I went, with fellow blogger Gianni Washington TK link to see Daydreaming with Stanley Kubrick at Somerset House. I confess right here that I am not an artsy person and what art I do like is mainly confined paintings or photography of wild life. I do think its good to push your boundaries a bit sometimes, so when Gianni suggested going to see Daydreaming, I was up for the challenge.

It was probably one of the weirdest events in my life. I am not someone who just goes to see a film because it is directed by a certain person, and I didn’t realise I’d seen so many of his films until today. The only ones I knew to be his were 2001: A Space Odessey and Full Metal Jacket.

Somerset House gave all the visitors a little guide book, although there were places where I found it too dark to read it!

The exhibition started with a display of a sort of three dimensional image of a chimp looking through into a space helmet – then went straight into a load of electric, log effect fires. Apparently, this referred to a scene in The Shining. That was pretty normal compared with the rest of it.  I tried to photograph this but it just turned out as an orange blob.

Two big teddy bears on cardboard boxes, apparently with a scent in the room that I couldn’t smell (Gianni could, so it was clearly there) seemed OK, until I read what it was depicting a reference to the pantry scene in The Shining.

I completely missed the sinister aspects of some of the paintings I thought some of them looked quite nice, while others were just a bit.. Well, plain, I suppose. The picture of the barn for the final duel in Barry Lyndon fell into this category for me.

I did like the breathing camera, although I didn’t realise that was what it was until afterwards. I started by thinking it was a peacock feather, but the eye of the peacock seemed to be the centre of the universe.

I had to take a photograph of the concrete penis on top of a crushed car Partly because I could actually understand what I was looking at and partly because it just epitomised the weirdness of the exhibition.

If I say that I didn’t really enjoy it, that doesn’t mean its a reason not to go – I did say at the start, I am not an artsy person. I feel a bit sorry for these artists, all their work was wasted on me, but if you like that kind of thing, go along.

© Susan Shirley 2016