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 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
February 17th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
A new London exhibition brings together works by artists tuned into JG Ballard's surreal, dystopian universe
Posted in Andy Warhol, Art, Art and design, Culture, Ed Ruscha, Editorial, Exhibitions, Installation, JG Ballard, Jeremy Deller, Painting, Roy Lichtenstein, Sculpture, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 17th, 2010 Adrian Searle, Andy Duckworth
WARNING: contains explicit language
Posted in Art, Culture, Editorial, Exhibitions, London listings, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 17th, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
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
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Editorial, Photography, World news, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 17th, 2010 Adrian Searle, Andy Duckworth
WARNING: contains explicit language
Posted in Art, Culture, Editorial, Exhibitions, London listings, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 17th, 2010 Adrian Searle, Andy Duckworth
WARNING: contains explicit language
Posted in Art, Culture, Editorial, Exhibitions, London listings, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 15th, 2010 Skye Sherwin, Robert Clark
Fiona Crisp: Subterrania, Penzance
In Fiona Crisp's spooky new series of photographs, tunnels lead the eye on and on, into the dark. Littered with decaying rafters and machinery, the rust-coloured dirt and stone walls of an old mine stretch downward into the womb-like earth in one image. Another shows the grim, sterile corridor of a German military underground hospital created on the Channel Islands in the second world war. In Crisp's compositions, these moody locations – all tourist destinations – become psychologically charged inner worlds.
Newlyn Art Gallery, Sat to 17 Apr
Skye Sherwin
Don McCullin, Manchester
A retrospective of over 50 years of frontline photography by one of the most incisive war photographers of all time. While Don McCullin has distinguished himself in landscape and still life, it is human misery that appears to bring out the great in him. Who can forget the blank-eyed look of the Vietnam soldier, photographed in 1968, staring death straight in the face? Similarly, the agonised pose of a woman mourning the death of her husband in the Greek-Turkish war hits one with the force of a great pietà. It is McCullin's ability to bring the news back home, to invest the particularity of a faraway individual's loss with momentous yet intimate significance, that marks his extraordinary achievement.
Imperial War Museum North, to 13 Jun
Robert Clark
Candice Breitz: Factum, London
With her pithy samplings of celebs and their devotees, Candice Breitz has crafted a pop culture commentary with as much spectacular pep as anything Hollywood throws at us. She has remixed the likes of Whitney and Annie Lennox to howl "I", "you" and "me" in a cacophony of self-love and emulation, and spliced actors out of context so their dialogue becomes a pantomime of gender roles. Yet Breitz's projects with everyday people show we're more than equal to mass media's iron grip on individuality: like her videos featuring Madonna fans, singing in unison, but all adding their own quirks to the repertoire. In her new video series, Factum, the South African artist focuses on identical twins and musings on selfhood, doubling and culture.
White Cube, N1, to 20 Mar
Skye Sherwin
Ian Breakwell: Elusive States Of Happiness, Derby
This is the first major retrospective of the work of Ian Breakwell, who died just five years ago after establishing his reputation as the greatest artist to come out of Derby since Joseph Wright of Derby, and one of the most mischievously spirited artworld provocateurs of the late-20th century. Working in just about every medium, his deadpan take on the world amounts to a life long series of mundane epiphanies. One of the most engaging diarists of his time, he was arguably one of the last great diarists before the blog age. Typical is The Walking Man Diary 1975-78, a series of photographic and textual observations made from the window of his Smithfield home of a lone passerby imbued with pathos.
QUAD, Sat to 18 Apr
Robert Clark
Billy Childish, London
Pitched between misunderstood genius and stubborn bugger, Billy Childish is an awkward perennial of British culture who's stayed true to his stripped back garage rock and defiantly throwback expressionist painting for three decades. If he's never reached a broad audience, it seems largely because his anti-establishment stance, nay-saying contemporary culture's power systems, would never allow it. When he recently created a cover aping an old Penguin edition for a collection of poems, the publisher slapped him with a cease and desist order. Billy's response was to ceremoniously burn the offending copies at his own book launch. Yet now he's got a survey show at the ICA, suggesting he might have finally found his moment. Painting, woodcuts, music and candid, autobiographical writings pack sincerity and obsession in equal measures, channelling a wistful yearning for a purportedly more authentic past.
ICA, SW1, Wed to 18 Apr
Skye Sherwin
Ron Mueck, Manchester
Any show of Ron Mueck's hyper-real sculptural figures is bound to bring up the age-old artworld dilemma: can art this immediately attractive and intriguing really be much good as art? Does its very popularity signal an over-reliance on sculptural special effects? Does its considerable wow factor indicate a sensationalist and shortlived significance? And, indeed, are such questions, by their very nature, elitist? Whatever Mueck's eventual historical standing, it is undeniable that his work has a great charisma. Walking into this show of three of his fleshy tableaux, one cannot be taken aback by their spooky embodiment of human magnetism. Irresistibly inspecting a semi-naked couple curled up asleep involves at least a twinge of voyeuristic guilt. Staring at naked strangers in public isn't really on, is it? Mueck reminds us that embarrassment is a perfectly worthy response to art.
Manchester Art Gallery, to 11 Apr
Robert Clark
Jitish Kallat: The Astronomy Of The Subway, London
Jitish Kallat's work has become as mercurial, big and bright as the city he draws inspiration from: Mumbai. He made a name for himself as a painter in the early noughties, with political subject matter hand-rendered in a pop graphic style, and has since produced video, sculpture and lenticular prints – as seen in last year's survey of Indian art at the Serpentine and the Saatchi's current show. In this exhibition exploring the relationship between the individual and the crowd, contrasts abound. A sculpture of a kerosene stove is enormous, while rioting crowds of tiny figures appear in danger of being trodden on.
Haunch Of Venison, W1, Mon to 27 Mar
Skye Sherwin
Party! Walsall
After a mixed history, New Art Gallery Walsall is back on track as a contemporary art venue of international significance. It celebrates its 10th anniversary with a flamboyant array of work ranging from the early-19th-century duende of Francisco de Goya, through the booze and dope sodden excesses of Michael Andrews's 1960s demimonde. Martin Creed's get-together of some 2,000 balloons updates the event with its hedonistic conceptualism, while Zhang Peng's photo of a little manga girl slicing into a bloody birthday cake is plain queasy.
New Art Gallery Walsall, to 17 Apr
Robert Clark
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Editorial, Exhibitions, The Guardian | Comments Off