Art

Linda

Step aside Nicole. Although intended for Kim Cattrall, Penelope Skinner’s new play ‘Linda’ is no celebrity vehicle feebly driving a ready – made feminist message.

This is a play that gives you an idea of what it might have been like to watch a Greek tragedy as a Greek woman.

Here is the power and powerlessness of women writ large, “Changing the world one girl at a time” .The word woman is the elephant in the room. It’s dangerous, it could lead to depression or worse…

Why? The play explores what it is to be a woman, now, through the eyes of a typically dysfunctional modern family. The play’s 5 women/girls face all the new “millenial” challenges, front – loaded with the old.

It’s staged on bright and wrinkle – free sufaces that ingeniously rotate us around and through Linda, the career – driven mother’s shiny, mirror-strewn, self – made world.

Work and home sets ingeniously pry into and reflect off eachother and back at the audience, showing what all the play ‘ s 5 female cast feel – The pressure to be, do and have everything, on display, with beauty as your foundation, funded by a far greater ad spend than “Truth”.

If ‘Linda’ means ‘the beautiful’, I’d love to task Penelope Skinner’s ingenious pen to write a sequel entitled ‘Vera’, ‘the true’.

Catch Linda in her last week at London’s Royal Court Theatre.

Agnes Martin gave us space to think beyond everything we see, what’s left when civilization is removed, before we impose language and thought, ‘My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind’.

Agnes Martin Press Call, Tate Modern 2.6.15

And so if Martin takes us outside time, provides the backdrop, the British Museum leads us through time, providing the props, wherever and whenever we want to set the play, the dressing room of civilization.

The museum’s objects play out, across vast distances and ostensibly disconnected cultures, our shared consciousness and show us humanity’s history. A history of diversity and integration, overlaid with repeating, universal patterns, indicating that we are all united by the same underlying needs, truths and impulses, wherever we are, whatever our culture and religion.

At this time of earth-shaking social friction and division, whether or not we, as autonomous individuals, understand and respect the universal nature of humanity is now a matter of life and death.

Cue for the British Museum to open its curtains and show the world the world – how no one race or culture is without connection to another and how every dominant race or culture eventually recedes.

In answer to accusations of colonialist hoarding piracy, the British Museum is now entirely open to everyone. Via its new online gallery tour, anyone can see everything that real visitors can see. Be you a shepherd in Afghanistan, a Greek in Athens, an Aborigine in Australia, a skater in LA……If you have a screen and broadband that is…

In its own words:

“The more we can work with partners in the technology sphere, and the more we rise to the challenge of making our world a digital one, the greater will be our impact on community cohesion and understanding, domestically and internationally. Through technology, the Museum’s collection can become the private collection of the entire world. And so our great Enlightenment vision moves into a phase our founders in the 18th century couldn’t even have dreamed of.”

Read the museum’s blog article introducing the online gallery.

Egyptian dwarf god Bes, protector of the family , childbirth and sexuality. 100 BC/AD. British Museum

My works and days

Reviewing and observing life passing through London and elsewhere

To be or not to be a woman

The British Museum is now the world’s private collection