20th century
Alison Cole
Of all the mesmerising images in William Kentridge’s major Whitechapel show, the one that lingers most, perhaps, is that of the artist himself, now turned 60, hunched and thoughtful, wandering through the studio in Johannesburg where he lives and works. He paces, meditates over a "magical" cup of coffee, imagines, draws, tears paper, works, adjusts, observes, directs – all in the gentle manner of a Buster Keaton-style silent film star. Time in this metaphoric space is thick with possibilities, under-stated humour and conundrums. It is also a Utopian universe, where mistakes can be undone, Read more ...
Florence Hallett
If you’ve had half an eye on BBC Four’s conceptual art week, you’ll have noticed that the old stuff is where it’s at, with Duchamp’s urinal making not one but two appearances, equalled only by Martin Creed, that other well-known, conceptual stalwart (who actually isn’t as old as he looks). The BBC would say that this is because 2016 marks the centenary of Dada, the anarchic, absurdist art movement (if a movement is what it was) that saw artists begin routinely to challenge and ridicule accepted ideas about art – what it is, why it is and what it’s for.The other reason, as demonstrated in Tate Read more ...
Clem Hitchcock
Neon was once the triumphant glowing symbol of commerce and capitalism. In the 1930s the distinctive tube lighting gleamed above broadway theatres and on prominent billboards in the world’s great metropolises from New York to Paris. These glory days were not to last. Within just few years neon signs were removed from their downtown pride of place, demoted instead to apologetically jutting out from roadside motels and peripheral dive bars.By the time that a group of American artists became known for using neon in the 1960s it had become the go-to metaphor for philosophers and writers lamenting Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Bruce Chatwin’s sense of place stayed slippery. If he had roots, they were in the Black Mountains across the Welsh border, a fond childhood memory he deepened for his third book with the rich anecdotes buried in old newspapers. The tale this iconoclastic travel writer spun in On the Black Hill was of twin brothers, Benjamin and Lewis, who stay put in their patch of Wales as the 20th century and its World Wars grind past them, like the noise of a car in the next field. Book and film are about lives in a landscape, each enriching the other.Writer-director Andrew Grieve also had childhood Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Owen Wingrave is the Britten opera that always comes with a caveat, an apology. Dramatically flawed (a problem partially, but by no means entirely, accounted for by its genesis as a television opera) and musically uneven, it has nevertheless emerged recently as a favourite choice for young singers, with Guildhall (2013), the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (2016) and now British Youth Opera (2016) all choosing to stage it, with varying degrees of success.Owen, last of the soldiering clan of the Wingraves, leaves officer training, casting his family’s history aside in favour of an avowed Read more ...
mark.kidel
The jungle, a region of Edenic fantasy and unspeakable terrors, has always fed the white man’s imagination as well as kindled his greed. Not surprisingly, this is rich ground for the movies – a place beyond time, the home of noble savages and an El Dorado to be stripped of its riches. In most jungle movies, including The Mission and The Emerald Forest, the indigenous population is romanced or demonised, or a mixture of both. Werner Herzog, with Aguirre, God of Wrath and Fitzcarraldo, managed to temper the exoticism that tends to colour the outsider’s view of nature untouched and cultures Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
A tousled-haired child wearing wings is framed in a candlelit casement window. It’s a beautiful, Georges de La Tour-like scene. He’s the angel of the Lord in a nativity play rehearsal: unto us a son is born, peace on earth. But hark – why is the soundtrack so piercing and Psycho-ish? And why has this little angel (Tom Sweet) left the rehearsal to throw stones at people in the darkness?This is surely the first film to formally divide its acts into “Tantrums”. There are three of them and, by today’s standards, they’re nothing major – refusing to eat dinner, barricading himself into his room, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
American photographer William Eggleston is famous for dedicating himself to colour photography at a time when it was still considered kitsch – acceptable for wedding and Christening photos, but not much else. The best known example of his embrace of colour is a 1973 photo of a red light bulb hanging from a red ceiling, a picture devoid of subject matter beyond redness and the associations it triggers.You could almost say the same of a photograph he took the following year of a young woman at a fast food counter in Biloxi, Mississippi (main picture). We see her from the side waiting Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Winifred Knights (1899-1947) was an impeccable draughtsman: her portrait drawings are compelling. She deployed fine webs of lines, her sure hand applying gradated pressure resulting in mesmerising studies of people that are hypnotically fascinating. Who knew pencil could do so much? But she was also a painter, a slow worker using techniques that were deliberately old-fashioned.As much of her surviving work as it is possible to retrieve is on view at Dulwich in an act of inspired re-discovery. The exhibition also tells us much about women artists near the beginning of the 20th century and of Read more ...
Bill Knight
Nous avons Brexité but we are still welcome at the 47th Rencontres d'Arles. Each summer this beautiful French town gives itself over to an international photography festival which this year features around 40 exhibitions of varying sizes with countless lectures, parties, book signings and fringe events.A photo fair is a collection of images for sale and Arles is not that at all. It is a well-organised series of exhibitions, some around a theme, others showing the work of particular photographers, but all presenting a body of work and showing us what photography can do better than other art Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
And so it ends: Hagen drowns, Valhalla burns, and the ring returns to the Rhine, while somewhere beneath – Wagner’s dawn trumpets sounding faintly in the distance – the dwarf Alberich continues his lonely scheming. It would be hard to find a more apt conclusion to a week of power-grabbing and back-stabbing than Götterdämmerung, and harder still to see its climactic conflagration as anything other than horribly prophetic. But where politics wreak chaos, so art must console, and this Ring cycle is consolation at its absolute purest and most ecstatic.Opera North’s Ring has been such a triumph Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Boy meets girl; girl and boy fall in love; boy loses girl. In true bohemian fashion, La bohème can lay its operatic head anywhere from Paris to Peshawar, in any era from 90s punk to the Belle Epoque, and still make sense. What matters are the emotions; do we believe in the relationship between Rodolfo and Mimi, the camaraderie between Rodolfo and his friends? Stephen Barlow’s new production for Opera Holland Park may relocate the action rather unexpectedly, but what emerges both fresh and familiar is a love story between two people who couldn’t care less what city or what age they find Read more ...