These classic traditional city pubs and their ales are fast disappearing from our city centres to be replaced by faceless lager and ‘Alco-pop Palaces’ and need to be supported.
Winding our way down to the river, The Baltic is not hard to miss. This magnificent old flour mill is a handsome sight and adjacent and juxtaposed to Foster’s new age stainless steel Sage building (dedicated to music and the arts) and accessed via the Gateshead Millennium Bridge over the Tyne almost identically to London’s Tate Modern.I have to say The Baltic is more aesthetically and architecturally appealing to me, in a downscaled kind of way for the regeneration and re-assignment of industrial space.
On the ground floor Fiona Crisp had a photographic exhibition entitled ‘Subterrania’, a series of underground images from lead mines to WW2 bunkers to early Christian catacombs and, in my view, a touch ‘yonic’ I thought.
In the darkened video room Akram Zaatari presents a silent film of two Lebanese men, in some kind of bunker, one mending his jacket while the other is preparing explosives.
‘The relationship between the men is unclear and we are left to question which will carry out the implied operation’ we are told – frankly I couldn’t care less and nor could anyone else I suspect, but if you fancy a kip it’s an ideal place (my Tour Manager fell asleep and had to be retrieved). There is also a very cool art shop on the way out of the building.
On the upper levels there is a rooftop restaurant with panoramic views of the Tyne while below one of the many installations being prepared in conjunction with The Tate is Damien Hirst’s 1992 work, Pharmacy (Oct 24th – Feb 7th 2010).
‘Hirst’s wide-ranging practice challenges the boundaries between art, science and popular culture, for Hirst, medicine, like art, provides a belief system which is both seductive and deceptive’ – fair enough I guess but don’t be tempted to nick a box of aspirins from the exhibit as the last time a teenage graffiti artist stole a box of ‘rare’ pencils from this ‘chemist shop in a gallery’ masterpiece as a prank at The Tate, he was arrested and charged with art theft.
Where’s Damien’s sense of humour gone? After all didn’t he sell a pickled shark to someone once? Anyway the box will probably turn out to be empty rather like much of his work (don’t get me started on his latest offerings at The Wallace Collection)
Despite my tongue in cheek comments about the art on display that day, this is about the experience of not just the art contained within, but the building itself and the collective calm of humanity flowing in and around the riverfront area.
Whatever your taste in the contemporary arts if you are visiting Newcastle, a trip to The Baltic is a must and so is a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale, drank cold and by the half pint glass…….bliss.
Newcastle Arms
© Words - Dave Cairns/ ZANI Media
