Visual Arts Reviews
Hana Vojackova, Chernobyl: Red Balloon 86, 11 Mansfield StMonday, 15 March 2010
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... Read more... |
English Journey Revisited, AV Festival, NewcastleMonday, 15 March 2010
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... Read more... |
Billy Childish: Unknowable but Certain, ICAThursday, 11 March 2010
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Irving Penn: Small Trades, Hamiltons Gallery/ Portraits, NPGThursday, 11 March 2010
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... Read more... |
Henry Moore, Tate BritainWednesday, 03 March 2010
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. Read more... |
Ron Arad: Restless, Barbican GalleryTuesday, 23 February 2010
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. |
Ana Mendieta, Alison Jacques GalleryFriday, 19 February 2010
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? Read more... |
Paul Nash, The Elements, Dulwich Picture GalleryThursday, 18 February 2010
In the mid 1940s when the Queen Mother purchased Paul Nash’s Landscape of the Vernal Equinox (1943) Princess Margaret remembers saying, “Poor Mummy’s gone mad. Look what she’s brought back.” But though this painting is one of the undoubted masterpieces of 20th-century British art, it’s easy to see why the Princess responded as she did. Read more... |
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, Tate ModernFriday, 12 February 2010
Arshile Gorky found it almost impossible to finish a painting. Something would always call him back. So he would go back and would add and retouch and tinker around over several years - sometimes over the course of a decade or two. “When something is finished,” he once said, “that means it’s dead, doesn’t it? I never finish a painting, I just stop working on it for a while. The thing to do is... never finish a painting.” Read more... |
Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World, Tate ModernMonday, 08 February 2010
Modernist art movements are a lot like totalitarian regimes. They produce their declaratory manifestos, send forth their declamatory edicts, and, before you know it, a Year Zero mentality prevails: the past must be declared null and void. Read more... |
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