Despite my love of monochromatic minimalism, this week saw me in London enjoying a few busy, crowded and high-key exhibitions. Ai Weiwei was at the Design Museum with his exhibition Making Sense. This induced hand-axe envy but also a reflection on the mass production of objects from canon balls to plastic bricks. Why are the former so aesthetically pleasing and latter less so, when both do damage to the physical world? At the National Gallery, I enjoyed Nalini Malani's immersive looped video installations 'Reality is Different'. Here, Malini critiqued well known historical works from the National Gallery Collection to highlight the marginalised in society. I also saw an exhibition on St. Francis of Assisi whose spiritual radicalism and love of nature inspired artists from the 13th century to the 21st. Are artists natural activists? Should we be? I wonder what comes first - the desire to make something which has aesthetic appeal or the need to address a societal wrong and how does one influence the other, if at all? If the message is the only meaning in the work then there is little for the viewer to respond to. Perhaps I enjoyed the above exhibitions so much because the messaging was subtle yet subversive. They appealed to the senses sensually without preaching. I wonder would St Francis have approved?
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