Features
fisun.guner
According to one broadsheet, Laure Prouvost was a “rank outsider” and the money was on comic doodler David Shrigley and the elusive Tino Seghal, he of those ghastly, utterly patronising performances designed to jolt the guileless gallery-goer from his or her imagined complacence.Her narratives are ambiguous, layered, unreliable, fragmentedWell, that’s news to me. For most who have seen the exhibition in Derry, it was the two women, Prouvost and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, who made the most favourable and certainly the most enduring impression. And for me, Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings had the edge. Read more ...
Tim Cumming
When it comes to a blank page, artists and poets lead different kinds of lives and leave different kinds of marks. One for the eye, one for the ear, but both dependant on the thrill of recognition. The word, like paint, can be worked and reworked until the delight of a new image, a fresh metaphor in its right setting rings from the twisted garbage of lines in a notebook.Back in the days of Surrealism, Revardy and Breton delighted in new images cast from the most disparate material. I understand that thrill. It’s what makes poetry worth reading. Art and poetry are concentrated mediums. Their Read more ...
theartsdesk
In the past weeks there has been a frenzy of publicity about the timelessness of a Time Lord. Through sundry incarnations (and one sizeable moratorium), Doctor Who has been on television screens for 50 years. But it's by no means the only show possessing what a football pundit once called stickability. In this edition of Listed, we celebrate the shows which have been knocking around for what feels like forever, nearly half of them for even longer than the good Doctor. There's something here for everyone: soaps, sport and satire, royalty and Casualty - with an inevitable bias towards the BBC. Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Those French and their grand projects! Not the least of them is the division of the country into 23 areas who acquire their own collections of international contemporary art, supplemented by a national loan collection, all under the rubric of FRAC, Fondation Régionale d’Art Contemporain. This 30-year programme has just opened a massive six-storey gallery as a brand new public face for the regional collection of the Nord-pas-de-Calais in the slightly forlorn city of Dunkirk. Supported by FRAC, it has so far amassed some 1,500 works of contemporary art, French and international.The seaside post Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A couple of weeks ago I was queueing to get into the BBC’s magnificently revamped HQ at Broadcasting House. Just behind me in the same queue were Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse. Their faces are craggier, their hair less confident than when the two comedians became part of the national furniture 20 years ago. And here they were, lightly joshing about the indignity of signing in to enter the offices of the national broadcaster which owes them so much. Meanwhile employees with passes, endowed with rather less of the talent that makes the BBC what it is, filed in and out of the revolving doors Read more ...
Claudia Pritchard
All eyes were on the Rijksmuseum when it re-opened in April after a 10-year refurbishment, but across the Museumplein, Amsterdam's gallery of contemporary and modern art, the Stedelijk, was already settling into its new look, unveiled six months before. With its world-beating collection and extended galleries, it is already an attractive destination, but a remarkable exhibition of the art of Kazimir Malevich and his contemporaries makes the Stedelijk reason enough to hop to Amsterdam right now.Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde (until 2 February 2014), gives something of a foretaste Read more ...
Daniel Hope
In 1998, as I was driving home and flipping through the radio channels, a piece of music caught my ear. A string trio. With elements of Bartók , Stravinsky and maybe Janáček? And yet I was pretty sure none of these composers had written for this combination. I pulled over and sat transfixed by the side of the road until the announcer said: “that was a string trio by Gideon Klein”. Who?I googled Gideon Klein and learned a lot about a place called Theresienstadt (also known by its Czech name as Terezín), a garrison town 60 km north of Prague, the central collection point or ghetto Read more ...
David Nice
You may have noticed an unholy silence from theartsdesk in the immediate aftermath of Sir John Tavener’s death a week ago today, just under three months short of his 70th birthday. Three of us in the classical team felt we just didn’t know his music well enough in the round, or care enough, to give an authoritative judgement.There were the early achievements – his trailblazing 1968 cantata The Whale, for instance – and then what felt like an increasing law of diminishing musical returns as Tavener took up the mantle of the Russian Orthodox Church. What ideas there were seemed spread thin over Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Doris Lessing’s storm-tossed life would make a stirring biopic. She spent her early years on an isolated farm in the Southern Rhodesian veldt, abandoned the children of her first marriage to take up with a German communist refugee during the war, then left for London, became a single mother with a third young child, and had her lifelong battles with her own mother. Much of it is recorded in the Children of Violence tetralogy about her literary alter-ego Martha Quest. And then there are Lessing’s memoirs, which took the reader up to 1962, just short of the publication of The Golden Notebook. Read more ...
Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen
It begins on the street, nastily. An immigrant has got his hands on an English woman. Trouble is brewing. Then there is a dispute about money, involving a “Lombard” – the identification originally applied to immigrants from Lombardy in northern Italy, famous for its banking, but it had gradually become a term of abuse for all foreigners engaged in trade or banking, a word bandied around in the same way as “Jew”. Doll, the lusty London woman who has been hauled by the arm, sums up the popular sentiment of the day: “I am ashamed that freeborn Englishmen, having beaten strangers within their own Read more ...
theartsdesk
On 22 November 1963 President John F Kennedy was shot, yoking his name to an ex-marine and sometime defector to the USSR called Lee Harvey Oswald. Everyone old enough to remember is said to know where they were when they heard. As America dealt with its trauma, the conspiracy theories started,and spawned well over 1,000 books. The assassination also became the focus for artists in all art forms - in literature, theatre, film and even music. The latest is the movie Parkland, out this week, which reconstructs events in Dallas while steering clear of the main event. Meanwhile the Finborough Read more ...
fisun.guner
The trumpeting of a lone elephant can be heard all around Durham city centre, blasting across the River Wear. The organisers of Artichoke’s Lumiere Festival, now in its third biennial year, have been turning up the volume as the evening’s progressed. The 3D elephant, which is the work of French design group Top’là, is a magnificent optical illusion projected onto a replica medieval fortress arch on Elvet Bridge, complete with thunderous audio.It's one of several light works currently dotted around the city centre, which is known as The Peninsula – the river wraps around the old part of the Read more ...