some of the standouts for me included Penny Slinger, Martha Wilson and the collaboration between Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz.

The Photographers gallery suffers from that curse of modern galleries. The mobile phone snapper. Invariably, your view of the exhibits is blocked by someone or somebodies, going around intently snapping every bloody thing on their mobile. Seemingly without pause for thought. This took a particularly sinister turn at this exhibition. An older gentleman, who hadn’t photographed any of the other exhibits, stopped in front of a series by Susanne Santoro. The three images were close-up photographic images of vaginas. He stopped. Studied them for a moment then produced a digital camera from his pocket and carefully -photographer each one. Something he didn’t seem to bother doing for any of the other images in the gallery. I felt like going over and saying to him, ‘here pal, you ken you can just use the internet for that these days right? no need to skoot around galleries being a shady pervert…’

After the Photographers Gallery, we walked back through Soho down through Trafalgar square (where we noticed David Shrigley’s giant thumb sculpture had taken residence on the fourth plinth) heading for the Millennium bridge towards the Tate Modern.

The first thing we wanted to check out was the Guerrilla Girl’s Complaints department, which was operating in the Switch House’s Tate Exchange. The Guerrilla Girl’s had invited people and organisations to visit the space, where materials had been provided to make their grievances with the art world, society and life in general known. 

Over a series of blackboards and whiteboards, people had been leaving notes, drawings, collages, venting their spleens on issues that mattered to them. There were a huge variety of issues raised and dealt with in all kinds of ways. In another part of the gallery, there was a retrospective of the various actions and projects the Guerrilla Girls had been involved with since their inception.


Our new housemate Samwise had loaned us his Tate Membership card, so we used that to take a quick recharge break in the member's lounge. From there you can relax with a coffee (or a special edition Switch House Beer by Fourpure brewing… ) and gaze into the sitting rooms of the occupants of Neo Bankside.

The second thing we wanted to see was the Georgia O’Keffe exhibition (again, free thanks to the membership card, rather than an eye-watering £19 it would be normally). O’Keffe is a big deal in the history of modern art, and the show was given a suitably large space. It has to be said though, there were some, erm, strange curatorial decisions. 

O’Keffe was married to Edward Steichen. The first few rooms of the exhibition were split equally between her paintings and his photographs. Now I won't lie. On one hand, I’m a huge photography geek. So I’m never going to be disappointed to get a chance to see some of his prints up close, particularly those from the famous Equivalents series. I guess the curatorial argument would be that the Steichen and O’Keffe influenced each other’s artistic development and they wanted to demonstrate that connection. But the exhibition then went on to feature photographs by Ansel Adams and Paul Strand. The link here for me becomes fairly tenuous. 


As Riot said if it was a major retrospective of a male artist, would you really expect their work to continuously be related to that of others to give it context? If the exhibition had been titled Georgia O’Keffe (and pals) it would be one thing. But it was supposed to be about her. Given the fact the Guerrilla Girls were occupying the space directly upstairs, the cognitive dissonance seemed quite profound.