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
From office blocks to shopping streets, Moore's sculptures are part of the fabric of Britain – so much so that we no longer notice. A new Tate retrospective wants to make us look again
As a new Tate retrospective prepares to open, it can be difficult to judge the reputation of Henry Moore, in his own lifetime one of the most famous and wealthy artists in the world. It's not that Moore has vanished from the public stage in the years since his death in 1986 – far from it, in fact. Moore's problem is that he has become so ubiquitous as to become near-invisible.
Stand on London's Bond Street, just beneath a massive work by Moore – the four-panel Portland stone Time-Life Screen, installed in 1953 as part of the building of the same name – and you guess that of the thousands of people who pass by every day, barely one looks up, still less admires. The nice American couple I found waiting to have their photograph taken on a park bench between a bronze Churchill and bronze Roosevelt looked startled at being asked what they thought of the Henry Moore. "But that's not by him, is it?" the man said in surprise. "Isn't Moore the guy who punches holes through everything?" If only they'd looked up. Like so much of Moore's work, the Time-Life Screen has become so familiar as to disappear into the background texture of 20th-century British urban life.
It's the same story just down the road in Millbank, where smokers shelter behind the gigantic bronze Locking Piece, and use it as a windbreak. Half a mile away there's another thumping great bronze, the two-section 1962 Knife Edge, opposite the House of Lords – a site chosen by Moore for its high visibility. Half a mile again, and you find Moore's very first public commission, made when he was a teacher at the Royal College of Art, the singularly un-airy West Wind high on the facade of the London Underground block over St James's Park tube station. Take a train to Stevenage and you can locate his first family group – one of many made after the death of his mother and the birth of his only child, Mary, named after her – outside a school, and another that used to be out in the precinct but now takes refuge in the civic centre in Harlow.
An elegant interactive website maintained by the Henry Moore Foundation lists scores more works on public display across 30 sites in Britain alone, from the 1944 Family Group in Aberdeen Art Gallery to the memorial to his friend Christopher Martin in the grounds of Dartington Hall, and even more all over the world, in stone, plaster, bronze, wood, on paper, in tapestries – around 800 works in all.
As the Turner prize-winning artist Simon Starling writes in the catalogue to the new Tate show: "From the beginning, Henry Moore seemed omnipresent – a state-endorsed, global player, the first of his kind perhaps. His huge bronzes seemed to drop from the sky in great meteor showers and felt to my young mind rather clumsy and anachronistic, even provincial." Starling, who won the Turner in 2005 for pieces including Shedboatshed – the shed he dismantled, built into a boat, paddled down the Rhine to a museum and reconstructed as a shed – has also made work directly responding to Moore's, and not necessarily with an admiring eye.
In 2006–07, Starling created a work called Infestation Piece for the Toronto Art Gallery of Ontario, a museum and a city with a complex relationship with Moore. In the late 1950s, a go-getting mayor, Philip Givens, commissioned a major Moore sculpture, The Archer, for its new City Hall. Starling's Infestation Piece is a Moore replica, lowered into the lake until it became encrusted with an invasive species of mussels: a hint that the sculpture itself is a form of alien in the landscape.
The Toronto Art Gallery is the Tate's partner in organising this exhibition. Both museums have world-class collections that were acquired in Moore's lifetime, but Toronto's is much the larger – and the story of how that happened is a fascinating insight into attitudes to Moore in his lifetime. Moore donated major sculptures, drawings, maquettes and other works to the Tate, of which he was a trustee. In the late 1960s, there was discussion of creating a special Henry Moore wing at Tate Britain, which would certainly have attracted many more donations – but the project was seen by some artists as memorialising Moore himself, and attracted bitter criticism. One of the show's curators, Chris Stephens, has written of the episode in an article for the Tate magazine, and of what he terms the "final insult" when in 1968, the year of Moore's 70th birthday, a letter appeared in the Times condemning the proposed wing. It was signed by 41 artists, including his former studio assistants Anthony Caro and Phillip King; not much of a birthday present. Moore donated more than 900 pieces – including some of the works he must have intended for the Tate – to Toronto in 1974, before eventually making another donation to the Tate with no strings attached.
In much the way that his public art now seems commonplace, it is easy to see Moore as invincibly nice and decent: the seventh of eight children of a Yorkshire mining engineer, a scholarship boy who never forgot his working-class roots, whose work speaks of home and family, peace and plenty, a man with socialist sympathies and a pacifist heart. When their London home was damaged in the blitz, the Moores moved to a modest two-storey rented farmhouse, Hoglands, at Perry Green in Hertfordshire – still a surprisingly remote and rural corner of the home counties. They eventually bought the house and the surrounding fields. Moore added workshops no grander than his neighbours' farm sheds, and extended the house slightly, but it has none of the grandeur you might expect of an artist who became a millionaire many times over while he lived there. Indeed, the Henry Moore Foundation, which now maintains the estate as a museum, archive and outdoor sculpture park, was established not just to ensure his legacy but to mop up some of the millions he would otherwise have spent in tax.
Visitors to Perry Green can tour the house, the handsome antique-filled dining room, the bright drawing room with Scandinavian-design modern furniture where grander visitors were received – and the claustrophobic sitting room where the Moores actually spent most of their leisure time, a space filled with rickety furniture that you wouldn't be surprised to see in a charity shop. The house reflects the popular image of the artist as "an easygoing, avuncular figure who produced an equally easygoing form of modern sculpture", as Stephens says – an image which the exhibition will attempt to destroy. There is, the curators aim to show, a lot more to Moore than monumental decency, despite his undergoing the national beatification which befell John Betjeman and has almost smothered Alan Bennett.
The exhibition will bring together more than 150 works, from the early white marble Dog carved in 1922, to a Reclining Figure in seductively polished elm, completed in 1978 when Moore was 80. There will be works in stone, bronze and plaster; working drawings and finished works on paper – including the famous blitz sleepers in London's Underground – and his cramped and contorted miners, who are given an archaic grandeur by the artist. Stephens sees anger, darkness and violence in many of these works – born, he believes, from the first-world-war experience that marked Moore for life: the artist was gassed at Cambrai and was among just 52 survivors from a 400-strong battalion. There is a sinister edge to many pieces, he argues, and a raw sexuality in all those holes and protruberances.
The elm reclining figures are exceptional. Moore himself never saw them together: the first was begun in 1935, and in his lifetime they were scattered across different collections. The surrealist painter Gordon Onslow Ford, who bought the 1939 version of the sculptures, wrote: "I felt that I was in the presence of the mother earth goddess." The critic David Sylvester was one of many who saw something almost menacing in its form – "the sacrificed and resurrected god of a fertility rite". Such views are a timely reminder that the artist was once seen as so threateningly modern that Roland Penrose's neighbours reacted in outrage when he put a Moore Mother and Child in his Hampstead front garden. And when an Essex new town commissioned a work entitled Harlow Family Group, it provoked a public demonstration by people fearful that the sculpture was an obscene jeer at Harlow's "pram town" nickname.
"In contrast to the dominant idea of Moore, we propose that he presented the body as abject, erotic, vulnerable, violated and visceral," Stephens writes. "They are part of a wider challenge to reason, of the redefinition of the human body as discontinuous, fluid and driven by deep unconscious forces, and of a world characterised by apprehension and anxiety, the uncanny and the absurd. Moore's is a troubled and troubling art that digs into the very essence of modern experience." That would be news to the tourists in Bond Street and the Millbank smokers – but maybe it is indeed time they looked again.
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?
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.
For one night only, the feral indie crew are to transform the esteemed art institution into a 'kinetic, psychedelic' jungle
Animal Collective are to take over New York's Solomon R Guggenheim museum, transforming the art gallery into a "kinetic, psychedelic" installation. The Brooklyn trance-pop gang will collaborate with artist Danny Perez for a one-night-only exhibition, Transverse Temporal Gyrus.
The 4 March event is part of the Guggenheim's 50th anniversary celebrations. After gigs by Yeasayer and Paul Banks last autumn, and one whole day with free museum admission, the gallery will now see its rotunda turned over to the architects of Merriweather Post Pavilion. Their creative partner, film-maker Danny Perez, worked on the band's videos for Who Could Win a Rabbit and Summertime Clothes, and directed their new art-film, ODDSAC.
"One of the things that you notice almost immediately in the jungle are the birds," Animal Collective wrote about the installation. "What are they saying? Does each variation serve a purpose? Why are there repetitions? Is there a pattern or is that just your imagination?" Over the course of Transverse Temporal Gyrus – and across space and time! – the group aim to provoke similar questions. To this end they will use video projections, costumes, props and original recorded music.
"As New Yorkers we are all familiar with the everyday noise around us – the car alarms, the subway trains braking, the music in bars ... Do we not realise how these sounds are affecting us? How they make us feel or act? With this in mind we wanted to create an environment where people could take some time to listen to other kinds of sounds and get away from those familiar sounds of the city. Keeping in mind the birds of the jungle, we've created an array of sounds with Animal Collective's music that is seemingly random – or is it?"
Visitors to the exhibition will be free to explore the group's "mysterious hideaway", wandering over the museum's ramps and across its open spaces. All this, Animal Collective promise, will help to "to unite [our sounds] with the inside of your brain". We just hope it doesn't hurt.
Tickets to the exhibition go on sale this morning at 10am EST.
Exhibition by trailblazing Israeli-born designer, architect and artist opens in London, his hometown for more than 35 years
There are bookshelves that bounce and roll, cutlery that pirouettes, a chandelier that you can text and chairs. Lots and lots of chairs. In what may be one of the most comfortable exhibitions of recent years, Britain's first major Ron Arad retrospective opens tomorrow.
The Barbican's art gallery in London is following up major shows it has held on Corbusier and Alvar Aalto by devoting three months to a designer, architect and artist still very much alive and working. Arad, who was born in Israel but has been based in London for more than 35 years, said he hoped anyone "interested in things" would visit.
The head of art galleries at the Barbican, Kate Bush, said: "We want to pay tribute to Ron Arad's very special place in the world of design. He is an incredibly important figure and this exhibition lays out his vision and his process as it has evolved over 30 years."
The show is divided into sections with names such as Volumising, Rolling, Superforming and Scavenging, where one of Arad's most celebrated chairs – the Rover chair, which uses a car seat salvaged from a scrap yard – is exhibited.
Then there is the Failing section, displaying designs that weren't taken up, or were misconceived. That includes the "table that eats chairs" in which chairs can be folded underneath the table top. "I think it was too complicated for the manufacturer," said the show's curator Lydia Yee, "but Ron's still confident that someone will come along."
There have been recent Arad shows at the Pompidou in Paris and Moma in New York, but the one in London was completely different, said its curator, Lydia Yee. "Ron wanted to do something new in his home town and we wanted … to show his interest in new materials and in new technologies."
There is a crystal chandelier called Lolita which has more than a thousand embedded LED lights and its own mobile number to which one can send texts, which are then displayed.
Arad and his studio have also created mechanical tricks to show off some of the pieces such as a long moving platform for bookshelves called "reinventing the wheel". The idea is that you can roll your bookshelves where you would like them – perfect for the indecisive – but there is a wheel within the wheel so the books remain upright.
For many, Arad will be best known for his chairs, many of which are on display and which are most definitely not for sitting on. A large section of the gallery will, however, contain chairs where visitors can take the weight off their feet and – should they wish – play table tennis on a stainless steel ping pong table designed by Arad to suit his game.
Behind Schorr's seductive photographs of beguiling, budding manhood lie politically pointed themes
Collier Schorr's photography sets out to seduce. Young athletes sweat and strain in machismo display. A teenage boy strikes an apparently girly pose. Adolescents play dress-up in soldier's uniforms. As attractive as this visual feast is, it asks serious questions about how identity is performed and framed. Schorr, who is an American-Jewish lesbian, typically photographs people who appear to be her exact opposite.
Perhaps Schorr's greatest voyage into the unknown has been her project in Schwäbisch Gmünd, a town in southern Germany. She has travelled there every summer for the last 18 years, photographing the life of a small town whose history could scarcely seem more alien. While many of these images feature pastoral idylls and dreams of regeneration, others push notions of otherness to the extreme. Among her series depicting boys dressed as soldiers, one image – entitled Traitor 2001–2004 – is a winningly romantic portrait of an angel-faced, flaxen-haired young man in Nazi uniform. He is, of course, the artist's invention: a present-day German teenager in costume for the camera. The picture might enable Schorr to address the country's painful past, but it also connects with Germany's present, where it remains illegal to display Nazi insignia. Just as significant – if no less troubling – Schorr shows us an image of youthful innocence, far from a movie-stereotype ogre.
While boys are her favoured subject matter, Schorr blurs the boundaries in beguiling if unsettling ways. Her boys frequently look girlish, while girls are to be found masquerading as boys. In Schorr's politically pointed photographs, ambiguity piles up.
Why we like her: Schorr's 2007 exhibition, There I Was, focused on drag-racing star Charlie "Astoria Chas" Snyder, who had been photographed by her father – who worked as a photojournalist – before dying in Vietnam. Seeking to engage with Snyder's life, Schorr turned to drawing, sketching imaginary scenes from a life that was cut brutally short.
Strangers on a train: One of Schorr's most celebrated series happened entirely by chance, after she met a German teenage boy on a train and asked him to model for her. The images that resulted, Jens F, explore the artist/muse relationship through the filter of American artist Andrew Wyeth's paintings of his German neighbour, Helga. Schorr's photographs, created over several years, feature the boy restaging Helga's poses.
Where can I see her? Collier Schorr's exhibition, German Faces, is at Modern Art gallery in London from 19 February to 20 March 2010.
A new London exhibition brings together works by artists tuned into JG Ballard's surreal, dystopian universe
WARNING: contains explicit language
See if you can spot artist Liu Bolin, the 'invisible man' who can camouflage himself against any backdrop, in any city, from China to the UK
You are currently browsing the archives for the Culture category.