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.
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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 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
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February 17th, 2010 Alfred Hickling
Nottingham Contemporary
Star City is an unassuming new town a few miles from Moscow – but for many years its location was a closely guarded secret. That is because it was the hub of the Soviet space programme, where cosmonauts trained and lived with their families in splendid isolation.
These days, you are more likely to bump into artists in Star City than space pioneers. Among the first to undertake residencies there were Jane and Louise Wilson, whose film installation shows a surprisingly mundane-looking place. It is as if Letchworth secretly housed a collection of flight simulators and anti-gravity machines with the aspect of totalitarian fairground rides. Most threatening is a huge centrifuge that generates the crushing g-force cosmonauts experience on takeoff. Can it be entirely coincidental that this emblem of Soviet supremacy resembles a giant iron fist?
The Otolith Group artist collective took advantage of Star City's training facilities to experience a flight out of the earth's atmosphere. They intercut images of floating around in space with footage of a delegation of Indian women who travelled to Moscow in the early 1970s as representatives of India's own attempts to establish a space programme.
This well-presented show proves nothing looks quite so old-fashioned as recent visions of the future. A replica of a Sputnik satellite seems as enigmatically pointless as a constructivist sculpture. Cold war propaganda posters, meanwhile, promise a cosmic collectivism that seems more palatable than the earthbound variety – though Goshka Macuga's tube of genuine Soviet spacefood (cottage cheese with blackcurrant flavour) suggests that maybe it wasn't so palatable after all.
Rating: 3/5
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February 17th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
The spirits of British poets and Romantic painters flit like moonbeams through fairy forests in this completely disarming exhibition. Paul Nash (1889-1946) painted the battlefields of both 20th-century world wars, and combined the ideas of the surrealist movement with a native feel for landscape. So much for the basic facts: Dulwich champions him with a passion that warms the heart.
The curator's clever choice is to show Nash's paintings outside chronology, which frees us from a prosaic trawl and enthusiastically draws attention to his strengths. Right from the start, you're in a distinctive, painted world that is part William Blake, part JRR Tolkien and all England. Red suns rise over chalk hills, grey breakers hit coastal defences. The landscapes of Kent keep recurring, along with unfamiliar views of London and, like a bass note building up to a sinister climax, the mudscapes of the first world war and the skeletal remains of Luftwaffe planes shot down in the Battle of Britain.
Surrealism was the one avant-garde movement of the early 20th century to which British artists took naturally. Its modern freedoms allowed Nash to paint his dreams, and mix up homely landscapes with personal myth in a way comparable to Dalì's mythologising of Catalonia.
Yet even when Nash takes surrealist photographs, his sensibility is as knotted as an English oak. Above all, his visions make you think of the nestled English village scenes painted by Blake's 19th-century disciple Samuel Palmer. It is a cliche that British Romantic art was always based on meticulous observation: it was pure inner revelation for Blake, for Palmer – and for Nash.
In the last room, the underlying note of war gets louder as you face Totes Meer (1940-41), a "dead sea" of German aircraft whose wings crash like metal waves on the English countryside. It is as if they have been absorbed into the timeless downland to become a new fairytale in this masterpiece, whose compassion for the enemy, given its date, is remarkable and inspiring.
Nash has always been an artist worthy of respect. Here he is rediscovered as one worthy of love.
Rating: 4/5
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February 14th, 2010 Laura Cumming
The first Gorky show in Britain for a generation shows a life scarred by unthinkable anguish, transformed into radiant, exhilarating art
If you think the art press has only turned spiteful in recent years, then think again. Consider the December 1948 edition of ARTnews. Barely five months after the Armenian-American painter Arshile Gorky hanged himself in a Connecticut barn after a year of incalculable agony – rectal cancer, a studio fire that destroyed much of his work, separation from his wife, a car crash that snapped his neck and paralysed his painting arm – the world's oldest art magazine chose to publish not a posthumous tribute but a derisively brief dispatch of his final show.
Among its insinuations was the claim that Gorky was an acolyte of the more successful Willem de Kooning, who immediately protested that the opposite was true. His letter remains the best of epitaphs: "When, about 15 years ago, I walked into Arshile's studio for the first time the atmosphere was so beautiful I got a little dizzy, and when I came to, I was bright enough to take the hint immediately... I come from 36 Union Square."
Gorky's studio in Union Square, Manhattan, appears the only fixed point in his adult life. From his name (assumed) and age (uncertain) to the tales he wove to obscure a devastating past, there are so many inconsistencies that the myths have become almost as familiar as the work. In Britain, where Tate Modern owns only one canvas, it often feels as if there are more biographies in print than paintings on permanent display.
Since this is our first show in a generation, it can hardly help but take the life and suicide into account. But Gorky, heralded as the father of abstract expressionism, is no Rothko aiming for the tragic sublime; nor is his art a chronicle of death foretold. The revelation of this tremendous show is, instead, the astonishing atmosphere his paintings exude and sustain.
Gorky died at the age of 44 – or 46. Of all great artists, he may be the slowest off the mark. It takes nearly 20 years (and four galleries) for Gorky to snail his way through the lessons of Cézanne, Picasso and Miró, emulating his masters stroke by stroke. Move briskly through, noticing his powers of concentration, his passion and physical relish even here, and you will still have absorbed something of his spirit before the exhibition proper starts.
The icebreaker is The Artist and His Mother, one of the most powerful portraits of the 20th century: heart-rending, irreducibly beautiful. The young Gorky stands next to his mother like a bridegroom, clasping a posy that seems to have sprung from the blossoms on her apron; she sits erect and contained in the halo of her own outline, archaic as a Byzantine icon. Spectrally pale, their ghosts haunt the picture, traces of life and innocence lost when she starved to death in his arms after the Armenian genocide.
Even if you did not know the painting began with a photograph taken as proof (or reproof) to Gorky's father in America of a family waiting behind, you would have the sense of a relic reverently preserved. It is well known that Gorky reworked the painting over and again, sanding the surface like a man scouring for clues, trying to reach the past; he even began another version, never letting go.
And what is so remarkable is that the very loss at its core – a portrait is a person here, but not here – is countered by the slow lyricism of the work: Gorky's mother is brought back from annihilation, held in the bounding contours and gentle colour, her momentary image indelibly fused with the painting's hard-won surface.
The portrait drawings in the same room put Gorky with Ingres and Picasso as a master of concision. He has to master figuration before stepping away, and even when he does, images continue to suggest themselves as irresistibly in his art as in clouds. But the release into abstraction after his marriage is absolutely euphoric: the paintings begin to breathe, stretch and unfurl.
The pivot in this show is rural Virginia, where Gorky goes wild for the landscape. The sun's a flying saucer surrounded by rays of elation, foliage throbs, every little cricket, cottage and cow becomes an excited hieroglyph in a leaping black tracery. Colour suffuses the canvas like a blush, or gathers like condensation on glass, changing the picture's mood and temperature.
There is so much exhilaration here: The Plough and the Song, with its furrowed gold below a cobalt high noon; the rustling depths of Water of the Flowery Mill. Even when tragedy returns, when black becomes both teller and tale as in Charred Beloved, where Gorky reprises a burnt painting from memory in sombre tones, the effect is of resurgence – life (or love?) brought back from the ashes.
People find autobiography in the art – ploughs and palettes, his father's orchard, his mother's apron – that the poetry of his titles does nothing to discourage. But whatever the paintings absorb from his anguished life they also transcend.
And what increases the joy of them, to me at least, is that the source of this remains mysterious – not much apparent in either form or content. You can isolate the elements of a great Gorky: the decoupling of colour from line, the trademark shapes, from winged biomorphs to quirky triangles, their points on the verge of bursting open; the sense of being nose-deep in a scene that might be scaled to an insect or a giant, being equally intimate and epic; of teeming incidents held in nebulous space. The way his paintings are voluptuous yet august. But when you are in front of them, their open effects feel very secretive.
How does he get such cold colours to thaw, how can the paintings be so speechless yet eloquent? The hues shift and glow like St Elmo's fire, the tones may be discordant, the lines stringent, and still there is this radiant ambience. It seems to be a matter of atmosphere, as de Kooning said, of something beautiful in the air.
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February 12th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
Both serious and surprising, this new retrospective looks at the work of an artist famous for his swirls of colour and spectral shapes
This is the kind of exhibition Tate Modern should put on all the time – a serious, sensitive and eye-opening encounter with a great modern artist.
Arshile Gorky was one of a generation of artists in 1930s New York who were fed by Roosevelt's New Deal while they studied the works of the European modern movement in Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. By the 1940s, these painters were opening themselves to a Jungian unconscious of mythic forms; by around 1950, they were becoming famous for abstract, wall-filling visions of sublime mystery.
But by the time Jackson Pollock and the other abstract expressionists broke the ice, Gorky was dead. He killed himself in 1948, with his painting still in the movement's intermediate phase of development, not yet purely abstract; his tearpools of paintings swim with psychic metaphors and spectral shapes, shards of figures, washes of landscape.
The achievement of this exhibition is to reveal that – far from being unresolved – these are among the monuments of American art. They flow and burst with life, evoking waterfalls in drips of thin green and orange paint. The talent that enabled Gorky to perfectly ape Cézanne in an early still life makes his poetic dreams of the 1940s formidably sharp. These are not vague shimmers, like Rothko's Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, but scarily real encounters with monsters and memories, made real in jagged black lines that stab through swirls of colour. These colours are by turns harshly hot and mercifully cool, and flow with a captivating freedom.
In the two versions of his portrait The Artist and His Mother, Gorky himself faces you: a boy lost in time with his mother, who died in Turkey's Armenian genocide at the end of the first world war. His canvases return obsessively to his childhood by Lake Van, as they strive manfully to create a place for a displaced heart.
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February 8th, 2010 Laura Cumming
Tate Liverpool
There is a work of such coruscating brilliance in this show that it overshadows most of the rest. No wonder it is saved until last. In a darkened gallery, preceded by a warning against explicit sexual content, what appears to be a silent movie unfolds to a score of speakeasy blues except that instead of actors there are shadow puppets performing in mordant black and white.
The film opens with a ship riding stormy waters from which bound slaves are being thrown. They drift to a desert island that turns into a gigantic head, swallowing and disgorging them in the American south. There, a male slave is forced – or is he? – into sexual union with a white man, the resulting baby tossed into the cotton fields by a midwife, where it grows into a sunflower and eventually a lynching tree. In between are many tragicomic scenes, each as complex as a Goya etching. Horror and sorrow are held in equal tension, violence intercut with tenderness throughout.
8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E Walker (2005) is controversial in America. Walker has been condemned for exploiting racial stereotypes, pandering to the white art world, even for marrying a white man. It is easy to see why her versions of history might offend because they are never clear-cut. Her marvellous graphic precision is used instead to spear the mind with images of the world turned upside down and inside out; her narratives have more in common with Flannery O'Connor than Uncle Tom's Cabin.
So Walker is definitely in the right room of this show, the one devoted to subversive originality. Though the curators have called it "From Post-Modern to Post-Black: Appropriation, Black Humour and Double Negatives" instead. From which you may deduce all you need to know about their unremitting academicism and dead-handed approach to art.
The subject of this chaotic, badly displayed but undeniably fascinating show is, in any case, ideas more than art, namely those of the eminent intellectual Paul Gilroy in his 1993 book The Black Atlantic. Or at least the central idea of the Atlantic as a kind of continent in negative, a place where cultures perpetually crisscross so that there is no dominant national tradition either in Europe or America; that black culture only means something to black people being as insidious an idea as that of European culture only having meaning for whites.
This is where modernist art comes in on cue: it's what cubism famously draws from African sculpture and, conversely, what African-Americans get from cubism. It's the surrealists with their ethnographic photos; it's Josephine Baker and art deco; it's the Guyanese-born Frank Bowling reprising Barnett Newman in the colours of the Rastafarian flag.
It is also, alas, paintings such as Edward Burra's Harlem and Palmer Hayden's Midsummer Night in Harlem, hung next to each other to show a painful convergence: the white Englishman and the black American producing equally awful variations on "primitivist" art.
Bowling excepted, this only takes the show as far as the 1930s. Thereafter, as it seems to me, Gilroy's ideas are harder to illustrate through art than music or writing. There are obvious two-ways: Lorna Simpson's Photo Booth of African-Americans which gets its commemorative aesthetic from Christian Boltanski; Glenn Ligon's stencilling of one of Richard Pryor's deadly race gags in the manner of a Richard Prince joke painting (with an overlay of Warhol gold). Would Prince ever dare?
But the theme peters out as the show goes in too many different directions at once. Naturally, it must include protest art (though there are noticeably few highpoints here other than David Hammons's 1969 Admissions Office, a glass door with a black face and hands pressed desperately against it like the traces of a scorched man).
And the curators don't want to leave out body art, gender art, identity art and so on, which introduces a whole slew of polemical work, some of which has no obvious place in this show. Why is the Cuban Ana Mendieta extensively represented when her ritualised performances with blood, earth and water surely speak exclusively to feminism when much more relevant artists such as African-Americans Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Kalup Linzy or Martin Puryear are not here at all?
In the opening galleries, Afro Modern presents art in the culture of jazz, blues, du Bois and Baldwin. But this approach, so conducive to Gilroy's ideas, pretty soon fades away to expose the dry box-ticking of this show. There is no more point in showing Chris Ofili's Double Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars (1997) without referring to its obvious soundtrack in rap, for instance, than in propping it next to a Pan-African version of the stars and stripes in red, black and green. Displayed like this, they are just one variety of black art after another.
No show that includes works by Jacob Lawrence or the inspired collagist Romare Bearden can truly lack power. If you have never seen Bearden's strange and compelling images, made of scraps of high and low art, old masters and ads, African masks and cartoons, then Afro Modern is ultimately worth the visit. Bearden orchestrates his fragments like a street scene through which the eye moves, taking it all in on the go. His vision of country folk by a railroad watching for a train to come – and then go – is bleakly beautiful: catching the spectacle of life even as it departs.
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February 7th, 2010 Laura Cumming
Tate Liverpool
There is a work of such coruscating brilliance in this show that it overshadows most of the rest. No wonder it is saved until last. In a darkened gallery, preceded by a warning against explicit sexual content, what appears to be a silent movie unfolds to a score of speakeasy blues except that instead of actors there are shadow puppets performing in mordant black and white.
The film opens with a ship riding stormy waters from which bound slaves are being thrown. They drift to a desert island that turns into a gigantic head, swallowing and disgorging them in the American south. There, a male slave is forced – or is he? – into sexual union with a white man, the resulting baby tossed into the cotton fields by a midwife, where it grows into a sunflower and eventually a lynching tree. In between are many tragicomic scenes, each as complex as a Goya etching. Horror and sorrow are held in equal tension, violence intercut with tenderness throughout.
8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E Walker (2005) is controversial in America. Walker has been condemned for exploiting racial stereotypes, pandering to the white art world, even for marrying a white man. It is easy to see why her versions of history might offend because they are never clear-cut. Her marvellous graphic precision is used instead to spear the mind with images of the world turned upside down and inside out; her narratives have more in common with Flannery O'Connor than Uncle Tom's Cabin.
So Walker is definitely in the right room of this show, the one devoted to subversive originality. Though the curators have called it "From Post-Modern to Post-Black: Appropriation, Black Humour and Double Negatives" instead. From which you may deduce all you need to know about their unremitting academicism and dead-handed approach to art.
The subject of this chaotic, badly displayed but undeniably fascinating show is, in any case, ideas more than art, namely those of the eminent intellectual Paul Gilroy in his 1993 book The Black Atlantic. Or at least the central idea of the Atlantic as a kind of continent in negative, a place where cultures perpetually crisscross so that there is no dominant national tradition either in Europe or America; that black culture only means something to black people being as insidious an idea as that of European culture only having meaning for whites.
This is where modernist art comes in on cue: it's what cubism famously draws from African sculpture and, conversely, what African-Americans get from cubism. It's the surrealists with their ethnographic photos; it's Josephine Baker and art deco; it's the Guyanese-born Frank Bowling reprising Barnett Newman in the colours of the Rastafarian flag.
It is also, alas, paintings such as Edward Burra's Harlem and Palmer Hayden's Midsummer Night in Harlem, hung next to each other to show a painful convergence: the white Englishman and the black American producing equally awful variations on "primitivist" art.
Bowling excepted, this only takes the show as far as the 1930s. Thereafter, as it seems to me, Gilroy's ideas are harder to illustrate through art than music or writing. There are obvious two-ways: Lorna Simpson's Photo Booth of African-Americans which gets its commemorative aesthetic from Christian Boltanski; Glenn Ligon's stencilling of one of Richard Pryor's deadly race gags in the manner of a Richard Prince joke painting (with an overlay of Warhol gold). Would Prince ever dare?
But the theme peters out as the show goes in too many different directions at once. Naturally, it must include protest art (though there are noticeably few highpoints here other than David Hammons's 1969 Admissions Office, a glass door with a black face and hands pressed desperately against it like the traces of a scorched man).
And the curators don't want to leave out body art, gender art, identity art and so on, which introduces a whole slew of polemical work, some of which has no obvious place in this show. Why is the Cuban Ana Mendieta extensively represented when her ritualised performances with blood, earth and water surely speak exclusively to feminism when much more relevant artists such as African-Americans Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Kalup Linzy or Martin Puryear are not here at all?
In the opening galleries, Afro Modern presents art in the culture of jazz, blues, du Bois and Baldwin. But this approach, so conducive to Gilroy's ideas, pretty soon fades away to expose the dry box-ticking of this show. There is no more point in showing Chris Ofili's Double Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars (1997) without referring to its obvious soundtrack in rap, for instance, than in propping it next to a Pan-African version of the stars and stripes in red, black and green. Displayed like this, they are just one variety of black art after another.
No show that includes works by Jacob Lawrence or the inspired collagist Romare Bearden can truly lack power. If you have never seen Bearden's strange and compelling images, made of scraps of high and low art, old masters and ads, African masks and cartoons, then Afro Modern is ultimately worth the visit. Bearden orchestrates his fragments like a street scene through which the eye moves, taking it all in on the go. His vision of country folk by a railroad watching for a train to come – and then go – is bleakly beautiful: catching the spectacle of life even as it departs.
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February 4th, 2010 Adrian Searle
Portugal's representatives at the last Venice Biennale bring together their clever, magical films for their first show in Britain
The short, silent films of João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva were among the most memorable works shown at last year's Venice Biennale, where the pair represented Portugal. Their seemingly inconsequential films stay in the head and won't go away. Now some of these same works fill a darkened floor of Birmingham's Ikon Gallery, in On the Movement of the Fried Egg and Other Astronomical Bodies, the duo's first show in Britain. A stone skips across a still pond, in very slow motion. An egg suspended from a thread slowly turns in space, like a distant moon, light and shadow crossing its surface like day turning into night. Somehow this is inexplicably beautiful, arresting and incomprehensible. It's like some kind of old scientific demonstration film – except one is never exactly sure what is being demonstrated, or why.
In another film, a man tries to make a tower of raw eggs, crushing the base of each shell and balancing the eggs on top of one another. He has several failures before finally managing to make a tabletop version of Brâncus¸i's Endless Column, using seven eggs. A farm worker, clearly a bit drunk, turns and turns in a dusty yard. You think he'll fall over, dizzy with it all. He bends to pick up a brick, but it slides away from him across the dust. Is this a joke on him, or a joke on us? In another film, the same man squints at the sky through a hole in his boot. There is as much sadness as humour in this brief moment.
These films are more than clever gags. Something deeper informs them, and they are made with a great deal of care, attention and expense. The artists' writings and catalogues explore extreme forms of deja vu, weird metaphysics and medieval anthropological rumours. The pair also make compilations of texts by other authors, including Plato and Pessoa, Jules Verne, HG Wells, Victor Hugo, Borges and Poe. It is impossible to know if they are teasing us, or trying to educate us in their occult and quite possibly fraudulent ideas; this is theory as rumour, fiction, old-wives-tale and fabulation. The overall effect is magical, without ever being twee.
The films themselves look a bit old-fashioned, the projections never very big on the wall. You can hear unseen projectors clattering. Some works focus on a single, tiny event – like the precise behaviour of water when a stone plunges through the surface. In this particular black-and-white film, the footage is slowed to a few frames a second, allowing one to watch the water's surface break and a sudden hole appear; then the surface boils and bulges, the crisp leading edge of the ripple spreading and losing energy as it expands, the water behaving as ponderously as lead. It is like watching a slowed-down atomic explosion, or some huge cosmic event.
The appeal of Gusmão and Paiva's films lies in their mystery. The Great Drinking Bout, in which a bunch of guys take a clay pot of hooch into the jungle for a booze-up, is like found footage from some lost, and quite possibly ill-fated anthropological expedition. In another film, a man's hand walks among sculptures dotted about a table; I shan't spoil the end, but let's just say it's tragic. The apparent simplicity, even corniness, of their work has to be seen in the particular context these young artists have given them. There must be something more to a film in which an egg is broken into a pan and slowly fries, the orange yolk floating in a coalescing, whitening cloud of albumen. Two more eggs join the first, not side by side but superimposed in triple exposure. At least, that's how I think it's done. The yolks float together and apart, like triple suns in a weird galaxy, striking through curdling interstellar matter. How strange the world is, Gusmão and Paiva seem to say. But in the end, it's just fried eggs.
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