Sunday was the last day of the first exhibition at The Museum of Everything, the first museum of folk art in London. The exhibition has has amazing reviews, and I first wanted to go the minute it opened.
But true to form, I waited until the last day, which also happened to be Valentine's Day. Would've been a nice date too, but the boy had to work. Plus we're both sulking at not having much money to play with so promised to something next weekend and made pancakes in the morning instead and off I went to the exhibition.
All was good until I arrived to find a queue of one hundred, all cool with their boyfriends and girlfriends and all I could do was stand their waiting for my friends to arrive...
There were people kissing in the queue and, I SHIT YOU NOT, describing themselves as "ingenues".
Someone called his friend a feminist snob.
Be quick my friends.
Once inside, I fell in love with the museum. It was beautifully laid out, with handmade signs and typewritter font info signs, everything looked like it had been pulled from a junk store. There were enough little rooms and twisty wooden staircases to make me very happy indeed.
The highlights were seeing Henry Darger's The Vivian Girls scrolls in London. I had previously only seen some Darger at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. But it was Morton Bartlett's secret teenage sculptures and sister Gertrude Morgan intense "Bride of Christ" paintings and recordings that interested me the most.
Sister Gertrude Morgan's simple, single-minded dedication and obsession came through so wonderfully as a recording of her songs was played in the room. I made a mental note to find some of those recordings.
A guy who my friend called Lenny Hendrix set up to play a set in the main room. It was, I guess his own form of obsession - he was a one man band playing harmonica, a tiny drum set with his feet and guitar and singing. Ive now decided tiny drum sets are cool.
And so was a little bit of obsession on a rainy Valentine's day.
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