performance art
Philip Hoare
A dark star explodes. I cannot remember the future. A figure appears on the beach. We're always reaching out. It's always just over there. We're always dreaming. The grey rocks, the red sand, the blue sea. Everywhere, the sea. Everything you ever wanted to be. Torbay arches around the south Devon coast like a proscenium arch, a natural arena echoing with the past, present and future. From Torquay's white villas to Paignton's promenade and Brixham's fishing village, these holiday destinations, known as the English Riviera, conceal countless stories behind the resort's veneer: the real lives of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Rose Finn-Kelcey was one of the most interesting and original artists of her generation. Yet when she died in 2014 at the age of 69, she could have disappeared from view if she not spent the last few years of her life assembling a monograph about her work. It's a beautiful book that helps you appreciate the range and complexity of a practice that might otherwise be too elusive and too mercurial to grasp fully.Modern Art Oxford’s partial retrospective similarly brings Finn-Kelcey’s work into focus, and we can hope that it will kickstart the process of acknowledging her importance. Her work is Read more ...
joe.muggs
There comes a point in any experimental music festival when you have to accept the silliness and go with it. And at Borealis, that point comes very early. Only a couple of hours off the plane in Bergen and we're in a pedestrian tunnel under the bus station, where a crowd surrounds Slovakian musician Jonáš Gruska who is sitting cross-legged on the floor with a laptop, directing the whirs, rumbles and cascades of bleeps that are emanating from different sections of the tunnel wall and ceiling. Through all of this, Bergen's Friday evening commuters bustle, variously perplexed and amused, many of Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Good American, a Texan no less, has landed at Tate Modern in style. This posthumous retrospective of the great Robert Rauschenberg includes a paint-bespattered, fully made-up bed hung vertically on the wall, and called – you guessed – Bed,1955 (pictured below right). A huge White Painting, 1951 – latex housepaint on seven panels, glossy and smooth – is joined by a huge, swirling, all-black painting, Untitled, c.1951, and an installation of various substances resembling bubbling mud, called Mud Muse, 1968-71. One gallery contains so-called Jammers, 1975-76, swathes of material leaning Read more ...
Katie Colombus
It has been 350 years since the Great Fire of London. A festival of art and ideas by Artichoke, the company behind Lumiere London, has brought a series of free, inventive installations and performances to the capital. These curated events and live art happenings don't so much teach us about the events of the past, but enable us to take stock of what's happening right now in the world, and challenge us to change for the future.Of All The People In The World, a performance installation by Stan's Cafe at Inner Temple, promises to illustrate the cost of the Great Fire in grains of rice (pictured Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Just a few hours earlier, as helicopters clattered overhead and thousands joined the good-humoured but impassioned March for Europe, an evening of contemporary art felt like the last thing anyone needed. On this day of all days, launching an art festival inspired by the success of Nuit Blanche in Paris felt like an unnecessary application of salt to the wound. While art can provide solace in times of crisis, really good art needs also to do so much more, and it was hard to see how an event conceived many months ago could adequately respond to the extraordinary developments of the past 10 days Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
As if to signal a coming of age, this year's Whitstable Biennale has a theme: The Faraway Nearby. And so for the first time artists have a guiding idea with which to post-rationalise their work. Until now, the 10-day festival of visual art has staked out broad territory with performance, film and emerging talent. So perhaps an equally broad theme was needed to ensure that works comprised of fan letters, a lecture tour in a car park and a new flavour of ice cream could cohere as a successful biennale. And as we gear up for a referendum about our place in Europe and consider the ongoing refugee Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Brighton Festival’s guest director speaks in a sort of rapid-fire drawl, ideal for her debut as a stand-up comic, which she claims was tonight’s Plan A. This half-century veteran of performance art is more slippery than that, proffering a discursive, unreliable, funny and profound master-class in shaggy-dog philosophy, with the festival’s theme of home at its arguable core.The hit single “O Superman” was Laurie Anderson’s vital calling-card to pop culture, her marriage to Lou Reed a brief downtown New York art nirvana, addressed elsewhere in the festival. But the life she zigzags through Read more ...
Heidi Goldsmith
The foyer of Brighton Dome for Brighton Festival director Laurie Anderson’s Song Conversation would have had a PR executive flummoxed; from punks in their 20s licking the rim of a plastic pint to a hobbling couple clutching programmes. The breadth of audience is surely a testament to Anderson’s unique career of performances combining pop melodies with countercultural performance art. As the seemingly ceaseless passings of pop eccentrics litter our newsfeeds, it’s a relief to see the former NASA artist-in-residence and “O! Superman” composer alive and electronic.The performance is a Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut of Palestinian parents. She came to London to study at the Slade School in 1975 and got stuck here when civil war broke out in Lebanon, preventing her from returning home. In effect, she has been living in exile ever since and the sense of displacement and unease induced by being far from home permeates much of her work.The video, Measures of Distance, 1988 (pictured below right) is a moving reflection on the love she feels for her mother, far away in war-torn Beirut. The screen is covered in a veil of arabic writing (her mother’s letters) Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The exhibition starts promisingly. You can help yourself to an orange from Roelof Louw’s pyramid of golden fruit. Its a reminder that, for the conceptualists, art was a verb not a noun. Focusing on activity rather than outcome, these artists were committed to the creative process rather than the end product. The idea was what mattered, and if it led to an open-ended exploration, so much the better.For centuries, the whole point of art had been its longevity; now mutability and destruction were welcomed as part of the creative process. Left intact, Louw’s pyramid of oranges (pictured Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The earliest known selfie is as old as the medium itself – literally. Hippolyte Bayard, one of the inventors of photography, pictured himself as a drowned man. His technique of photographic printing on paper had been upstaged by the daguerrotype, a metal plate alternative developed at the same time (1839) by Louis Daguerre. While Daguerre was showered with honours, Bayard was overlooked and, in disgust, he posed as a martyr to wasted endeavour; his hands stained with photographic chemicals, he slumps in a chair like a corpse newly dragged from the water. Performing for the Camera Read more ...