IWM and the House of Tomatoes

Me and the Pig had the day to ourselves today so we drove to Salford Quays.  Getting from the car park to the Lowry Outlet centre is interminable, the lifts are small and slow and the place is busy.  We did wait for the lift twice and each time it arrived at our floor and the doors slowly opened, we were presented with a lift full of sour faced people all shaking their heads disapprovingly that we had pressed the lift button only to interrupt them on their vertical journey.

First we checked out Rafael Gómezbarros ‘Casa Tomada’, an installation consisting of loads of ants made up of 2 human skull casts in the Lowry.  Casa Tomada is not translated as ‘House of the Tomato’ as Piggy first thought, it means ‘Taken House’.  I've sent Rafael an email and asked if he could change the name of the installation to ‘Casa de la Arana’ (House of the Spider), because no matter how many times I explained that the subject matter were Ants, Piggy continuously pointed and said “Spider”.

I then had to explain to Piggy that Lowry wasn't as idiotic as he was making him out to be, pointing to most paintings saying, “That’s rubbish, I could do that”.  We looked at some of the finer works by the man and Piggy agreed that some of the paintings weren't half bad.

We then had a slow walk to the War Museum and looked and some tanks and planes.  I say some, I mean 1 of each.  The War museum should be more about tanks, planes and guns and less about the hairy fairy part of war we both agreed.