Beginning the World: Episode 5 - London, Part 1

So, ah, we suddenly found lots and lots of things to do in Cambridge and got a bit held up for a time. Yes, that's what happened. Nothing at all to do with my totally falling down on the blog job or anything silly like that. Really, now.

Last time, I promised that our next destination would be the "Ox" half of Oxbridge. Yeah, changed my mind about that one; now we're headed to London! For many weeks, I expect, as there are roughly 379 museums, churches, and otherwise historic sites I intend to explore! And those are just the ones that interest me most!

We'll begin our tour with a visit to what is arguably the world's greatest museum of decorative arts and design: the Victoria & Albert, which actually comprises three separate museums: the V&A proper, the Museum of Childhood, the currently online-only Theatre Collections. The V&A will be our first destination, and we're in luck: it wasn't terribly long ago that much of their deeply awesome website was under some sort of maintenance, but no more; every exhibition site, with all the online galleries and interactive design games contained therein, is now up and running again! Whee!

First up: Ideally, we'd have the option to time travel to 2010-11 to visit the Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes 1900-1939 and Aestheticism: Beauty in Art and Design 1860-1900 exhibits. For some peculiar reason or other, though, the V&A hasn't posted extensive online galleries for these yet. Imagine such a thing! One would think they'd at least have something set up for Magnificence of the Tsars, given that it opens this Wednesday and all, but nooo. Suppose we'll simply have to content ourselves with a little retrospective time travel, then.

Allow me to indulge my historical and aesthetic biases just a bit...

Modernism: Designing a new world 1914-1939 - I'm especially partial to the "Mapping Modernism" page, mainly because it's just fun to slide the little timeline arrow and wave the cursor over the dots indicating designers. I'm easily amused.

This one's already put in an appearance on this blog, way back in my second entry, but may as well post it again: International Arts and Crafts. Not only is there a whole lot of gorgeous among the Exhibition Highlights, but the site also offers a list and directions to nine notable Arts and Crafts-style buildings located in and around London, as well as a map of the museum's Arts and Crafts objects not part of the exhibition. Which doesn't mean much now, given that the exhibition took place in 2005, but it's still quite considerate of them.

Art Deco: 1910-1939. Lots of features here similar to those found on the other two sites, but there's also a quiz, which I aced before even reading through the site. Yay for useless knowledge of early twentieth-century design movements!

As much fun as these exhibition-specific sites may be, nothing at all compares to the time-wasting delight of this little page. For real. I've already created an album cover for my imaginary band (La Belle Indifference, in case anyone wanted to know, for which I provide the imaginary vocals, keyboards, and novelty percussion, and may or may not be fictionally involved with the non-existent guitarist); designed a ring; created my own Modernist poster; created an awfully pretty blue and brown tartan which the site never managed to e-mail me a link to, in spite of the option given to do so, which saddens me greatly, as it really was quite lovely, if totally inauthentic; and designed not one, but two textiles. Behold the result of my attempts at playing William Morris:

Textile 1

Textile 2

Thanks to V&A, it's easy to pretend to have actual artistic ability, even if in reality you can't even draw a straight line with a ruler and can only manage to cut fabric on an arc! Not that, um, anyone is really that lame with regard to spatial reasoning! Ha ha! *cough cough*

Once we've killed 6 or 7 hours with fake arts and crafts projects, it might be worth a trip to the V&A's Theatre Collections. The collections pages themselves are fairly underwhelming -- lots of promises of images that will be posted later this year or sometime in 2009 -- but the subjects page offers plenty of resources on all manner of theatre-related things, which is quite interesting. To me, at least, but that's the way this whole travel show works, isn't it? Mwa-ha-ha.

Next time: More London, I'm sure, but maybe I'd best not make any more promises about this sort of thing.