The Xtra Diary - Animal logic lets kids draw on experience
Published: 3 September, 2010
WHO commissioned this study then?
Is it a coincidence that at a time when zoos are the least cuddly and fluffy they have ever been, a piece of research comes out to say they are good for children.
Everyone knows you can’t argue with that logic.
Dr Brady Wagoner of Denmark’s Aalborg University and Dr Eric Jensen of the University of Warwick, asked children to draw pictures of animals in their habitats at the beginning of their visit to London Zoo and directly after and apparently found “clear developments in the pupils’ understanding of different species”. Funny that.
Apparently children had drawn sloths in icy habitats because so many of them had seen the Hollywood movie Ice Age.
After they drew them in the rainforest.
Around 120,000 children a year visit London Zoo in Regent’s Park, and we can expect a few more on the back of this research.
A fine body of work
BODY politics but not as we know it.
The latest instalment of a three-part series of exhibitions exploring the representation of women’s bodies opens in Fitzrovia next week.
Transgressive bodies, rebellious bodies, sexualised bodies and uncontrollable bodies – they’re all on show – a reminder that the woman’s body is never fixed but constantly in a state of flux.
Works by Tracey Emin, Cecily Brown, Helen Benigson and Tiina Heiska feature heavily at Rollo Contemporary Art in Cleveland Street.
The exhibition opens on September 8 and runs until November.
Best of British (or English) luck
WHAT is Britishness? For those who believe our island identity is inextricably bound up with cups of tea, red telephone boxes, cricket and cucumber sandwiches, put this in your diary.
On Saturday The Crown Estate and Jermyn Street Association (those two bastions of ye olden days) are throwing a party called The Art of Being British, aimed at celebrating English eccentricity.
Diary reckons there will be a few Welsh and Scots with something to say about the promiscuous interchange of British and English.
As well as food stalls (a hog roast among them) and shop offers, there will be a special performance by musicians from the Royal Academy of Music, and the Ritz have loaned out a Rolls-Royce Phantom for the day.
The Art of Being British is on tomorrow (Saturday) from noon until 5pm in Jermyn Street.
Beams in the eyes of the beholders?
Artist Martin Creed’s Work No. 700 (2007) continues the outdoor sculpture programme from Hauser & Wirth at Southwood Garden, St James’s Church, Piccadilly, from Monday September 5 until the new year.
It comprises three “progressively slimmer steel I-beams” on top of each other.
The rusted beams are 12m long and, say H&W “…neatly stacked, discarding their previous functionality to form a whole in keeping with Creed’s distinctive ‘artistic logic’”.
When Creed won his 2001 Turner Prize for an empty room featuring the lights flickering on and off at five-or-so second intervals, there were calls for the £20,000 prize to be given back and the annual award itself to be dustbinned.
In his defence at the time, one art expert explained: “He wants to make art where he is doing as little as possible that is consistent with doing something… The fact that many people find his work so baffling indicates that he’s working on the edge.”
He still is, very successfully, currently with a major show in Edinburgh and another due for Madrid in November.
Go to the church to judge for yourself the work of this son of Quaker parents, who was born in Wakefield, grew up in Glasgow and now lives and works in London.