News
The Guardian
May 16 2021
David Hockney | Tracey Emin | David Cameron | Classical music
Hockney is in trouble in these pages (Letters, 11 and 13 May) for thinking it was Derrida’s quip that painting is dead, when the sentiment has been around for 400 years. But in a recent catalogue to a show of his work in Paris, the French curator Donatien Grau explains that Hockney’s reference to Derrida is to the gist of Derrida’s set of essays La Vérité en Peinture of 1978. This gist is that “the legitimacy of painting as representation” had been broken at the time of the “birth of modernity” – a claim that Hockney manifestly resists and in his work triumphantly refutes. His reference to Derrida is precise and apt.
Jonathon Brown
Duranus, France
• Tracey Emin – what a star (‘This is mine, I own it’, 13 May). Having been decolonised and stomatised a couple of years ago, I found that it is surprising what you take in your stride and what you miss after such a change in your bodily functioning. For me, the greatest loss has been the relaxing 15 minutes on the loo in the morning with the Guardian crossword. I do it in bed now before getting up, but it’s not the same.
James Lindesay
Leicester
The Guardian
May 16 2021
Tate Modern, London
A succession of plaster arms, legs and heads reveal Rodin’s working practices in a fascinating show that nevertheless leaves you longing for the finished work
The Making of Rodin is a show almost entirely composed of plaster casts: fragile and small, delicate or solid, heavyweight, lifesize or gargantuan. It is thronged with figure groups, solo statues, trays of hands and feet in glass cases. Smooth, chipped, marked up in pencil for rearrangement or enlargement, provisional studies or final casts – they are all uniformly, overpoweringly white.
This puts Rodin in a strange new light (sharpened by the open shutters at Tate Modern), although not for scholars, or perhaps for his own contemporaries. For Rodin himself chose to show nothing but plaster casts at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris. The central gallery here is based on his self-designed pavilion, including studies for the monument to Balzac, pint-sized and colossal; limbs, heads and hands for The Thinker, as well as the finished figure; and numerous versions of Rodin’s The Walking Man, imprisoned in mid-stride as if navigating shifting sands.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 16 2021
Do artists have a more liberated attitude to clothes? Fashion journalist Charlie Porter talks about his fascination with what painters, sculptors and photographers choose to wear to work in the studio
The fashion writer Charlie Porter has always been a compulsive reader of the language of clothes, his eye drawn irresistibly to the colour of a stranger’s coat; to the cut of their suit or the logo on their trainers. “I think everyone’s a bit like that,” he says. “We all do it, all the time. Clothes are information. A policeman’s uniform tells you what he does. If you feel threatened or out of place, it’s often clothing that gives you this sense first. But because I’ve worked in fashion, I suppose I’m particularly attuned to it.” Is the sartorial ticker tape in his head a bit exhausting sometimes? “Not exactly.” He laughs. “But the pandemic has given me quite a nice rest from it.”
I meet Porter, the author of an eclectic but invigorating new book about artists’ clothes, in the public garden at Arnold Circus, near his home in Shoreditch, east London – and, naturally, my first question has to do with his own look. Never mind his painters and sculptors. What is he wearing today? Porter regards himself as “quite a mess, usually,” but yes, he admits to having put some thought into his look this morning. “This is by Craig Green, a young London designer,” he says, of a heavy cotton jacket in Yves Klein blue that’s decorated with mirror work. Opening it, he reveals an off-white artist’s smock from Labour and Wait, hipster purveyor of all that is functional, from aprons to watering cans, which he favours for the freedom of movement it permits as well as for its “space-age” collar. This is matched to a pair of striped trousers whose provenance he can’t quite remember. Finally, there are his loafers, which are Gucci and about 15 years old.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 16 2021
Five thousand years of Iranian art goes on show at the V&A this month. A private collector who lent many of the works reveals what light these treasures cast on the country
The drive from London to a certain nameless valley in rural Oxfordshire - a preposterously pretty realm of flint cottages, quaint pubs, willow trees and gentle hills - is always slightly unnerving. This part of the country is so close to London and yet the feeling is of stepping back in time, a remoteness that is sudden and unexpected. But today the experience is all the stranger, for I’m on my way to visit an institution I did not even know existed until a few days ago. Housed in a private museum whose location, hidden beneath farmland, I cannot reveal, the Sarikhani Collection is one of the most extraordinary and significant assemblies of art in Britain, if not the world. It comprises, in all its magnificence, some 1,000 items: ceramics, metalwork, textiles and manuscripts that together tell the long and wondrous story of Iran and its culture from 3000BC until the 18th century.
The driving force behind this collection is Ina Sarikhani Sandmann, the warm and curious person who greets me when I finally arrive (there is no mobile signal and I twice get lost). Her passion for Iranian art is, as I’m about to discover, disconcertingly infectious. Talk to her about an object for only two minutes and you will quickly be overcome by the feeling that you cannot possibly sit still until you’ve seen this inlaid candlestick or that turquoise ewer; an exquisite 11th-century fragment of the Qur’an written in a script called Eastern Kufic; a magnificent 400-year-old carpet on which, if you look carefully, you can see a bixie (a leonine animal) locked in combat with a qilin (in this case a type of deer with a dragon’s face). She knows a lot, but she makes her expertise so accessible you hardly notice the learning involved, let alone the fact that you left home without having eaten any breakfast.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 16 2021
With few overseas tourists, curators think there has never been a better time for Britons to see their own national treasures
Leading museum and gallery directors have urged the public to grab a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see national treasures up close when the buildings reopen in England on Monday. Social distancing means that great art, like the newly restored Gainsborough, Cornard Wood, at the National Gallery, or the precious archaeological finds from Sutton Hoo in the British Museum, will be easier to examine than ever before – all due to government bailouts. It is an enticing offer, although one that stands to be taken up most readily by privileged sections of the population.
Hartwig Fischer, director of the British Museum, told the Observer he regarded it as “the perfect moment to rediscover” the exhibits: “In the summer, the museum usually has a high proportion of overseas tourists, so this year will of course be different.”
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 16 2021
Hayward Gallery, London
Ovid meets the NRA as Matthew Barney revisits his Idaho childhood, while Igshaan Adams takes tapestry to the next level
Matthew Barney’s first British show in more than 10 years is all picturesque nature, a 21st-century version of the American sublime. Everything centres on the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, where the artist was raised. Gilded tree trunks soar up through darkened galleries, radiant etchings cast an eerie glow on the ground, and a feature-length movie unleashes spectacular visions of snowbound peaks, torrential rivers, star-shine, dawn, dusk and wolves. This is a meditation on the wilderness, with Barney as a multimedia Thoreau.
The film is easily summarised (surprisingly, given the abstruse mythologies of Barney’s great five-film Cremaster cycle). Ovid’s tale of Diana and Actaeon is restaged with Actaeon working as a ranger for the US forest service, and Diana as a camouflaged sharpshooter tracking him through the sights of a hi-tech rifle. The nymphs he unwittingly spies are two contemporary dancers in hideous white long johns. The choreography is laboriously weird.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 16 2021
An early still life painting by the Pink Floyd founder will be sold at auction
Monet had his water lilies, Van Gogh his sunflowers, but for Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett it was orange dahlias. A vibrant still life painted by the late frontman of the British band when he was 15 will go under the hammer on 27 May as his childhood playmate puts it up for sale.
“I have lots of happy memories, including watching the first Dr Who series from behind the sofa together. But the Syd I remember is a different, younger person, and I know there are a lot of fans who feel even more about him who might give this painting a home,” said Phil Harden, who spent hours with Barrett as a boy in Cambridge and later visited him as an adult, when the former musician was struggling with mental illness in seclusion. “He was a funny and lively boy, but also very protective of me, as I was six years younger. It is rather amazing to me that he is still so highly regarded across the world.”
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 15 2021
Making an exhibition out of living things rather defeats any environmental message they are supposed to convey
A gaggle of oak saplings has gathered outside Tate Modern. They were grown by the British artists Ackroyd & Harvey from acorns from the trees that the German artist Joseph Beuys had planted in the city of Kassel in the 1980s, in a “social sculpture” called 7000 Oaks. This temporary installation, the official blurb says, creates “a place for gathering and for rethinking our connections with nature”.
It takes its place alongside the forthcoming four-week appearance of 400 trees in the courtyard of Somerset House, by the designer Es Devlin for the London Design Biennale, which is also meant to make us reflect on nature and the environment. Plus, there’s a temporary wooded hill planned for Marble Arch and the different-but-related craze for putting trees high up on multistorey apartment buildings in Shanghai, Milan and Quito.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 15 2021
In Sven Jacobsen’s painterly images, the young become as one with their environment, seemingly without a care in the world
Sven Jacobsen’s photographs ask interesting questions about innocence and bliss. A new book concentrates on images of youthful freedom; teenagers scale fences and climb trees and plunge into lakes, they skateboard and snog and do headstands and backflips and laugh like they will never, ever stop. Any of the pictures might lead advertising campaigns for spring water or blue jeans or perfume – Jacobsen has worked as a commercial photographer for multinational corporations and knows all the seductive emotions – but there is, too, an extra edge of intimacy and challenge at work. They invite you to recall moments when you felt as alive as the people – family members, friends and models – he depicts. He calls his collection Like Birds.
Jacobsen suggests that when he takes the pictures he is looking always for the “flow of beauty” that might unite the figure with the landscape, a sense of subject and background dissolved. He likens his process to surfing, letting a wave take over and seeing where it takes you. This picture of the underwater swimmer is typical. He captions it as a “painting” for good reason – the scene carries visual reminders of a pre-Raphaelite Ophelia, but the young woman here is very much alive, in her element, not yet ready to break the glassy surface of the water, holding her breath for dear life.
Continue reading...The New York Times
May 15 2021
The Guardian
May 15 2021
Organisers have faced huge challenges in the Covid pandemic, but hope their events can help rejuvenate the arts sector
Under the colourful kaleidoscope of Coventry’s latest public artwork, Chenine Bhathena reflects on what the next 12 months hold for the city as it begins its year as the UK’s city of culture after a four-month delay due to the pandemic.
“The city is transforming around us. I think it will be really important to build pride for people here, and to be able to show off on a national stage, to help people understand the city as it is now,” she said. “After Covid, the city of culture is more important than ever.”
Continue reading...The New York Times
May 14 2021
artforum.com
May 14 2021
artforum.com
May 14 2021
artforum.com
May 14 2021
artforum.com
May 14 2021
The Guardian
May 14 2021
The escalating conflict in Gaza and Israel, young migrants on the border between Mexico and the US, protests against the government in Colombia and the enduring impact of Covid-19: the most striking images from around the world this week
Continue reading...artforum.com
May 14 2021
artforum.com
May 14 2021
The Guardian
May 14 2021
Tate Britain, London
Resistance is futile in the sumptuous colours of Phillipson’s entertaining apocalypse, filled with colossal metal creatures, agitated animal eyes and a giant celestial peach
Animal cries, a howling wind, the distant calls of a flock of swans and a gurgling of buffalo at the water hole fill the length of the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain. Heather Phillipson is at it again in her delayed 2021 Duveen commission, opening, along with the rest of the gallery, on Monday. A funfair ride to the end of the world, Rupture No 1: blowtorching the bitten peach (Phillipson’s titles are always a bit of a stretch) takes on eco-doom and nature up against it in a trashed world, ourselves, beset by pandemic, included. Her aesthetic is post-industrial, post-disaster, post-everything; part Mad Max, part video game, part excised scenes from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, redone in glowing Technicolor. Filled with alarms, and fun for all the family, this three-part installation, her biggest work in the UK to date, is the most complex Duveen commission I’ve seen. You can’t but help let it suck you in.
To begin with, the eyes grab you. They know you’re here. A pink tongue licks an alien lizard pupil. Eye of tiger and eye of wolf, zebra eyes, swivelling chameleon eyes and bright monkey eyes, jostling and blinking and swerving on a procession of flat screens that lean this way and that, wedged into the mound of sand that runs down the middle of the gallery, each screen like a tilting tombstone. It is a kind of Noah’s ark as much as a Gulch City graveyard; there are even funnels, broadcasting the sound of a flooded world. Beached on the gallery floor, this imaginary vessel is drenched in a red glow of ambient lighting.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 14 2021
As galleries reopen their doors, we preview a visual feast that includes Rodin, Eileen Agar, Paula Rego, Matthew Barney – and an out-of-body experience in Liverpool
Provocateur, founder of art brut, or raw art, Jean Dubuffet embraced the arbitrary and irrational, using crude materials and working with an ironic rejection of skill and finesse. Immersed in French intellectual and artistic life, the show focuses both on Dubuffet’s own work and on his extensive collection of outsider art. It’s the first major UK exhibition of this complex, fascinating artist in more than 50 years.
Barbican Art Gallery, London, 17 May-22 August.
artforum.com
May 14 2021
The New York Times
May 14 2021
The Guardian
May 14 2021
When gallery reopens on Monday, artist says she will not be ‘inviting people in to be comfortable’
People may well be unsettled by the strange, apocalyptic disaster zone created in Tate Britain’s grand central galleries and so be it, the artist Heather Phillipson said. “That’s fine. I’m not inviting people in to be comfortable.”
Visitors to the reopened gallery on Monday will encounter a sensory experience of noise, colour, animal eyes staring at them from screens, post-industrial mutant creatures, a 14-metre papier-mache ram-type creature and much, much more.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 14 2021
Nature-driven artist and environmentalist Clare Celeste Börsch among contributors to exhibition exploring concept of Eden
As in many paradise gardens, particularly those inspired by Islamic culture, a fountain lies at the heart of the quadrilateral garden created inside the Aga Khan Centre gallery in King’s Cross, London. This fountain doesn’t spout water, however, but beautiful, intricate strips of paper with laser-cut flowers made by Berlin-based American artist Clare Celeste Börsch.
The fountain is at the centre of Making Paradise, an exhibition exploring the concept of Eden through art and Islamic garden design. On display are numerous artworks depicting trees, flowers and fruits, including botanical illustrations from the Royal Horticultural Society’s Lindley library collection, alongside contemporary works.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 14 2021
We also have the wildly subversive Jean Dubuffet, the making of Rodin and Tracey Emin’s unflinching self-portraits – all in your weekly dispatch
Eileen Agar
One of the most imaginative and quirky early 20th-century British artists gets a fresh look – is Agar’s seaside surrealism due a revival?
• Whitechapel Gallery, London from 19 May until 29 August.
The Guardian
May 14 2021
Barbican, London
With his galumphing caricatures, spurting paint and quivering doodles, the art brut master caught the hectic rhythm of the postwar world – and his street scenes make you want to jump right in
Grinning and bald, Jean Dubuffet leans comically over one of his little sculptures, a frangible little figure that looks like almost nothing at all. Here he is again, in one of the many photos of the artist that punctuate the Barbican’s exhibition, sitting in his studio surrounded by his painters’ paraphernalia, his pastes and concoctions. For all their wild galumphings, the boss-eyed grins and childlike caricatures, the lumps and excretions and strata-like accretions, Dubuffet’s paintings were the product of an ordered mind and an equally ordered studio.
He may have wanted to give the impression that his art was produced in a state of laid-back amateurism, but it is belied by the professionally stretched canvases stacked-up behind him, their corners all nicely wedged, their heaving surfaces kept within their perfect rectangles. Even so, he delighted in the fact that bits of his paintings cracked and flaked and sometimes slid off, or spurted wet paint from beneath their congealed slurries on to the floor or people who got too close.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 14 2021
Shoephoria! at the Fashion Museum in Bath showcases 350 pairs of boots and shoes to illustrate their evolution over the last 300 years, demonstrating the creativity and style of shoemakers and wearers
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 13 2021
Photographer Timothy Spurr has been a lifelong resident of Finsbury Park, north London. His work Blackstock Road focuses on food and the environments in which it is served, and examines the stories of independent family businesses of the multi-ethnic community in the area, celebrating the fruits of London’s diversity
Many years later, while sitting at my parents’ home during the first national lockdown of the coronavirus pandemic, I would remember the late afternoons in school uniform, returning to Blackstock Road to find refuge in my mother’s café. Back then, Finsbury Park, an energetic municipality of north London, was not a destination where people sought “good” food, at least not to the level of the early TripAdvisor critic. Rather, its high street was lined with more utilitarian fare: bustling electronics shops, barbershops, and newsagents. Merely a handful of restaurants decorated the street with vivid shop fronts and a variety of cuisines, bringing a visual relief to a north London grey. These establishments were founded and frequented by a multicultural and multi-ethnic immigrant population, enriching the community with its diversity.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 13 2021
Long-delayed show features footwear from across four centuries, from red velvet mules to sneakers
More than 350 pairs of shoes, from Noël Coward’s monogrammed slippers to white Toffeln clogs worn by a frontline health worker, are to go on show as part of the long-delayed Shoephoria exhibition at the Fashion Museum in Bath.
The show, which opens next week, also features Kanye West-designed Yeezy trainers, a pair of cream calico trousers that morph into boots by Gareth Pugh, and 36 pairs of Manolo Blahniks. It had been due to open last year, but was postponed because of the pandemic.
Continue reading...artforum.com
May 13 2021
The Guardian
May 13 2021
Design Museum, London
From battered Vans to box-fresh Adidas, how did sneakers become an $80bn-a-year global industry? This fun show has all the answers – including how to get really fat laces
‘It was all about being the freshest,” says Koe Rodriguez, toothbrush in hand. “That’s how you pulled honeys, how you got respect from the hard rocks. That’s how you laid your game down. It was all about being fresh.” The hip-hop historian’s not talking about his teeth, though, but his sneakers.
Rodriguez appears in Just for Kicks, a 2005 documentary about sneaker culture that also features an MC explaining his painstaking monthly shoelace-cleaning ritual. Treating his precious laces as if they were the finest cashmere, he would carefully scrub them between his clenched knuckles, then pinch out the water, squeeze them with a towel, and press them with the tip of a hot iron, to make them as wide as possible. “They gotta be fat,” he insists.
Continue reading...The New York Times
May 13 2021
artforum.com
May 13 2021
The Guardian
May 13 2021
The customized cars have been symbols of cultural resistance for 70 years. Kristin Bedford tells their story in pictures
Since the first lowriders rolled out of Los Angeles more than 70 years ago, the ground-hugging, customized cars have served as mobile canvasses for vibrant self-expression, Mexican American pride, and cultural resistance.
The essence of that movement is captured by the photographer Kristin Bedford in her new book, Cruise Night, a collection of 75 color photos and interviews which she hopes will transport readers to the passenger seats of lowriders, allowing them to sense the nostalgia for a bygone era and glimpse the ways in which the cars remain woven into the fabric of everyday life.
Continue reading...artforum.com
May 13 2021
The Guardian
May 13 2021
14-year-old Guardian readers | Cerne Giant | ‘Painting is dead’ | Peter Mandelson | Boris Johnson
It’s gratifying that the Guardian still publishes letters from 14-year-olds (10 May). After the Manchester Guardian printed mine in 1955, a teacher commented sardonically on my poor handwriting in a report: “Does he type his letters to the press?” Seven years later I was taken on as a graduate trainee reporter in Manchester, starting a decade on the paper. You may not have seen the last of Joseph Walker.
Richard Bourne
London
• Given that the Cerne Giant hillside carving is apparently from the same period as Cerne Abbey and there are no records at the abbey of it (Cerne Giant in Dorset dates from Anglo-Saxon times, analysis suggests, 12 May), could it be that locals unhappy with the abbey, or the imposition of religion, decided to carve this magnificent “F you!” for abbey residents to contemplate? I expect religious controversy, and possibly planning objections, are not just modern human reactions.
Marsha O’Sullivan
Derby
The New York Times
May 13 2021
artforum.com
May 13 2021
The New York Times
May 13 2021
The Guardian
May 13 2021
British Museum, London
The archbishop’s slaying and martyrdom transfixed the medieval world – and inspired some magnificently murderous art and artefacts that are still shocking today
If you thought medieval religious art was all clasped hands and uplifted eyes, then prepare yourself for the gorefests that shudder through this brilliant new show like a broadsword hitting bone. On 29 December 1170, four knights sent by King Henry II entered the holy sanctum of Canterbury Cathedral with swords drawn and slew its archbishop, Thomas Becket, a flamboyant, charismatic politician who’d started his career as the king’s right-hand man then became a thorn in his side as a champion of church over crown. The murder – whether or not Henry really intended it – rapidly became notorious across Europe and Becket was revered as a modern martyr. Not figuratively but literally, being canonised as a saint just three years after his death.
The medieval cult of Becket was promoted with shockingly realistic murder scenes on bejewelled caskets, the glowing pages of illuminated manuscripts and mystical stained glass. This exhibition has plenty to fascinate history buffs. But its glory is to make the art of the middle ages come alive. The emotional story of Becket’s slaying and the strangeness of the rites and rituals that celebrated him provide a direct human connection with the people and images of a remote world. Suddenly the art of that faraway time seems brutally contemporary.
Continue reading...The New York Times
May 13 2021
The New York Times
May 13 2021
The Guardian
May 12 2021
The famed artist and architect draws attention to climate change’s biodiversity loss with a forest of dying Atlantic cedars in New York
In Manhattan’s bustling Flatiron District, 49 coastal Atlantic cedars – each around 40ft tall, leafless branches grasping at the sky – tower over Madison Square Park’s usually flat, grassy plain. The spectral forest, a new installation by the artist and architect Maya Lin, looms like a jarring holdout from winter – barren, save for smattering of lichen on each trunk, a stark contrast to the verdant six-acre park’s late-spring growth and the clean lines of the skyscrapers overhead.
Related: 'They are living maps': how Richard Mosse captured environmental damage in the Amazon
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 12 2021
New York artist Moyra Davey found a selection of little-seen images in the renowned US photographer’s archive – then responded to them with her own images
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 12 2021
Taken on a 25,000-mile trip across 16 countries, these images capture cities, landscapes and people along the trading route – and the pre-Covid freedom of cross-border travel
I set off on my dream journey from London to Beijing in the halcyon days of 2019. It’s a trip that seems unimaginable today. Travelling overland, I wanted to experience the transitions between cultures, to understand more about what connects us. I was also interested to see the legacy of exchange along the Silk Road trade routes that once connected China with the west.
My first major stop was Venice. The city is full of influences brought there by its many and varied visitors, especially those from the east. You can see these in the domes of Saint Mark’s Cathedral, which evoke the medieval minarets of Cairo, and in Renaissance masterpieces with their brilliant blue pigments – produced from lapis lazuli mined 4,000 miles away in northern Afghanistan and brought to Venice along the Silk Road.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 12 2021
As she starts to rebuild her life after surgery, the artist shares her unflinching self-portraits taken during treatment, talks about seeing dead people in hospital walls, and explains why she’s buying herself a punchbag – and kittens
‘I’m smiling and talking to you,” says Tracey Emin, sitting at her kitchen table. “But it’s not always like this.” We’ve been delaying this conversation until she finally felt well enough. She has been spending a lot of time in bed, just resting. On the phone, she sounded weak, but today she is indeed smiling, getting excited as she speaks – the Tracey who I have been fortunate enough to get to know.
“Now I’ve got a terrible pain in my legs, it’s unbearable. That’s why I’ve been in bed. I’m determined to go for a walk later because I hardly ever go out. I have a urostomy bag, so I have a major disability. The more well I get, the more annoying it is. Previously it was all right because I was on morphine. But now I want to do things and I can’t.”
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