Richard Hamilton, the true father of Pop art and spiritual descendant of Duchamp, is not a particularly prolific artist. Rather, he sticks to an idea and works on it over several editions and in different media, so that we get a large body of work repeating the same image in paint, in collage, in photography and in mixed media. For Hamilton, now 87, in so much of what he has done over the decades the key idea cannot be conveyed by a single unique work of art, because the key idea is often to do with the multiplicity of images: in other words, the medium is the message.
visual arts reviews
josh.spero
What emerges from tonight’s Culture Show on Henry Moore, which examines how the sculptor exploited the media (and vice versa), is not the difference between the media of sculpture and television but the similarity.
doro.globus
From Floor to Sky looks at a relatively little known, but pivotal, moment in the development of British sculpture: the period in the late 1960s and early 1970s when tutors and students at St Martin's School of Art and the Royal College worked together in challenging traditional attitudes to the medium. New ways of teaching and thinking about sculpture were evolved, and new materials such as fibreglass and plastic introduced. This exhibition focuses on the students of one particular tutor, Peter Kardia, whose radical teaching methods brought politics, theory, perception and perspex into the studio.
sue.steward
A 1986 documentary about the USSR’s new modernist city, Chernobyl, featured a five-year-old boy kicking a football through landscaped gardens, past blocks of clean, elegant flats and inside the soon-to-be opened funfair in the workers' town of Pripyat. A brilliant propaganda tool for the new status symbol Nuclear Power Plant, the film was intended to convey the message around the Soviet empire that the nuclear age implied a safe, happy future. The film was never shown; three weeks later, the plant exploded in the world’s worst ever nuclear disaster and Chernobyl’s almost 40,000 inhabitants were evacuated after two days. Hana Vojackova, a Czech photographer and film-maker working in London, was also five years old at the time of the accident. Last November, she visited Chernobyl to tell a story about a story in danger of being forgotten.
alice.vincent
The description of the AV Festival’s closing event was vague in the promotional material. Going only by the promise of “music/performance,” and the undeniably odd combination of Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair with performance musicians including the guitarist from drone doom band Sunn O))), expectations were hard to form. The organisers must have realised the mystery - four sheets of A4 were thrust into our hands last night by ushers upon entry as a means of explanation, although the itinerary was hardly kept to.
fisun.guner
Billy Childish claims to think only in pictures. But since writing forms as big a part of his creative output as painting, that can’t be quite true. In fact, he’s written a number of autobiographical novels as well as collections of poetry. What’s more, he’s a hugely prolific musician, so I’m sure he means only that he feels a little more comfortable expressing himself through imagery rather than abstract concepts – though obviously, being human, he must do that as well.
sue.steward
This week I discovered Irving Penn’s little-known portraits of anonymous street traders, taken in Paris, London and New York between 1950 and 1951. Previously unseen in the UK, they are now appearing at Hamiltons’ Mayfair gallery: 33 examples from a series of almost 252 full-length portraits collectively titled Small Trades. While they lack the instant glamour of the celebrity Portraits currently showing at the National Portrait Gallery, these sensitive depictions of skilled street traders – including a Parisian cheese-seller, a London house painter, a New York flower delivery man - are refreshingly different from the refined quality of the celebrity prints.
mark.hudson
Who gives a **** about Henry Moore? The standing of the craggy-faced Yorkshire miner’s son who dominated British art for half a century has declined massively since his death in 1986. Where once Moore was British art, most people in this country have now probably never heard of him. Those pin-headed, slab-like forms that once seemed universal in their embodiment of utopian modernity now feel so of their time you expect to see Muffin the Mule come clopping round the corner at any moment.
fisun.guner
Like Philippe Starck, whose Alessi tripod lemon squeezer is a bit like an evil-looking Louise Bourgeois spider, Ron Arad emerged in the Eighties as something of a “rock‘n’roll” designer. It’s a label that’s stuck, as has its sexy variant “post-punk”. The latter came about after his break-through Rover Chair (1981; main picture) found its first customer in Jean-Paul Gaultier.
josh.spero
Works of art are usually quite easily recognisable: they’re in a frame, or on a pedestal, or (if it’s a particularly expensive one) there’s a security guard nearby. You’ll probably be in an art gallery or a smart private house too. But what about when the art is in the land? And moreover, when that art is almost too subtle to be noticed?