February 23rd, 2010 Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk
A new exhibition at Tate Britain reveals the great sculptor in darker, and deeper relief
The pleasing curves, the Yorkshire lilt, the sculptures that fit so organically with the landscape that they could have been hewn by nature herself. All of this is as true of Henry Moore as it is familiar, but a new exhibition at Tate Britain chisels away at his reputation, and reveals a darker – and deeper – relief. Curator Chris Stephens concentrates on Moore's middle years, between his early discovery of "primitive" forms and the late era, when outsize commissions for plazas and campuses made him the country's top wage-earner. During the blitz, sketches of enforced Tube huddling cemented Moore's reputation, but here we see him engage with the wider tumult of his troubled times, painting to raise funds for the Spanish civil war and responding to disturbing ideas about sex and bodies that emerged with early analysis. Moore's seemingly heartening mother-and-child sculptures often face away from each other, and he has an unsparing eye for the pit props that cage miners in physically, and for the heartstrings that psychologically imprison his reclining nudes. The fractured shards of modernity that Moore carved out are here presented as forming a sculptural equivalent of The Waste Land. But unlike with Eliot – who produces nothing but head-scratching until you've genned up on Virgil – with Moore the clever ideas are an optional extra. You can still simply stroll round a sculpture park, and feel strangely calmed by those curved faces which bring the Moomins to mind.
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February 22nd, 2010 Laura Barnett
'When I was up for the Turner, people talked about me in terms of the emperor's new clothes. I could see their point'
What got you started?
Not being able to decide what I wanted to study. I was interested in architecture, music, psychology and literature. In the end, I chose art school, because art seemed to contain all of these.
Who or what have you sacrificed for your art?
It's really hard to work, in every way. You sacrifice something every time you make a choice between one thing and another. But I work because it helps me to live: without my work, I'm an empty shell.
Is contemporary art misunderstood?
No, because I don't think there's anything in it to understand. Works of art are just arrangements of colours, or shapes: any meaning they have is given to them by the people who value them, or think they're beautiful.
What's your favourite film?
Gregory's Girl. It was filmed near where I grew up and came out when I was a teenager, so it's very much of my time.
Is there anything about your career you regret?
Getting sidetracked by having to deal with work I've already made, rather than concentrating on new work. If a gallery is mounting an exhibition of my work, I often have to deal with it personally. It's a bit like writing and recording a song, and then having to be present every time that song is played on the radio.
Is the art world too money-oriented?
No – I'd say it's probably less money-oriented than most worlds, because it's primarily about people trying to express themselves.
What one song would work as the soundtrack to your life?
I once wrote a song called I Don't Know What I Want, which always comes back to me. I guess it's true.
What advice would you give a young artist?
Do what you're scared of. Often people are scared of the things they really want.
Is there an art form you don't relate to?
No. Everything that everyone does is art, or at least a little creation. There's no difference between someone calling a friend or going down to the shops, and someone else waving their arms around and making marks on a canvas.
What's the worst thing anyone ever said about you?
When I was nominated for the Turner, a lot of people talked about my work in terms of the emperor's new clothes. I could see their point: my piece was just an empty room. But it was also a room where the lights were going on and off, like a mini theatrical production. No one would say that the lighting in a theatre was an emperor's new clothes situation, would they?
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February 20th, 2010 Robert Clark, Skye Sherwin
Kill Your Timid Notion, Dundee
There's likely to be nothing timid about this annual festival of music, art and film. KYTN defines its agenda as radically experimental and largely participatory. Projects by artists such as influential film-maker Morgan Fisher, Basque sonic provocateurs Mattin, and Sharon Lockhart's Teatro Amazonas are staged together just to see what happens. Yet the liberated spirit of free improvisation is countered by a precise accordance with quite absurdly systematised procedures. So Christof Migone will ask audiences to join him in beating the floor 1,000 times for a piece called Hit Parade. Then there's a screening of Tehching Hsieh's Performance 1980-1981, a six-minute film recording the artist punching the clock every hour on the hour for a year. Daft, yes, but so committed it's convincing.
Dundee Contemporary Arts, Sun to 28 Feb
Robert Clark
Ron Arad, London
Design objects have become familiar art gallery fodder in recent years. Meanwhile, spangly new labels like Design Art have sprung up to explain a particularly baroque brand of product design. Chances are, though, that Ron Arad doesn't care for classifications. In 1981 when he grafted Rover car seats to a steel frame, he found himself catapulted into the design limelight. He has since blasted his own path, exuberantly playing off form against function. This exhibition gives visitors the chance to test his innovations in fittings and fixtures for themselves. Bookcases roll, vases bounce and an LED light chandelier transmits text messages.
Barbican Art Gallery, EC2, to 16 May
Skye Sherwin
Jorge Pardo/Anne Tallentire, Dublin
Not only does Jorge Pardo use just about all fine art media, he adopts techniques from architecture and interior and furniture design for a fine art purpose. So this retrospective is presented in the form of an elaborate photo-mural wallpaper. Anne Tallentire's work uses video performance, photography and sculptural assemblage to present fragmented narratives of urban glimpses. She obliquely focuses our attention on such apparent banalities as a yellow "Stop" sign being painted on a tarmac road, so they appear like a moving and revealing vocabulary of urban life. "I use the frame to find out what lies beyond it, at the limit of the image," she says.
Irish Museum Of Modern Art, to 3 May
Robert Clark
Gary Hume, Salisbury
Super-slick paintings featuring bland subjects – everything from blackbirds and flowers to Kate Moss – made Gary Hume the quintessential 1990s artist. With his bright blocks of colour realised with household gloss paint on thin, unyielding aluminium, this YBA's oeuvre was as knowingly soulless as the times, beguiling and frustrating in equal doses. In negotiating the bumpy transition of these themes into the 21st century, the last decade has seen the artist develop his play with surface through mediums as various as charcoal and luxuriant marble. New paintings on aluminium, in the candy-coloured pastel palette with which he made his name, offset works on canvas in darker hues: flowers in muted blues and oranges against an intense charcoal black.
New Art Centre, to 18 Apr
Skye Sherwin
Henry Tietzsch-Tyler, Gainsborough
There's an air of an interzone no-man's-land about Henry Tietzsch-Tyler's paintings. They are heavily shaded, dense with obscurities, and just about as abstract as abstract can get, despite their surface of worried gestures. While the artist is open about some of his sources arising from his Anglo-German origins, his statements of intention are more concerned to be painstakingly honest than accessible. As a handy reference he cites the term Zwischenraum, which he defines as "a space or place that has no meaning in itself but rather gathers up the meanings of those things that press against it". There's something almost petrified about this art; these are paintings in which expressive impulses are muted, images suspended in uncertainty, yet for sure it's serious stuff.
BendInTheRiver, to 13 Mar
Robert Clark
Kenneth Anger, London
The reputation that precedes Kenneth Anger's name is long and strange: godfather of avant garde cinema; occultist and Crowley devotee; Hollywood scandal-pedlar; prickly provocateur of pop culture. This show brings together two strands on which his taboo-busting cult reputation is based. The 1969 film Invocation Of My Demon Brother is a sexy, scary and wildly psychedelic plunge into the ominous vibe that marked the latter days of the 1960s. Mick Jagger provided the trippy soundtrack, while Lucifer was played by Bobby Beausoleil, a cohort of Charles Manson's later convicted of murder. There's also his neon work, Hollywood Babylon, a nod to Anger's infamous exposé of the same title, a book full of scabrous tales of the film industry's sinister side.
Sprüth Magers, W1, to 27 Mar
Skye Sherwin
Leo Fitzmaurice & Kim Rugg, Manchester
Leo Fitzmaurice has called himself a detourist who goes in for "design-bending". Cutting up and rearranging commercial catalogues, posters, flyers and cardboard packaging, his methods might seem basic, but their outcome can be amazing. He takes the detritus of consumer advertising and transforms it into a series of sculptural constructions that come on like maquettes for futuristic devotional architecture. Kim Rugg's cut-and-paste scrapbook aesthetic is targeted at more weighty media messages. With almost obsessive patience, she cuts out the printed letters and rearranges them into alphabetical or seemingly arbitrary order. The Guardian becomes "aaedGhinrTu". She has also chopped up postage stamps, stuck the tiny fragments onto envelopes, and successfully sent them through the post. It somehow makes you feel like cheering.
Castlefield Gallery, Sat to 3 Apr
Robert Clark
Henry Moore, London
Sometimes it feels like there's always a Henry Moore exhibition going on somewhere in Britain. This can dull his impact, alongside all that public sculpture he made. Yet Moore's reappraisal has been steadily building, thanks partly to a younger generation of artists peering into modernism's nooks and crannies. This Tate survey attempts to cut through the artist's over-familiar, conservative image, turning out one massive reclining figure or Mother and Child after another. Featuring 150 works, it's a definitive one-stop shop of a show which situates the artist's radical achievements against his changing times. Highlights include Moore's extraordinary, era-defining drawings of the Blitz.
Tate Britain, SW1, Wed to 8 Aug
Skye Sherwin
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February 20th, 2010 Robert Clark, Skye Sherwin
Kill Your Timid Notion, Dundee
There's likely to be nothing timid about this annual festival of music, art and film. KYTN defines its agenda as radically experimental and largely participatory. Projects by artists such as influential film-maker Morgan Fisher, Basque sonic provocateurs Mattin, and Sharon Lockhart's Teatro Amazonas are staged together just to see what happens. Yet the liberated spirit of free improvisation is countered by a precise accordance with quite absurdly systematised procedures. So Christof Migone will ask audiences to join him in beating the floor 1,000 times for a piece called Hit Parade. Then there's a screening of Tehching Hsieh's Performance 1980-1981, a six-minute film recording the artist punching the clock every hour on the hour for a year. Daft, yes, but so committed it's convincing.
Dundee Contemporary Arts, Sun to 28 Feb
Robert Clark
Ron Arad, London
Design objects have become familiar art gallery fodder in recent years. Meanwhile, spangly new labels like Design Art have sprung up to explain a particularly baroque brand of product design. Chances are, though, that Ron Arad doesn't care for classifications. In 1981 when he grafted Rover car seats to a steel frame, he found himself catapulted into the design limelight. He has since blasted his own path, exuberantly playing off form against function. This exhibition gives visitors the chance to test his innovations in fittings and fixtures for themselves. Bookcases roll, vases bounce and an LED light chandelier transmits text messages.
Barbican Art Gallery, EC2, to 16 May
Skye Sherwin
Jorge Pardo/Anne Tallentire, Dublin
Not only does Jorge Pardo use just about all fine art media, he adopts techniques from architecture and interior and furniture design for a fine art purpose. So this retrospective is presented in the form of an elaborate photo-mural wallpaper. Anne Tallentire's work uses video performance, photography and sculptural assemblage to present fragmented narratives of urban glimpses. She obliquely focuses our attention on such apparent banalities as a yellow "Stop" sign being painted on a tarmac road, so they appear like a moving and revealing vocabulary of urban life. "I use the frame to find out what lies beyond it, at the limit of the image," she says.
Irish Museum Of Modern Art, to 3 May
Robert Clark
Gary Hume, Salisbury
Super-slick paintings featuring bland subjects – everything from blackbirds and flowers to Kate Moss – made Gary Hume the quintessential 1990s artist. With his bright blocks of colour realised with household gloss paint on thin, unyielding aluminium, this YBA's oeuvre was as knowingly soulless as the times, beguiling and frustrating in equal doses. In negotiating the bumpy transition of these themes into the 21st century, the last decade has seen the artist develop his play with surface through mediums as various as charcoal and luxuriant marble. New paintings on aluminium, in the candy-coloured pastel palette with which he made his name, offset works on canvas in darker hues: flowers in muted blues and oranges against an intense charcoal black.
New Art Centre, to 18 Apr
Skye Sherwin
Henry Tietzsch-Tyler, Gainsborough
There's an air of an interzone no-man's-land about Henry Tietzsch-Tyler's paintings. They are heavily shaded, dense with obscurities, and just about as abstract as abstract can get, despite their surface of worried gestures. While the artist is open about some of his sources arising from his Anglo-German origins, his statements of intention are more concerned to be painstakingly honest than accessible. As a handy reference he cites the term Zwischenraum, which he defines as "a space or place that has no meaning in itself but rather gathers up the meanings of those things that press against it". There's something almost petrified about this art; these are paintings in which expressive impulses are muted, images suspended in uncertainty, yet for sure it's serious stuff.
BendInTheRiver, to 13 Mar
Robert Clark
Kenneth Anger, London
The reputation that precedes Kenneth Anger's name is long and strange: godfather of avant garde cinema; occultist and Crowley devotee; Hollywood scandal-pedlar; prickly provocateur of pop culture. This show brings together two strands on which his taboo-busting cult reputation is based. The 1969 film Invocation Of My Demon Brother is a sexy, scary and wildly psychedelic plunge into the ominous vibe that marked the latter days of the 1960s. Mick Jagger provided the trippy soundtrack, while Lucifer was played by Bobby Beausoleil, a cohort of Charles Manson's later convicted of murder. There's also his neon work, Hollywood Babylon, a nod to Anger's infamous exposé of the same title, a book full of scabrous tales of the film industry's sinister side.
Sprüth Magers, W1, to 27 Mar
Skye Sherwin
Leo Fitzmaurice & Kim Rugg, Manchester
Leo Fitzmaurice has called himself a detourist who goes in for "design-bending". Cutting up and rearranging commercial catalogues, posters, flyers and cardboard packaging, his methods might seem basic, but their outcome can be amazing. He takes the detritus of consumer advertising and transforms it into a series of sculptural constructions that come on like maquettes for futuristic devotional architecture. Kim Rugg's cut-and-paste scrapbook aesthetic is targeted at more weighty media messages. With almost obsessive patience, she cuts out the printed letters and rearranges them into alphabetical or seemingly arbitrary order. The Guardian becomes "aaedGhinrTu". She has also chopped up postage stamps, stuck the tiny fragments onto envelopes, and successfully sent them through the post. It somehow makes you feel like cheering.
Castlefield Gallery, Sat to 3 Apr
Robert Clark
Henry Moore, London
Sometimes it feels like there's always a Henry Moore exhibition going on somewhere in Britain. This can dull his impact, alongside all that public sculpture he made. Yet Moore's reappraisal has been steadily building, thanks partly to a younger generation of artists peering into modernism's nooks and crannies. This Tate survey attempts to cut through the artist's over-familiar, conservative image, turning out one massive reclining figure or Mother and Child after another. Featuring 150 works, it's a definitive one-stop shop of a show which situates the artist's radical achievements against his changing times. Highlights include Moore's extraordinary, era-defining drawings of the Blitz.
Tate Britain, SW1, Wed to 8 Aug
Skye Sherwin
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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 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 18th, 2010 Mark Brown
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.
Posted in Architecture, Art, Art and design, Culture, Design, Exhibitions, Installation, Life and style, News, Sculpture, The Guardian, UK news | Comments Off
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 17th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
In one room, this sensational exhibition shows the greatest drawings that survive from Michelangelo's hand
The Courtauld gallery, that sombre, academic institution, dares to go where Irving Stone never went in his bestselling novel about Michelangelo, The Agony and the Ecstasy. It refutes, with all the authority at its command, centuries of bowdlerisation that have left the nude saints in Michelangelo's painting The Last Judgment still – in 2010 – emasculated by prudish drapes. It gives us the unmade movie Michelangelo in Love, pouring out his soul in art and verse to a handsome youth whose beauty crystallised all the longings inherent in Michelangelo's art ever since he carved his teenage masterpiece The Battle of the Centaurs, with its vision of life as a tumult of wrestling male bodies.
This is a sensational exhibition in more ways than one. It is the most intimate encounter with Michelangelo yet staged by a British gallery but, if you come for the story, you will stay for the art, for here in one room are the greatest drawings that survive from his hand. Most of Michelangelo's surviving sketches are just that, sketches for the sculptures, paintings and buildings that awe visitors to Italy: only a handful of his drawings were intended to be enjoyed as works of art in their own right, and he made most of these as love gifts for Tommaso de' Cavalieri. They are brought together here to release you soaring among winged, ascending and falling beings in the strange and wonderful atmosphere of Michelangelo's "chaste desire", as he described his passion for Tommaso.
Michelangelo's devotion is right there to see, in an amazingly slavish note he scribbled on a drawing of the hubristic Phaeton falling from the sky after he tried to drive the sun god's chariot: "Master Tommaso, if this sketch does not please you, say so …" It must truly have been an overpowering love to reduce Michelangelo, who refused to take orders from popes, to such servility. And what a drawing it is: horses sculpted in delicate black chalk fall in a nightmarish vortex towards twisting mourners whose grief is literally rooting them to the spot. Beside it his finished drawing of the same tragedy, presumably completed after listening to Tommaso's comments, portrays Jupiter high in the heavens hurling a thunderbolt from the back of an eagle. Images of eagles keep recurring, as if in a sex dream scripted by Freud. Michelangelo's most explicit present for Tommaso portrays the classical myth of Ganymede, the beautiful boy carried away by lustful Jupiter who has taken the form of an eagle to achieve his rapture; imagine being young Cavalieri and getting this gift from your famous, older admirer.
Love was in the air in Renaissance Italy, and Michelangelo's drawings compete with the heterosexual hedonism of Titian's paintings: his wonderful red chalk Bacchanal responds to Titian's Children's Bacchanal. But Michelangelo's drawings for Cavalieri are more personal and confessional than any other Renaissance renderings of saucy Roman myth, and what you are left with, as you contemplate the Courtauld's magnificent possession The Dream, which sums up all existence as a striving of bodies and a yearning of souls, is an immense love for this most courageous and human of artists.
Jonathan Jones's book about Michelangelo is published by Simon and Schuster in April.
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