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.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Blogposts, Culture, Stage, Theatre, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 19th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
Ackermann's exhibition at White Cube references century-old techniques but feels thrillingly contemporary
Recently I moaned about the abuse of the term "modern art" to describe the art of today. The joy of working as a critic is that every theoretical notion you may have is going to be contradicted by empirical reality. And lo and behold, I walked into an exhibition yesterday afternoon that proves art is still able to rise in an ambitious and intelligent way to the challenges posed by modern life.
Franz Ackermann (born 1963) lives and works in Berlin. His current exhibition at White Cube, Mason's Yard in London is a whirligig of ideas and impressions. If cinema director Michael Haneke tries to trace the connections of a globalised world in fractured narratives, Ackermann captures the fissions and fusions of our unmoored age through an art of kaleidoscopic energy.
At first glance, his paintings and the playground-like installations in which they are displayed are so bright and hard you begin to dismiss them as just another pop contrivance. But stay a moment. The gallery upstairs is given over to a spectacular, fizzingly theatrical installation where your mind finds it hard to settle on anything: to register the subtlety behind it you need to go downstairs where his paintings are more conventionally displayed and there's enough quiet to assimilate their complexity.
Pulses of colour that resemble computer graphics are interrupted by drawn perspectives; broken images of buildings and city squares judder across storms of energetic random marks. The aesthetic is new and yet it has a history: it responds to the confusions and liberations of contemporary urban life with techniques of fragmentation, explosion and juxtaposition that go back a century, to cubism.
Go back upstairs after taking in his paintings and you can properly appreciate the power and excitement of his installation called Wait. Its hybridisation of painting, sculpture and kinetic art amounts to a street-cultural grotto containing the possibility and menace of modern life: the modern life that we are living, now.
Ackermann's dynamism and colour capture something about the contemporary. Is the exhilaration he depicts that of a new democracy or an impenetrable chaos? It's a great place to visit, Franz Ackermann's 21st century. But would we want to live there?
Posted in Art, Art and design, Blogposts, Culture, Exhibitions, Installation, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 19th, 2010 Nosheen Iqbal
Animal Collective's forthcoming installation at the Guggenheim comes from a proud tradition of pop mash-ups with the art world
It's better than copying Jackson Pollock and more ambitious than pretending to be full-time robots. The only surprising thing about Animal Collective taking over New York's Guggenheim museum is that nobody thought of it sooner. But the Brooklyn experimental pop crew are collaborating with video artist Danny Perez on a site-specific installation for the museum's 50th anniversary.
The idea is to "transform the rotunda into a kinetic, psychedelic environment". From the sounds of it, the piece – Transverse Temporal Gyrus – could beef up the band's future live shows considerably. Ticket-holders are promised video projections and visual abstractions; I'd count on at least a couple of ethereal black-and-white film shorts and Cy Twombly-ish swiggles projected on the walls. The band won't be performing in the space, but the three-hour show will include recorded music composed for the event.
The Guggenheim's curators have pulled off a neat trick. Of all the Brooklyn-based bands experimenting with art rock, this lot are the best choice to fill the space. Just imagine their bass bouncing through Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic space, their blissed-out rave-pop sliding down the spiral walls.
Animal Collective are not the first to try the art-pop mash-up, though. Plenty of bands have played live shows in galleries or museums. Blur's comeback started with a gig at the railway museum in Colchester. Pet Shop Boys have also played in several modern art institutions. And seeing the Strokes perform among 50ft dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum in 2006 is probably one of the most surreal gigs I've been to.
However, artistic intervention in a public institution, mixing musicianship with modern art, is a little less common. There's the Velvet Underground getting it on with Andy Warhol, and Kevin Shields curating and soundtracking an exhibition of Patti Smith's polaroids. Similarly, Massive Attack's 3D and UnitedVisualArtists worked on Volume at the V&A, another site-specific piece. The former built the sounds, synchronised to fit a luminous installation of columns in the foyer of the building in 2005. The audio-visual sculpture could only be triggered by visitors moving inside and around the piece, like a Dan Flavin show crossed with Kraftwerk.
Last year, David Byrne of Talking Heads brought his museum piece, Playing the Building, to London's Roundhouse. Originally staged in Stockholm's Färgfabriken gallery, Byrne's interactive installation was a sublime bit of mechanical doodling. Visitors were invited to the show to play an organ connected by trailing tubes and wiring to the walls, girders and beams of the building. Bizarre, but properly seductive. As I'm sure Animal Collective will be.
Posted in Animal Collective, Art, Blogposts, Culture, Electronic music, Indie, Museums, Music, Pet Shop Boys, Pop and rock, The Strokes, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 16th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
For London's smaller art galleries, such as the Courtauld, Wallace and Dulwich, getting crowds in can be done intelligently ... or in a way that suggests desperate fashion-chasing
It's a peculiar destiny to be a small art museum in London. A city whose big galleries are so famous and so well-attended must be an unnerving place if you are responsible for attracting audiences, press coverage and funding to one of the quieter, more taken-for-granted institutions. These smaller London venues have their own "big three". The Courtauld Gallery, the Wallace Collection, and Dulwich Picture Gallery are all outstanding collections that offer unique pleasures of their own.
At the Courtauld, you can see one of the choicest collections of late-19th century French art anywhere in the world. At Dulwich, you can take in such great old master paintings as Rubens's Venus, Mars and Cupid in the setting of an architectural masterpiece by Sir John Soane. And the Wallace Collection can boast such a universal masterpiece as The Laughing Cavalier.
In a sane world these galleries would not have to compete for attention. It would be fine if they were empty of people. They could just concentrate on presenting their collections well, and perhaps putting on the occasional erudite exhibition of old master drawings – indeed, the Courtauld is about to do just that.
But this is not a sane world. Art is as nuts as everything else. If you don't get people in, you're not accessible, you're elitist – and your budget becomes vulnerable. The monies that can be got from gift shops, cafes, and ticket sales are considered indispensable. And besides, these collections doubtless have a genuine democratic urge to share their riches.
These galleries provide three very different models of how a venerable, small but choice collection might do that. The Wallace Collection has been most fazed by the fame of contemporary art, rattled by the roar of the publicists. Its recent D****n H***t exhibition was just the latest in a series of attempted crowd pleasers. And it did get in the crowds: gift-shop sales mutliplied many times over, I hear.
But at what cost has the Wallace Collection modernised itself? This used to be the quietest, most forgotten and therefore most thoughtful museum in London. It was great in its remoteness. Now it feels neurotic: always trying one glib idea after another, ending in this recent unholy car crash.
When all the papers were covering this worthless event, a superb Frank Auerbach exhibition at the Courtauld got far less notice. Yet, that does not mean the Courtauld is failing. Lots of people were at the Auerbach – lots were loving it. This gallery seems busier all the time, indeed, with keen, interested visitors of all ages. That was also true when I went last Friday to see the fine Paul Nash exhibition at Dulwich.
Both the Courtauld and Dulwich are pursuing intelligent, worthwhile exhibition programmes that add to their excellent collections without spoiling their meditative atmospheres. They prove it is possible to modernise without losing your soul - and it is the Wallace Collection, desperately chasing fashion, that looks silly.
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February 16th, 2010 Mercedes Bunz
More than 20 newly digitised documentaries are to be released online for the first time after a link-up between the BBC and the Henry Moore Foundation. The material will be released on 24 February to coincide with the opening of the Tate Britian's major Henry Moore retrospective that runs until 8 August 2010.
"Visitors to Tate Britain's Henry Moore exhibition will be able to watch clips of Moore, including footage of him in his studio with some of the works featured in the show. We'll also be showing highlights on Tate's website", said Jane Burton, the creative director of Tate Media. "Tate is delighted to have played its part in making these wonderful archive programmes available to the public."
The material encompasses documentaries, interviews and reports spanning nearly five decades of Britian's most famous sculptor. It includes six classic programmes made by pioneering producer John Read for the BBC. Read's first film portrait of Moore was broadcast in 1951 to coincide with a Tate Gallery exhibition, and his "Henry Moore: Art is the Expression of Imagination and Not the Imitation of Life" is considered to be the UK's first television arts documentary. It shows the artist creating the "Reclining Figure" filming the entire process from sketch to the final bronze sculpture.
The material will form a part of a permanent resource in execution of the BBC's commitment to support and enable the cultural life of Britain, particularly through digital access to archive content and investment in arts and music programming. In January, the BBC has launched the interactive website A History of the World in 100 Objects in collaboration with the British Museum and 350 museums across the UK.
"The BBC archive is full of riches and these remarkable programmes are among the most precious. They comprise a treasure-trove of unique footage of a great artist, most of which has been unseen by the public for decades." said Roly Keating, the BBC director of archive content. "We're very grateful that thanks to the support and enlightened partnership of The Henry Moore Foundation, working with Tate Britain, these programmes can be rediscovered and freely enjoyed by audiences across the UK, now and in the future."
The material can be seen by visiting at the BBC's archive website and at the Henry Moore Foundation site.
Posted in Art, BBC, Blogposts, Culture, Digital media, Media, Sculpture, Tate Britain, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 16th, 2010 Mercedes Bunz
More than 20 newly digitised documentaries are to be released online for the first time after a link-up between the BBC and the Henry Moore Foundation. The material will be released on 24 February to coincide with the opening of the Tate Britian's major Henry Moore retrospective that runs until 8 August 2010.
"Visitors to Tate Britain's Henry Moore exhibition will be able to watch clips of Moore, including footage of him in his studio with some of the works featured in the show. We'll also be showing highlights on Tate's website", said Jane Burton, the creative director of Tate Media. "Tate is delighted to have played its part in making these wonderful archive programmes available to the public."
The material encompasses documentaries, interviews and reports spanning nearly five decades of Britian's most famous sculptor. It includes six classic programmes made by pioneering producer John Read for the BBC. Read's first film portrait of Moore was broadcast in 1951 to coincide with a Tate Gallery exhibition, and his "Henry Moore: Art is the Expression of Imagination and Not the Imitation of Life" is considered to be the UK's first television arts documentary. It shows the artist creating the "Reclining Figure" filming the entire process from sketch to the final bronze sculpture.
The material will form a part of a permanent resource in execution of the BBC's commitment to support and enable the cultural life of Britain, particularly through digital access to archive content and investment in arts and music programming. In January, the BBC has launched the interactive website A History of the World in 100 Objects in collaboration with the British Museum and 350 museums across the UK.
"The BBC archive is full of riches and these remarkable programmes are among the most precious. They comprise a treasure-trove of unique footage of a great artist, most of which has been unseen by the public for decades." said Roly Keating, the BBC director of archive content. "We're very grateful that thanks to the support and enlightened partnership of The Henry Moore Foundation, working with Tate Britain, these programmes can be rediscovered and freely enjoyed by audiences across the UK, now and in the future."
The material can be seen by visiting at the BBC's archive website and at the Henry Moore Foundation site.
Posted in Art, BBC, Blogposts, Culture, Sculpture, Tate Britain, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 15th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
The current climate crisis shows that even 21st-century science can be trumped by dogma. Or is madness creeping in?
It should be obvious from my articles that I love history as much as I love art. And I think it's time to come clean: I am a historian manqué. As a teenager in the 1980s, I spent so much time reading history that I became as pale as a maggot, got spots all over my face ... and won a scholarship to Cambridge to study it.
In those far-off days, when Margaret Thatcher faced the enemy within and I sat looking out of a classroom window at a rainswept rugby pitch in Wrexham, one history book I had come across in the public library reached out to me like a blazing vision. It was called The Strange Death of Liberal England and its author was George Dangerfield. In the last few weeks its title has kept ringing in my head.
Dangerfield's theme is the disintegration of the Liberal Party in Britain before the first world war. But this is no staid parliamentary history, it is a sweeping cultural interpretation of what Dangerfield sees as the death of Victorian rationalism and sobriety. In the 1900s, a wave of new forces conspired to undermine not just the Liberal Party but the optimistic and reasonable view of human nature on which it was based. The fall of liberal reason is one of the themes of the literature of that age, from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to WB Yeats's 1919 poem The Second Coming:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
In art, you can see the madness creeping on in Sickert's paintings and Epstein's post-human sculpture The Rock Drill.
We seem to be living through the demise of liberal England all over again. The current crisis in climate science is a profound shock to anyone who thought that, for all the cataclysms of the early 21st century, there were some basic values and rationalities that held our society on course. It seems science itself is disintegrating into tit for tat internet accusations and email scandal. Where is human reason if the lines between research, belief and subjectivity disappear?
And where is the liberalism of the New Labour era if it cannot even make a scientific case for environmental action without it being assailed by dogma? We're now in a realm where the maddest opinions are valid and the most apparently cogent are open to doubt.
The strange death of liberal England has us in its grip.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Blogposts, Climate change, Environment, Joseph Conrad, Labour, Politics, WB Yeats, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 12th, 2010 Helienne Lindvall
Meet the rock managers who've spotted an opening for them to bring expertise and experience – as well as funds – into the art world
Music and the visual arts have had a loose relationship for decades. From the 60s onward, bands like the Beatles, The Who and Roxy Music all had at least one member who went to art school before embarking on a music career. Others, like Tony Bennett and Ronnie Wood, pursued careers as painters in the later part of their careers.
Still, the funding and business side of the visual arts has traditionally been dominated by trust funds, the rich and corporate City patrons. There is evidence that this is starting to change. As the music business became more lucrative, so artists such as Madonna, Sir Elton John, Jarvis Cocker, Brian Eno and his ex-band mate Bryan Ferry invest much of their accumulated wealth in both modern and classical art. Even Kylie, Robbie and the Gallagher brothers have been seen in art galleries and auction houses.
Music manager and promoter Raye Cosbert thinks that the art community can gain more than just funding from the music industry – he thinks it could use the expertise and experience gained from manoeuvring some of the most successful music careers of the last couple of decades. That's why this week he along with artist agent Serena Morton launched new art venture Morton Metropolis.
If anyone should know how to nurture the talented, but emotionally fragile, personalities that frequently populate the art world, it's Cosbert. He has managed Amy Winehouse since the spring of 2006, and has also worked as a promoter with acts such as Blur, Robbie Williams, Lily Allen, Massive Attack and Björk.
"Developing talent, that's what I do," he says. "I find it and I A&R it, which I guess could be called curation." Cosbert thinks that although accessibility to music has changed the music business, what hasn't changed is that talent still needs to be found and nurtured. "The middle man is still important. What Serena does is to transpose my experience into the art world."
Morton had taken Cosbert, a personal friend, to artist Gerald Laing's studio to see his piece Belshazzar's Feast, based on a picture featuring Raye at a table with Amy Winehouse reaching for a bottle of champagne at the Ivor Novello awards. From then on, Cosbert's interest in the art world grew.
The idea for the project came about after a chance encounter with another music manager – Pat Magnarella, who looks after Green Day. "Pat was the first music industry person to truly spot the market," explains Morton. Last year, Magnarella's management signed up UK visual artist Charming Baker – giving him some rock'n'roll-style promotion – and recruited Morton to work on a US art show for them.
"I introduced Raye to Pat," she continues. "and seeing what Pat was doing in the US got Raye thinking along the same lines."
"The art world is ready for some new blood," says Morton, who joined Christie's 20th century and contemporary British arts department in the 90s and set up one of the first pop-up shows in London's Brick Lane in 1998. "We want to make it more fun."
Morton Metropolis is funded by Cosbert and, he says, Morton provides "15 years of eye". The gallery opens with an exhibition of prints by Gerald Laing, including Belshazzar's Feast, and is aptly located on Berners Street, where the Perfoming Right Society and UK Music are also situated. The company will focus on artists in their mid-careers, aiming to spot talent that has been overlooked by the more established houses. "We want to provide a safety net for our artists," says Cosbert.
Winehouse's manager thinks he can take the business of art forward. One thing artist managers and concert promoters know about is risk management – they understand the intricacies of profit and loss. In the same way that a record label can use the profit from one successful artist to underpin the funding for another whose music isn't selling well enough, so Cosbert and Morton say that if they're able to help two artists to become the new Hockney, they can afford to support other up-and-coming artists with the profit.
"Art is long, life is short," says Cosbert. "I was tired of going to my friends' houses, seeing Ikea pictures on the walls. I haven't felt this excited for a long time."
But maybe there's more to it than that. As the internet has made music more disposable, easily transferable and downloaded for free, the visual art world may in the future become even more alluring to people in the music business. After all, you can't download a painting, installation or sculpture.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Art markets, Blogposts, Music, Music industry, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 12th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
The legacy of modernism is all around us. But to find the true power of modern art, we have to look to the past ...
Modern art. I used to know what those words meant. Modern art began with Manet and the discovery of flatness as a value in painting. It reached a new clarity of purpose with Cézanne and exploded into full existence in Picasso's 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon... or, if I remember The Shock of the New, it began with the Eiffel Tower and the motor car ...
I am talking, of course, about modernism – the art movement, or constellation of art movements, that is widely held to have ended in the 1960s. When I was a student, the fashionable term for what came afterwards was postmodernism. That fell with The Late Show. And now? Well, we all say "modern art" and mean anything from Duchamp to Ryan Gander.
When I realised a few years ago that people no longer had any reference to the history of modernism in mind when they said "modern art", I was shocked. I blamed it on Tate Modern for adopting such a grand name and then filling its opening displays with the brashly new back in the early noughties. But since then it has become clear that modern art, in its current sense of the art of today and its direct antecedents, is here to stay. It's understandable when we are so obviously living in modern times, in a world hurtling towards a new future every day. This is tomorrow. If modernism dreamt of a utopia, it's here.
But, when I personally say "a great modern artist", I still probably mean an artist who worked before 1960. We may have modern art, but modernism (RIP) still sets the bar higher than most of our own moderns dream of.
And this is the problem that dogs the art critic in the 21st century. Our glibly high evaluation of today's art, casually calling it "modern art" as if it could ride roughshod over the achievements of the last century, and we could cherry pick modernism's history to find phoney lineages for whatever we want to plug, is a massive lie. The arts in the period between 1880 and 1920 reached heights of achievement unseen since the Renaissance. The avant garde in its prime was all greatness, all glory. With the best will in the world, and however much we find to admire and to hope for, our time is mannerist in comparison. Modern art? I wish it would come back.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Blogposts, Culture, Modernism, Pablo Picasso, Tate Modern, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 11th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
With their giant canvases and towering ambition, Gorky and Rothko transcended everything we thought possible of art today
The abstract expressionists, those Amercian artists who made their country's art famous 60 years ago, cannot be ignored. They are so real and so massive; so absolute.
They've rolled back over me recently. Walking into Tate Liverpool a couple of weeks ago, I found that Mark Rothko had got to the Albert Dock before me. His Seagram Murals currently hang in a warehouse space on the ground floor of the museum, and I found them devastatingly beautiful. Their wine-dark ecstasy pays such Bacchic homage to the House of Mysteries in Pompeii, whose paintings he saw while planning them. Just recently, I saw Roman wall paintings in the archaeological museum in Naples that bleed with Rothko reds.
Rothko is a great artist, and so is Arshile Gorky, whose retrospective has just opened at Tate Modern. I'll be reviewing that shortly, so I will just comment more generally on how Gorky and Rothko transcended almost everything we now expect art to be. They aspired to greatness – a quality almost no art nowadays believes it can attain. Some people call them pompous for that; I call them courageous.
It's worth looking, in the first few rooms of the Gorky show, at how he tried on different habits of excellence: painting like Picasso, then like Cézanne. The desperation to achieve on their level is both moving and disconcerting. But finally he, like Rothko, found a personal, original road to the highest mountains.
When I encountered the abstract expressionists en masse for the first time in New York's Museum of Modern Art in the 1990s, they taught me that art in our time can be not merely interesting or shocking – let alone "fun" – but can attain the most profound qualities of the noblest masters. And here in the UK, they've taught me that all over again.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Blogposts, Culture, Exhibitions, Mark Rothko, Painting, Tate Liverpool, Tate Modern, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off