I had a surprisingly nice evening.
Cycled up to the British Museum in the face of a bit of headwind for The Age of Stonehenge exhibition.
The recent Age of Nero exhibition had been a bit crap but this was excellent. Strong recommend.
The curation was superb. Yes a wall of axe heads can be moving and beautiful. The range of artefacts showed the extraordinary saltatory leaps in technical and cultural innovation in Europe, threaded round the development, domination and eventual desuetude of Stonehenge.
The whole was mysterious and beautiful. Exemplified by the extraordinary Nebra Sky Disk. No I didn’t take a picture. Go see it.
Detachable penises! Dead beaker folk!
Also lol aurochs were massive and scary. Stood another head or so above humans.
Then went to the Museum Tavern. I always forget that it’s surprisingly beautiful inside, with a wonderful bar.
So home, on the back of a now glorious tailwind, to a very basic but a very nice chick pea soup that had been cooking in the oven for eight or so hours.
Now off to continue reading Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s really excellent The Mushroom at the End of the World.
Lowenhaupt Tsing’s use of the concepts of assemblages, time creation and contamination between humans, fauna and the environment contributed significantly to my enjoyment of the exhibition, which after all depicted people carving tools and history and gods and art out of the cosmos. The overlapping assemblages of stone, time, stars, bone and swirling mystic design, transforming to sun worship, bronze and gold should in ALT’s depiction not be seen as progression but a change in the assemblage of elements, and cadences, a new set of lithic, cosmic, and anthropological contaminations and influences.
So, yes, sorry for the bland post. Pepys this is not. But I had a surprisingly nice evening. And that is a thing to be celebrated.
