06 January 2011
Picasso vs. Potter
At the Seattle Art Museum, Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée Picasso, Paris is a generous display of 150 works from the artist’s own collection representing an astonishing eight decades of output. But visitors can optionally wave the audio wand supplied and shrink the experience to 25 sample works, listening to recorded introductions to them through its earpiece.
Meanwhile, at the Pacific Science Center’s Harry Potter: The Exhibition, audio tour headsets are also offered (for an extra fee), but the wands are in glass cases: those of Potter and his arch-enemy Lord Voldemort as well many waved by supporting cast-members.
For those with little interest in art, and whose knowledge of Picasso may amount to no more than familiarity with his name and its connection to cubism, the great variety of the works on show and the very approachable and even charming nature of many of them will come as a surprise. From a moving “blue period” portrait, via paintings with strong African influences, to a simple sculpture of a bull’s head made from the saddle and handlebars of a bicycle, Picasso proves to be the art world’s answer to the Potter stories’ shape-shifting boggart: his work comes in almost any style you care to imagine.
And when the works are more demanding the audio wand offers explanations. Cubism, for example, is the attempt to show a subject from multiple points of view at the same time, and later the fusion of multiple subjects and media in one work. Once that’s understood the relevant canvases become visual puzzles it is a pleasure to solve.
For those lacking previous experience of the Harry Potter books or movies, it’s the Pacific Science Center show that must prove harder to understand, beginning perhaps with the question as to what an exhibition starring the improbable suspension of the laws of physics is doing in a museum devoted to science.
It opens with a live section the Picasso show certainly cannot match, when volunteer children are invited to wear the Sorting Hat, a sentient and loquacious piece of headgear that decides and then announces which house each new arrival at Hogwarts School should join. Here it is recreated in 3D with a clever bit of animatronics under the control of an actor playing the part of one of the school’s professors.
But from then on it’s the Potter show that seems the more static of the two, despite the presence of screens on almost every wall showing clips from the films. From Hogwarts robes to broomsticks, and from centaurs to house elves, shorn of both their context in the stories and the CGI magic that animates them on-screen, every item seems more dead than any still life. Unlike Picasso’s canvasses, there’s no puzzle to solve and no imagination is needed.
Past a steaming but stationary replica of the Hogwart’s Express, and along a meandering route through various prop-filled hints at Hogwarts classrooms and a partial recreation of half-giant Hagrid’s house, there’s a chance to uproot a mandrake plant and make it squeal, and to throw a quaffle ball through a hoop.
But like the Potter narrative itself, the exhibition becomes more sinister and glum as it proceeds, with a Dementor (fiend), an Acromantula (giant talking spider), and a visit to the Forbidden Forest, although the really scary part of the whole show is the gift shop. This is a trap to which the whole experience, like some cunning Voldemort plan, has really been leading.
Here groaning shelves of merchandise, much of it at higher prices than those of ordinary toy stores, conjure up visions of financial doom in the minds of parents.
Visit both shows. But you may find that even younger members of the family, when armed with audio wands, find more magic in Picasso than in Potter.
ACCESS
Move fast: Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée Picasso, Paris closes on January 17, and Harry Potter: The Exhibition on January 30. Both are sufficiently popular to require timed entry, and both should be booked on-line well in advance where possible.
The Seattle Art Museum is right in the compact city centre and can be reached on foot from many hotels. Full details of the Picasso show, opening hours, supporting activities, downloadable audio files, and on-line booking information can be found at picassoinseattle.org.
Similar details for the Harry Potter show can be www.pacsci.org/harrypotter. The Pacific Science Center can be reached directly by monorail from downtown Seattle, the train having been temporarily redecorated as the Hogwarts Express, complete with steam whistle. The very comfortable Hotel Monaco (www.monaco-seattle.com) is offering packages that include discounted tickets for both the show and the monorail.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment