Visual Arts Reviews
2011: Where the Hell Was Now?Monday, 02 January 2012
2011 was a year when now was difficult to find. The YBA/heroic monetarist era was definitively over – though Tracey Emin was accorded a far better retrospective than she deserved at the Hayward (see image below right). Read more...
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2011: The British Are ClimbingSaturday, 31 December 2011
My Top 10 movies of 2011, in order, are: Mysteries of Lisbon, Melancholia, Meek’s Cutoff, A Dangerous Method, Aurora, Hugo, The Princess of Montpensier, City of Life and Death, The Descendants, Midnight in Paris. Read more... |
2011: From Russia - With Love?Saturday, 31 December 2011
It took a relatively little-noticed television documentary, Vlad’s Army, broadcast in Channel 4’s Unreported World strand to confirm that theartsdesk has a readership in Russia. Peter Oborne’s film (the presenter pictured below) caught the pro-Kremlin youth movement, the Nashi, with its defences down, and the result depicted, no holds barred, how politics works there today. Read more... |
2011: Car parks, Curtains and ConsidineThursday, 29 December 2011
In a year when eyes turned to London for the riots, the budget cuts and the hacked phones, there seemed to be a fair amount of middle England portrayed by British creatives. Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork’s London Road at the National retold 2006’s Ipswich murders as a darkly comical contemporary musical, with middle-aged gardening competitions and dull community-centre realism success. Read more... |
2011: Unlovely Love Stories and Unerotic Erotic TalesWednesday, 28 December 2011
While I'm still learning to disentangle my mezzo from my Meistersinger, I enjoyed a lot of the opera on offer in London this year, especially at English National Opera. Parsifal was perfect and Rameau's Castor and Pollux, while probably a little too Germanic in direction with its dancing amputated legs and unerotic nudity, was wonderfully sung. Read more... |
2011: Belgian Surrealism, Austrian Angst and a Dane in a MadhouseMonday, 26 December 2011
Last year, like every year, is a bit of a blur. I saw a lot, but all the good stuff seems to have clustered near the end. Maybe an end-of-year cultural bloat has finally settled. Anyway, to help jog the memory, I think I should start bottom-up. Read more... |
The Mystery of Appearance, Haunch of VenisonMonday, 19 December 2011
Here be wonderful images, in an anthology of two score of paintings and drawings from the 1950s through the mid-Nineties by 10 artists whose shared interests only sharpen their individuality. Francis Bacon is the autodidact in the group, which includes two Berliners – Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud – who came to England as children. David Hockney is the witty, adventurous northerner who has now returned, mostly, to Yorkshire from a life lived between London and Los Angeles. Read more... |
Lygia Pape: Magnetised Space, Serpentine GalleryWednesday, 14 December 2011
The Serpentine’s north gallery has been transformed into a magical space (main picture). Strung from floor to ceiling of the darkened room, shafts of copper wire glimmer in subdued lighting like sunbeams, or the searchlights that scanned the night sky for enemy aircraft during World War Two. Read more... |
Anselm Kiefer: Il Mistero delle Cattedrali, White Cube BermondseyTuesday, 13 December 2011
That Anselm Kiefer is one of the great elder statesmen of contemporary art goes without saying. His work’s precise relevance to now is less clear. In the early 1980s, when he sprang to fame as part of the New Image Painting phenomenon (with Schnabel, Baselitz et al), the Berlin Wall was still up and the post-Holocaust Teutonic angst that Kiefer has relentlessly mined felt far more immediate and problematic than it does today. The great Monetarist showbiz-art wave hadn’t yet broken... Read more... |
A Hankering after Ghosts, Dickens and the Supernatural, British LibraryWednesday, 30 November 2011
Well, if you haven’t yet realised that 2012 is Dickens Central, there’s no hope for you. The 200th anniversary of Dickens’s birth is still two months away, but Claire Tomalin’s biography has scampered out of the starting gate already, as has Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s more scholarly Becoming Dickens. The Beeb is ready with a Great Expectations film this Christmas, and more adaptations to follow. The Museum of London has a Dickens and London exhibition opening on 9 December... Read more... |
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