February 23rd, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
A new exhibition at Tate Britain reveals the great sculptor in darker, and deeper relief
The pleasing curves, the Yorkshire lilt, the sculptures that fit so organically with the landscape that they could have been hewn by nature herself. All of this is as true of Henry Moore as it is familiar, but a new exhibition at Tate Britain chisels away at his reputation, and reveals a darker – and deeper – relief. Curator Chris Stephens concentrates on Moore's middle years, between his early discovery of "primitive" forms and the late era, when outsize commissions for plazas and campuses made him the country's top wage-earner. During the blitz, sketches of enforced Tube huddling cemented Moore's reputation, but here we see him engage with the wider tumult of his troubled times, painting to raise funds for the Spanish civil war and responding to disturbing ideas about sex and bodies that emerged with early analysis. Moore's seemingly heartening mother-and-child sculptures often face away from each other, and he has an unsparing eye for the pit props that cage miners in physically, and for the heartstrings that psychologically imprison his reclining nudes. The fractured shards of modernity that Moore carved out are here presented as forming a sculptural equivalent of The Waste Land. But unlike with Eliot – who produces nothing but head-scratching until you've genned up on Virgil – with Moore the clever ideas are an optional extra. You can still simply stroll round a sculpture park, and feel strangely calmed by those curved faces which bring the Moomins to mind.
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February 22nd, 2010 Laura Barnett
'When I was up for the Turner, people talked about me in terms of the emperor's new clothes. I could see their point'
What got you started?
Not being able to decide what I wanted to study. I was interested in architecture, music, psychology and literature. In the end, I chose art school, because art seemed to contain all of these.
Who or what have you sacrificed for your art?
It's really hard to work, in every way. You sacrifice something every time you make a choice between one thing and another. But I work because it helps me to live: without my work, I'm an empty shell.
Is contemporary art misunderstood?
No, because I don't think there's anything in it to understand. Works of art are just arrangements of colours, or shapes: any meaning they have is given to them by the people who value them, or think they're beautiful.
What's your favourite film?
Gregory's Girl. It was filmed near where I grew up and came out when I was a teenager, so it's very much of my time.
Is there anything about your career you regret?
Getting sidetracked by having to deal with work I've already made, rather than concentrating on new work. If a gallery is mounting an exhibition of my work, I often have to deal with it personally. It's a bit like writing and recording a song, and then having to be present every time that song is played on the radio.
Is the art world too money-oriented?
No – I'd say it's probably less money-oriented than most worlds, because it's primarily about people trying to express themselves.
What one song would work as the soundtrack to your life?
I once wrote a song called I Don't Know What I Want, which always comes back to me. I guess it's true.
What advice would you give a young artist?
Do what you're scared of. Often people are scared of the things they really want.
Is there an art form you don't relate to?
No. Everything that everyone does is art, or at least a little creation. There's no difference between someone calling a friend or going down to the shops, and someone else waving their arms around and making marks on a canvas.
What's the worst thing anyone ever said about you?
When I was nominated for the Turner, a lot of people talked about my work in terms of the emperor's new clothes. I could see their point: my piece was just an empty room. But it was also a room where the lights were going on and off, like a mini theatrical production. No one would say that the lighting in a theatre was an emperor's new clothes situation, would they?
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Features, Interviews, Martin Creed, The Guardian | Comments Off
February 21st, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
All the stars of the Young British Art movement appear in this curator's memoirs
All the stars of the YBA movement appear in this former journalist's memoir, swearing and yelling as they go. Typical of Muir's approach is his description of Sarah Lucas's Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab, which he describes as "a work of transformative genius", when the point was surely to mock anyone taking the idea of transformative art seriously. Muir describes punky daftness without seeming to know that is what he is talking about, and treats the art as if history had already decided it was up there with Michelangelo. If you know about the YBA phenomenon already, this book is superfluous, not because it's inaccurate (it isn't) but because it adds nothing to the existing mythology. Still, if you're a bright young student wanting an introduction to the art of the period, or a dinner party type who wants to bone up because one of your guests is in the art world, it's a neat package.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Biography, Books, Culture, Features, Reviews, The Observer | Comments Off
February 21st, 2010 Laura Cumming
Courtauld Gallery, London
What is a dream but a reel of images you can only see when your eyes are closed? Every other definition is subjective. Visions, visitations, the workings of the subconscious, the reliving or reordering of experience, yearnings and fears transformed into outlandish scenarios: whatever else they represent, dreams take the form of secret and inexplicably linked images. And though they seem a modern obsession, no artist has ever made their mystery more perfectly visible – turned it inside out – than Michelangelo.
Michelangelo's Dream, as it is known, is the centrepiece of one of the greatest (yet smallest) shows you will ever see. The drawing shows a winged figure alighting from the skies, blowing a soundless trumpet into the forehead of a sleeper; though at first glance this male nude seems more awake than asleep, for his eyes appear open. Beneath him is a box full of theatrical masks; propped at his back a rock-hard globe; around him a halo of spectral scenes materialising on the page like breath on a mirror.
But what strikes straight away is the incredible softness of the drawing and the strange weightlessness of the sleeper. So magnificently muscled and yet light enough to levitate, he might be a figment in himself; Captain Marvel minus his costume.
The bulging money bag proffered by huge hands, the old man gathered up by the scruff, flaccid as his own nightshirt, the thug about to brain his victim: the images radiating round the sleeper run all the way from the comic to the horrifying, erotic, incoherent and symbolic. Just like a dream, you might say.
But that only covers the content. What is so exceptional is the way these images are present without quite being defined, and defined without being altogether present. They fade in and out, diaphanous, unreal, scenically separate and yet continuously interlinked. Our stock analogy for dreams is cinema, but Michelangelo is closer to the truth: precise as they are, his pictures are already vanishing, as if escaping from memory.
The Dream was made around 1533 for Tommaso de' Cavalieri, the love of Michelangelo's life. The artist was 57 when they met, the young Roman nobleman somewhere between 13 and 20 but probably nearer to 13. Or so one hopes, given the embarrassing bathos of his response: "ben fatto", he writes back, "well made".
Every surviving gift from Michelangelo to de' Cavalieri is in this show: letters, poems, drawings in black and red chalk. Some have never travelled outside Italy before. You can try to make a love story from the images, as some scholars have, citing all these beautiful bodies in motion, striving, falling, surging, heroic; though in this respect they are pretty much indivisible from the rest of Michelangelo's art whereas the letters are openly adoring. Of de' Cavalieri's feelings little is known: he married and had children; he learned to draw from these works; he was there at the artist's deathbed.
But the drawings bring Michelangelo's mind far closer than the Sistine ceiling (or the letters) ever can, and here are the show's revelations. That Michelangelo is the greatest draughtsman who ever lived is a commonplace, even though his was an age of incredible performers on paper. And everyone knows that his figures excel, that his grasp of form and conflation of the real with the ideal are without parallel.
But it is much harder to catch the strangeness of Michelangelo's originality than its power. Standing close, you become intimate with its inflections here. What would it be like if a chariot and horses were tipped from the clouds, to decimate the doomed below? How might a torso look when solidifying into a tree? Is a satyr more comic than sinister? Nobody has ever seen such things, still less an eagle ravishing a boy or a corpse quickening into life, but Michelangelo makes the barely conceivable spectacularly real. To see the so-called presentation drawings all together is a dreamy, stream-of-consciousness experience in itself. Characters, motifs and ideas appear and reappear; each work seems to give rise to the next. Phaeton plunges from his chariot, Ganymede is snatched upwards by the bird, his helpless limbs spreadeagled; the winged spirit swoops to the sleeper, the spirit leaps skywards from the grave.
The same figure – Tityus, prone, shackled and about to be devoured by another eagle – even doubles as Christ rising from the tomb. Michelangelo simply flips the page, holds it to the light and resurrects the form, inspiring it with new life. The Bible story becomes a model for his art.
And the apotheosis of the show is one final uprush: Christ's stone-cold body returning to eternal life in a shiver of futurist motion. Which other artist could endow solid form with such supernatural lightness: Christ rises, but there is no visible source of force, within or without. Is this, the drawing implies, what divine power might be like?
It is a lightning strike of pure imagination, like the nearly-meeting fingers of God and Adam between which one imagines the sparks leaping. Michelangelo seems to intuit, and anticipate, electricity; and even the fluid continuities, if not the medium, of cinema. If this sounds far-fetched, compare Michelangelo with his peers in a special section of this superbly curated show.
Of the many contemporaries who copied The Dream, not one could help fixing the images and limiting the space. Even Dürer's equally mysterious Melancholia, with its morose angel in her junkyard of allegorical symbols, is earthbound and heavily defined. Whereas Michelangelo's visions appear to be still arriving on the page, while at the same time departing: their dimension not so much space as time.
The Dream makes the mind's motions visible (and, of course, those of the artist). The crux of the drawing is the dreamer's eye, open and yet unseeing. Even with a magnifying glass it is still not possible to determine the implied angle of vision. The pupil is barely discernible, a chalk particle, and the look is inward; inward looking – the very definition of a dream.
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February 20th, 2010 Robert Clark, Skye Sherwin
Kill Your Timid Notion, Dundee
There's likely to be nothing timid about this annual festival of music, art and film. KYTN defines its agenda as radically experimental and largely participatory. Projects by artists such as influential film-maker Morgan Fisher, Basque sonic provocateurs Mattin, and Sharon Lockhart's Teatro Amazonas are staged together just to see what happens. Yet the liberated spirit of free improvisation is countered by a precise accordance with quite absurdly systematised procedures. So Christof Migone will ask audiences to join him in beating the floor 1,000 times for a piece called Hit Parade. Then there's a screening of Tehching Hsieh's Performance 1980-1981, a six-minute film recording the artist punching the clock every hour on the hour for a year. Daft, yes, but so committed it's convincing.
Dundee Contemporary Arts, Sun to 28 Feb
Robert Clark
Ron Arad, London
Design objects have become familiar art gallery fodder in recent years. Meanwhile, spangly new labels like Design Art have sprung up to explain a particularly baroque brand of product design. Chances are, though, that Ron Arad doesn't care for classifications. In 1981 when he grafted Rover car seats to a steel frame, he found himself catapulted into the design limelight. He has since blasted his own path, exuberantly playing off form against function. This exhibition gives visitors the chance to test his innovations in fittings and fixtures for themselves. Bookcases roll, vases bounce and an LED light chandelier transmits text messages.
Barbican Art Gallery, EC2, to 16 May
Skye Sherwin
Jorge Pardo/Anne Tallentire, Dublin
Not only does Jorge Pardo use just about all fine art media, he adopts techniques from architecture and interior and furniture design for a fine art purpose. So this retrospective is presented in the form of an elaborate photo-mural wallpaper. Anne Tallentire's work uses video performance, photography and sculptural assemblage to present fragmented narratives of urban glimpses. She obliquely focuses our attention on such apparent banalities as a yellow "Stop" sign being painted on a tarmac road, so they appear like a moving and revealing vocabulary of urban life. "I use the frame to find out what lies beyond it, at the limit of the image," she says.
Irish Museum Of Modern Art, to 3 May
Robert Clark
Gary Hume, Salisbury
Super-slick paintings featuring bland subjects – everything from blackbirds and flowers to Kate Moss – made Gary Hume the quintessential 1990s artist. With his bright blocks of colour realised with household gloss paint on thin, unyielding aluminium, this YBA's oeuvre was as knowingly soulless as the times, beguiling and frustrating in equal doses. In negotiating the bumpy transition of these themes into the 21st century, the last decade has seen the artist develop his play with surface through mediums as various as charcoal and luxuriant marble. New paintings on aluminium, in the candy-coloured pastel palette with which he made his name, offset works on canvas in darker hues: flowers in muted blues and oranges against an intense charcoal black.
New Art Centre, to 18 Apr
Skye Sherwin
Henry Tietzsch-Tyler, Gainsborough
There's an air of an interzone no-man's-land about Henry Tietzsch-Tyler's paintings. They are heavily shaded, dense with obscurities, and just about as abstract as abstract can get, despite their surface of worried gestures. While the artist is open about some of his sources arising from his Anglo-German origins, his statements of intention are more concerned to be painstakingly honest than accessible. As a handy reference he cites the term Zwischenraum, which he defines as "a space or place that has no meaning in itself but rather gathers up the meanings of those things that press against it". There's something almost petrified about this art; these are paintings in which expressive impulses are muted, images suspended in uncertainty, yet for sure it's serious stuff.
BendInTheRiver, to 13 Mar
Robert Clark
Kenneth Anger, London
The reputation that precedes Kenneth Anger's name is long and strange: godfather of avant garde cinema; occultist and Crowley devotee; Hollywood scandal-pedlar; prickly provocateur of pop culture. This show brings together two strands on which his taboo-busting cult reputation is based. The 1969 film Invocation Of My Demon Brother is a sexy, scary and wildly psychedelic plunge into the ominous vibe that marked the latter days of the 1960s. Mick Jagger provided the trippy soundtrack, while Lucifer was played by Bobby Beausoleil, a cohort of Charles Manson's later convicted of murder. There's also his neon work, Hollywood Babylon, a nod to Anger's infamous exposé of the same title, a book full of scabrous tales of the film industry's sinister side.
Sprüth Magers, W1, to 27 Mar
Skye Sherwin
Leo Fitzmaurice & Kim Rugg, Manchester
Leo Fitzmaurice has called himself a detourist who goes in for "design-bending". Cutting up and rearranging commercial catalogues, posters, flyers and cardboard packaging, his methods might seem basic, but their outcome can be amazing. He takes the detritus of consumer advertising and transforms it into a series of sculptural constructions that come on like maquettes for futuristic devotional architecture. Kim Rugg's cut-and-paste scrapbook aesthetic is targeted at more weighty media messages. With almost obsessive patience, she cuts out the printed letters and rearranges them into alphabetical or seemingly arbitrary order. The Guardian becomes "aaedGhinrTu". She has also chopped up postage stamps, stuck the tiny fragments onto envelopes, and successfully sent them through the post. It somehow makes you feel like cheering.
Castlefield Gallery, Sat to 3 Apr
Robert Clark
Henry Moore, London
Sometimes it feels like there's always a Henry Moore exhibition going on somewhere in Britain. This can dull his impact, alongside all that public sculpture he made. Yet Moore's reappraisal has been steadily building, thanks partly to a younger generation of artists peering into modernism's nooks and crannies. This Tate survey attempts to cut through the artist's over-familiar, conservative image, turning out one massive reclining figure or Mother and Child after another. Featuring 150 works, it's a definitive one-stop shop of a show which situates the artist's radical achievements against his changing times. Highlights include Moore's extraordinary, era-defining drawings of the Blitz.
Tate Britain, SW1, Wed to 8 Aug
Skye Sherwin
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Editorial, Exhibitions, The Guardian | Comments Off
February 20th, 2010 Robert Clark, Skye Sherwin
Kill Your Timid Notion, Dundee
There's likely to be nothing timid about this annual festival of music, art and film. KYTN defines its agenda as radically experimental and largely participatory. Projects by artists such as influential film-maker Morgan Fisher, Basque sonic provocateurs Mattin, and Sharon Lockhart's Teatro Amazonas are staged together just to see what happens. Yet the liberated spirit of free improvisation is countered by a precise accordance with quite absurdly systematised procedures. So Christof Migone will ask audiences to join him in beating the floor 1,000 times for a piece called Hit Parade. Then there's a screening of Tehching Hsieh's Performance 1980-1981, a six-minute film recording the artist punching the clock every hour on the hour for a year. Daft, yes, but so committed it's convincing.
Dundee Contemporary Arts, Sun to 28 Feb
Robert Clark
Ron Arad, London
Design objects have become familiar art gallery fodder in recent years. Meanwhile, spangly new labels like Design Art have sprung up to explain a particularly baroque brand of product design. Chances are, though, that Ron Arad doesn't care for classifications. In 1981 when he grafted Rover car seats to a steel frame, he found himself catapulted into the design limelight. He has since blasted his own path, exuberantly playing off form against function. This exhibition gives visitors the chance to test his innovations in fittings and fixtures for themselves. Bookcases roll, vases bounce and an LED light chandelier transmits text messages.
Barbican Art Gallery, EC2, to 16 May
Skye Sherwin
Jorge Pardo/Anne Tallentire, Dublin
Not only does Jorge Pardo use just about all fine art media, he adopts techniques from architecture and interior and furniture design for a fine art purpose. So this retrospective is presented in the form of an elaborate photo-mural wallpaper. Anne Tallentire's work uses video performance, photography and sculptural assemblage to present fragmented narratives of urban glimpses. She obliquely focuses our attention on such apparent banalities as a yellow "Stop" sign being painted on a tarmac road, so they appear like a moving and revealing vocabulary of urban life. "I use the frame to find out what lies beyond it, at the limit of the image," she says.
Irish Museum Of Modern Art, to 3 May
Robert Clark
Gary Hume, Salisbury
Super-slick paintings featuring bland subjects – everything from blackbirds and flowers to Kate Moss – made Gary Hume the quintessential 1990s artist. With his bright blocks of colour realised with household gloss paint on thin, unyielding aluminium, this YBA's oeuvre was as knowingly soulless as the times, beguiling and frustrating in equal doses. In negotiating the bumpy transition of these themes into the 21st century, the last decade has seen the artist develop his play with surface through mediums as various as charcoal and luxuriant marble. New paintings on aluminium, in the candy-coloured pastel palette with which he made his name, offset works on canvas in darker hues: flowers in muted blues and oranges against an intense charcoal black.
New Art Centre, to 18 Apr
Skye Sherwin
Henry Tietzsch-Tyler, Gainsborough
There's an air of an interzone no-man's-land about Henry Tietzsch-Tyler's paintings. They are heavily shaded, dense with obscurities, and just about as abstract as abstract can get, despite their surface of worried gestures. While the artist is open about some of his sources arising from his Anglo-German origins, his statements of intention are more concerned to be painstakingly honest than accessible. As a handy reference he cites the term Zwischenraum, which he defines as "a space or place that has no meaning in itself but rather gathers up the meanings of those things that press against it". There's something almost petrified about this art; these are paintings in which expressive impulses are muted, images suspended in uncertainty, yet for sure it's serious stuff.
BendInTheRiver, to 13 Mar
Robert Clark
Kenneth Anger, London
The reputation that precedes Kenneth Anger's name is long and strange: godfather of avant garde cinema; occultist and Crowley devotee; Hollywood scandal-pedlar; prickly provocateur of pop culture. This show brings together two strands on which his taboo-busting cult reputation is based. The 1969 film Invocation Of My Demon Brother is a sexy, scary and wildly psychedelic plunge into the ominous vibe that marked the latter days of the 1960s. Mick Jagger provided the trippy soundtrack, while Lucifer was played by Bobby Beausoleil, a cohort of Charles Manson's later convicted of murder. There's also his neon work, Hollywood Babylon, a nod to Anger's infamous exposé of the same title, a book full of scabrous tales of the film industry's sinister side.
Sprüth Magers, W1, to 27 Mar
Skye Sherwin
Leo Fitzmaurice & Kim Rugg, Manchester
Leo Fitzmaurice has called himself a detourist who goes in for "design-bending". Cutting up and rearranging commercial catalogues, posters, flyers and cardboard packaging, his methods might seem basic, but their outcome can be amazing. He takes the detritus of consumer advertising and transforms it into a series of sculptural constructions that come on like maquettes for futuristic devotional architecture. Kim Rugg's cut-and-paste scrapbook aesthetic is targeted at more weighty media messages. With almost obsessive patience, she cuts out the printed letters and rearranges them into alphabetical or seemingly arbitrary order. The Guardian becomes "aaedGhinrTu". She has also chopped up postage stamps, stuck the tiny fragments onto envelopes, and successfully sent them through the post. It somehow makes you feel like cheering.
Castlefield Gallery, Sat to 3 Apr
Robert Clark
Henry Moore, London
Sometimes it feels like there's always a Henry Moore exhibition going on somewhere in Britain. This can dull his impact, alongside all that public sculpture he made. Yet Moore's reappraisal has been steadily building, thanks partly to a younger generation of artists peering into modernism's nooks and crannies. This Tate survey attempts to cut through the artist's over-familiar, conservative image, turning out one massive reclining figure or Mother and Child after another. Featuring 150 works, it's a definitive one-stop shop of a show which situates the artist's radical achievements against his changing times. Highlights include Moore's extraordinary, era-defining drawings of the Blitz.
Tate Britain, SW1, Wed to 8 Aug
Skye Sherwin
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Editorial, Exhibitions, The Guardian | Comments Off
February 19th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
ICA, London
Punk's not dead, and neither is skiffle in the quaintly timeless art of Billy Childish. A more appropriate moniker might be Billy Perpetual Adolescent for a man who seems stuck in the depressions and self-pity of his teenage years. A placard on which he's written a kind of manifesto for Childishness paints a picture of a genuinely miserable existence, a scenario for the devil's sitcom.
And yet his music, playing nearby, is likable stuff, and so are the record sleeves telling of a career in punk that began in 1977. These engaging ephemera are confined to the upstairs gallery at the ICA, set up as a sort of Billy Childish archive. Downstairs are his new paintings, on which this well-earned exhibition by such a veteran cult figure will be judged.
Childish is a much better painter than Damien Hirst, but that's like saying a live dog catches a stick faster than a dead dog. Perhaps more to the point is that his paintings have something in common with those of his former girlfriend Tracey Emin: both are addicted to the expressionist fjords of Edvard Munch, while being mired in the shorescapes of south-east England. Childish seems to me a mirror image of Emin, if she had a sex change and gave up conceptual art. There's the same scratchy insistence on me, me, me that is at once maddening and heroic.
Childish is no Munch, but these paintings of isolated figures and coastal dreck have the guts to be totally joyless and maudlin, and might well have come out of a 1950s art school. This cussed quality makes for an interesting exhibition – and I trust Billy Childish to go on irritating the skin of modern Britain for some time to come.
Until 18 April. Details: 020-7930 3647.
Rating: 3/5
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Reviews, The Guardian | Comments Off
February 19th, 2010 Andrew Dickson
As quick as a gesture, as long as an eternity? While a play can go on for hours, some of the most memorable theatre happens in the blink of an eye
Forget that piece of string. How long is a piece of theatre? An act? A scene? A soliloquy? Aristotle reckoned you had to have a beginning, a middle and an end. Peter Brook, with the kind of chutzpah it's still possible to admire 40 years on, suggested it might be as straightforward as asking a man to cross an empty space while someone else watches. (Something, it has to be said, that sounds significantly more dramatic than his latest play, but that's another story.)
I wonder. I was wondering on Saturday night when I was at a theatre event in a converted warehouse just behind the Arcola theatre in east London. It was rather seductively entitled Live Art Speed Date, but in the end – phew – there was rather more in the way of live art than speed dating, for all that it had a Valentine's theme. Though the whole shebang was pleasingly anarchic – one of the first things you saw when you walked in was people gyrating to the DJ in orang-utan costumes – the timetable was strict. You got yourself issued with a number and a map, acquired an envelope telling you your timetable, and marched between mysterious appointments with artists sitting at tables, behind desks and in private booths. Over the course of three hours I clocked up a bewildering array of assignations: a private duet with a xylophone-wielding Elvis fan; a waltz with a dancer and her tame Italian violinist; a text conversation with a couple auditioning their new flatmate; a personal performance of a piece bravely scored for bass guitar, trumpet and homemade theremin.
This wasn't an event, such as Ontroerend Goed's Internal, meant to make you ponder deeply on the pleasures and perils of encountering a stranger one-on-one – no obvious setup; no anxious, faintly illicit collision between hope and desire. Instead, these were more like games: literally so in the case of the football obsessive (wearing her boyfriend's strip, apparently) who tried to persuade me into a game of adapted keepie-uppie. Some of the shows worked better than others. The one constant was time: an announcer gave us a countdown to start, a klaxon-blast to finish. Four minutes each. The time it takes to boil a kettle, or toast a couple of slices of bread.
I confess to being a great believer in theatre happening fast: for all that Tynan wrote somewhere that all great art contains an element of boredom (annoyingly, I can't find it today – anyone?), surely there's no quicker way to lose an audience than making them conscious of things they'd rather be doing. A play may take hours, but theatre surely happens in moments as tiny as a glance, a word or a gesture. Something as small as an embrace; something as big as a murder. If they're done well, those moments make long hours spent at the theatre worthwhile. So I guess I went in looking for the self-enclosed miniature, the beautiful four-minute riddle, the haiku-like piece with all the concision of a Raymond Carver short story or a finely tuned pop song.
In fact, in this feast of fragments, the pieces that lingered – well, wanted to. One was a conversation with an artist cheerfully offering herself as a temporary muse. She steadfastly refused to perform until I'd revealed something I hadn't told anyone else – which, to my surprise, I did. It opened into a discussion far larger than four minutes would allow, as good a demonstration as any of theatre's curious ability to open up truths that otherwise remain untouched. But the one that has really stuck was performed by artist Tiffany Charrington, who offered a speeded-up version of an art project called I Shall See Your Houses, which (at least in its abbreviated form) featured recordings of people talking, simply but movingly, about home. It was an attempt to live out what a French thinker I'd long forgotten about, Gaston Bachelard, called the poetics of space. As the voices unspooled over headphones, Charrington placed a series of tiny model houses on the table between us: a small ritual, delicate and somehow rather beautiful. But the best bit concerns the envelope she presented as I left, which it's now up to me to fill in with my own thoughts on home, so that the chain of recorded memories can continue – who knows, for ever. Best of all: I can take my time.
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February 19th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
A look at the life of Henry Moore, whose curvacous, modernist sculptures created a new British bronze age
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Editorial, Henry Moore, Sculpture, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 19th, 2010 Robert Clark, Skye Sherwin
Gary Hume explores his dark side in Manchester, while in London Tate Britain gives Henry Moore a radical twist. Find out what's happening in art around the country
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Editorial, Exhibitions, Henry Moore, Installation, Painting, Sculpture, The Guardian | Comments Off