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| Grommit's garden. Galleon in background |
Mrs Drew & I have just visited a truly superb exhibition at Young V&A* in Bethnal Green.
It's brilliantly well done and is chock full of original Aardman stuff (Morph, Wallace & Gromit, Creature Comforts, Chicken Run, Shaun the Sheep etc) - meaning, of course, that it's in full collaboration with the famous animation studio itself. A marketing ploy? Who cares.
It works along so many dimensions. Where do the ideas come from for the models and characters? We learn a lot about the creative, artistic processes involved, every inch and frame the equal of Disney. How do they make the models? Yep, we learn that, too. You wanna see the models themselves? All there, from the tiny rivets on the space ship (they use chickpeas) to the immense galleon from The Pirates! How do they make it all move? Plenty of that, too.
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| How is a were-rabbit articulated? Now we know ... |
And it's a lot of fun! Loads of kids - as one might expect - really enjoying themselves. Kids of all ages.
Getting a bit more po-faced about it all, in the context of Hockney I recently rehearsed my views on what constitutes Art is threefold: complete mastery of the craft au fond; boundless, compulsive creative output; and a strong eye / ear for abstraction. It's all here at Aardman. Nick Park is a true artist. Go and see his stuff.
On till November and tickets go quickly during the hols.
ND
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* This V&A outpost dates from 1872 and has had several incarnations: it once housed the V&A's Rodin collection; in 1974 it became the V&A Museum of Childhood. Once the heart of Kray territory and very readily accessible from central London, Bethnal Green after the Krays became a magnet for South Asian immigration, notably from Bangladesh; and more recently, it's been gentrifying - just one tube stop from the heart of the City, with lots of fine brick buildings from the Georgian era onwards, ripe for conversion to smart, up-market housing. The wonder is, it took so long to become trendy.
The museum itself went through a typically annoying woke phase some years ago; but in this case, as in many others, peak woke is mercifully behind us.
2 comments:
OT, sorry. but reading the post-Arday "it would never happen to a white academic" comments I came across this guy, who wasn't a frauster:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Adams_(columnist)
Aardman and the creative industries shine through in the end. Well some of them do. Takes a while and requires a suitable customer base aka Auntie BBC. Chop down too much of the forest and you end up with a desert.
A couple of vaguely related pieces. Chris Dillow has a Substack discussing the reasons why we have quite a few areas of economic stagnation. It's a natural cycle. Then the FT refers to Baumol's Disease which as we moved to a services economy the Baumol effect became more visible. Thinking of large numbers of not very productive 'services' folk a look at the Reddit Civil Service pages warms the cockles of your heart. Positively designed to achieve very little and slowly too. But a very good way of keeping large numbers off the streets. Well done HMG.
Some blame the educators but you can see why in a stagnant and overcrowded lower-middle workforce Jack & Jill Average is going to find it hard going. Better to educate as an 'influencer' or advertiser or adviser or roofer or plumber - or animator. Money is made at the front end of an innovation - AI coders and at the back end - viz blacksmiths and talent will with luck shine though - vis Aardman.
Sadly for HM Treasury knocking out Wallace & Gromit movies does not scale all that well. BTW the Young V&A is not that far from Whitechapel Road and The Nags Head. In former days a somewhat disreputable drinker handy for bored data centre workers. Now that industry does scale.
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