News
artforum.com
Jun 20 2018
The Guardian
Jun 20 2018
The Rill near London Bridge falls victim to health and safety for people on phones
No ball games, no busking, no protests – and now no stream. The More London estate, which covers 13 acres of the the south bank of the Thames, providing a home for City Hall, has always been an apt symbol of the London’s creeping privatisation. Owned by the sovereign wealth fund of Kuwait and patrolled by private security guards, it is a damning symptom of the capital’s thrall to foreign investment that journalists must seek permission to conduct interviews outside its own seat of democracy.
Related: From Olympic Park to East Bank: how St Paul's 'faux pas' led to design rethink
Continue reading...The Guardian
Jun 20 2018
Harrison Funk spent three rollercoaster decades capturing the pop legend’s extraordinary life. He reveals the stories behind his favourites shots, from hugs with Mandela to wielding a powder puff backstage
‘Me and Michael had our own language,” says Harrison Funk. “The buzzword was always the same. He would ask, ‘Harrison, can you make magic?’ Anything less wasn’t acceptable.” Funk was the photographer who got closer to Michael Jackson than any other, working with the singer from the late 1970s right up until his death in June 2009, witnessing and capturing his many changes, as the star rose to be the most famous person on the planet.
Funk was born 12 days before Jackson, on 17 August 1958, just outside Brooklyn. He was inspired to pick up a camera by his uncle, Leo Friedman, a famous Broadway photographer. Starting off with street photography and shooting local basketball matches, Funk worked his way up to such magazines as Time, Life and Newsweek. But a chance meeting with Jackson at New York’s infamous nightclub Studio 54 (where Jackson, a regular, would dance in the DJ booth to avoid autograph-hunters) set Funk’s career on a different trajectory.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Jun 20 2018
Jonathan Jones (16 June) makes the surprising claim that for Jan van Eyck to show Adam and Eve naked in 1432 was “unprecedented”. What about the Genesis sculptures on the facade of Orvieto cathedral, dated 1325-30, the early 1400s painting of the Fall by Jean Limbourg, and the famous Masaccio Expulsion from the Garden of Eden in the Brancacci chapel 1426-27? You might argue that Jan van Eyck would not have seen any of these but that’s not the same as saying they didn’t exist.
Mary Hoffman
Carterton, Oxfordshire
• Re the sad news of Puan’s demise (Oldest Sumatran orangutan dies at Perth zoo aged 62, 20 June), I was struck by the last part of your report. It seems she was put down because “age-related complications” were affecting her “quality of life“. Why should such useful facilities not be available to her human cousins?
Richard Carden
Harleston, Norfolk
artforum.com
Jun 20 2018
The New York Times
Jun 20 2018
The Guardian
Jun 20 2018
Palermo, Sicily
The migratory European art biennale takes over churches, palazzos and gardens with some of its most provocative political statements yet
There’s a rustling in the shrubbery, a glimpse of sleek, young bodies pale among the foliage. Naked young men eye up the lush foliage and stems. Soon, they are rutting away with the plant life, rooting with the roots. There’s a lot of groaning and wailing and chewing, saliva and chlorophyl.
Filmed in a forest in Taiwan, Chinese artist Zheng Bo’s Pteridophilia is replete with groans and panting, the slither and crackle of leaves ripped with teeth and slathered by tongues. Shown on a small screen set up in a bamboo grove in Palermo’s magnificent botanical garden, the Orto Botanico, the action is a demonstration of “eco-queer potential”. It looks like plant abuse to me. The actual fornication remained off screen, but there was plenty of rhythmic bucking and shoving. I didn’t wait for the money shot, if there was one.
Continue reading...artforum.com
Jun 20 2018
The New York Times
Jun 20 2018
The Guardian
Jun 20 2018
★★★★★/★★★★☆
Barbican, London
One woman painstakingly chronicled injustices in the US during the Great Depression. The other is finally being acknowledged in Britain for her contemporary documentary photography
“The camera,” Dorothea Lange once said, “is an instrument that teaches people to see without a camera.” Her portrait of Florence Owens Thompson, now universally known as Migrant Mother, provided powerful evidence that this was indeed the case. Taken in a camp for destitute migrant workers in California in 1936, while Lange was documenting the plight of the dispossessed during the Great Depression for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the portrait is a study of a mother’s anxiety. When it was published in the press, it precipitated a generous flow of government aid to the Californian work camps.
Migrant Mother has become perhaps the most famous American photograph of the past century. It haunted Thompson, who later tried to prevent its reproduction and, in 1978, told a journalist: “I wish she had never taken my picture. I can’t get a penny out of it. She didn’t ask my name.” Ironically, Lange had been instructed to ensure the anonymity of her subjects in guidelines laid down by the FSA. The portrait is given a room of its own in this extensive retrospective, with five alternative versions on display, including one of the few surviving early prints in which Thompson’s thumb is visible in the bottom-right corner, clasping a tent pole. For some reason, the thumb bothered Lange so much that she rendered it as a blurred presence in later prints.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Jun 20 2018
Painting of stag will be shown alongside Peter Blake version owned by Paul McCartney
The Monarch of the Glen, one of Scotland’s most recognisable and reproduced artworks, is to go on display at the National Gallery in London alongside a Peter Blake version owned by Sir Paul McCartney.
Edwin Landseer’s painting of a stag in a misty Highlands landscape will be displayed at the gallery for the first time in more than 160 years over the Christmas period.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Jun 20 2018
The mostly empty streets of Aden, Yemen’s southern port city and seat of government, are eerily quiet after three years of civil war. Violence, famine and disease have ravished the country, which was already the Arab world’s poorest before the conflict began. Aden has taken the brunt of the conflict which has pitted a Saudi-led coalition that support the government against Houthi rebels
Continue reading...artforum.com
Jun 20 2018
The Guardian
Jun 19 2018
Sunbed, skate ramp, clothes horse, climbing frame … TTP, a collection of shots of a Leipzig park’s table-tennis table, has just won the MACK first book award
Continue reading...The Guardian
Jun 19 2018
From a washing-up scourer to a pile of crisps, the Japanese architect draws on the most unlikely everyday objects – while testing the idea of privacy with a glass-walled public toilet
A cloud of white blocks leaps from a plinth, hanging in the air like an explosion in a sugar cube factory. Nearby, a great spiral of ribbons swirls across a model landscape, like a whirlwind of noodles caught among the trees. A host of other curious creations fills the basement gallery of Japan House, a new cultural centre on Kensington High Street, west London, from teetering nests of wooden sticks to sheets of scrunched up paper, and what looks like a floppy silver pancake resting on a glass cube.
These are the dreamy visions of Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, who approaches the design of his buildings more like a conceptual artist searching for new forms – or a scavenger foraging through a skip.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Jun 19 2018
Breakwater, Plymouth: A boat trip three miles out into the sound to visit this 19th-century engineering feat designed to provide safe anchorage for the Channel fleet
Tide and calm weather permit a pre-booked landing on the breakwater, built between 1812 and 1840 to provide safe anchorage for the Channel fleet in Plymouth Sound. Six swans glide from Sutton Harbour across smooth, rising water before the excursion boat Silver Crest leaves the Barbican landing stage by the Mayflower Steps. Ahead, the morning sun lights red cliffs fringing Mount Edgcumbe; low mist lies around the far-off Mew Stone, and water becomes choppy off shadowy cliffs beneath Staddon Fort.
Almost three miles out, beneath blue sky, our boat ties up near the Breakwater Fort; passengers climb an iron ladder to disembark on to the slippery surface of the mile-long construction that rises 60 feet from the sea bed. Waves continue to break over the western third but our guide leads us eastwards across the pavement of limestone, drilled with holes that facilitated the quarrying, hoisting and placement of these massive blocks above the foundations of granite. Puddles of green and brown slime, seaweed and rusty rails slow progress but all tread warily, keeping close to the median line and diagrammatic stars, engraved and still faintly visible along the middle of the crest, about 45ft wide above high water.
Continue reading...The New York Times
Jun 19 2018
artforum.com
Jun 19 2018
artforum.com
Jun 19 2018
artforum.com
Jun 19 2018
The New York Times
Jun 19 2018
artforum.com
Jun 19 2018
The New York Times
Jun 19 2018
artforum.com
Jun 19 2018
The Guardian
Jun 19 2018
The Glasgow School of Art was a masterpiece, but promises to build a reproduction are premature
The gutting by fire of Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh building is a huge loss to Scotland and the world. The highly distinctive structure, completed in 1909, was Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s masterpiece. It is also the home of one of the UK’s most important art schools and a place beloved by students, many of whom have spoken in recent days of their shock and sadness. Neither the fact that the art school has a strongly Scottish identity, nor divisions between Scottish and UK politicians over Brexit, should obscure a shared sense of deep dismay.
That anger was also being expressed even before the fire was fully out is understandable, and right. A costly and painstaking £35m restoration was nearing completion, with timbers to match the originals sourced from a Massachusetts mill. An exhibition at Kelvingrove Museum, planned to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the architect’s birth, opened a few weeks ago. The refurbished Mackintosh-designed Willow Tea Rooms reopens in a fortnight; another tea room is one of the centrepieces of the new V&A in Dundee. Mackintosh was a one-off, his career a brilliant chapter in the story of Scottish and British art and design. Now the heart of Glasgow’s Mackintosh legacy has been ripped away.
Continue reading...The New York Times
Jun 19 2018
artforum.com
Jun 19 2018
The Guardian
Jun 19 2018
A new gallery exposes gaping holes in what was known about Sir Richard Wallace
The treasures collected by the illegitimate son of an English aristocrat, who married a Parisian perfume seller, inherited a fortune and then had to fight a cousin in court to keep it, have gone on display in a new gallery at the Wallace Collection dedicated to the museum’s founder, Sir Richard Wallace.
They include Renaissance bronzes, a pendant with a pearl the size of a walnut, a bell once owned by an Irish saint from which childless women drank to ensure safe pregnancies and a hunting horn claimed to have belonged to Saint Hubert. Two of only four in the world golden wine cups made for a Chinese emperor and a unique Asante gold head – which may be a portrait of a leader killed in battle whose real head was taken as a trophy – also form part of the collection.
Continue reading...artforum.com
Jun 19 2018
The Guardian
Jun 19 2018
Wallace Collection, London
This sumptuous show in the gallery’s new exhibition space explores treasures amassed by the museum’s singular founder
A gold face glitters under a spotlight in the cave of curiosities that is the Wallace Collection’s new exhibition space. Is it a French rococo whatnot? A Renaissance objet d’art? These are the kinds of European treasures this museum is famous for. But no. The beaten gold mask that holds you enthralled in this gorgeous exhibition was made in the Ashanti empire in west Africa in the 18th or 19th century. It is a masterpiece of African art that has lain tucked away in the abundance of the Wallace Collection since Victorian times.
When the British empire was at war with the gold-rich Ashanti empire in 1873-74, this astonishing object was looted from the royal palace in Kumasi. It ended up in the hands of the royal jeweller Garrard and Co, which sold it to the wealthy and omnivorous collector Richard Wallace.
Continue reading...The New York Times
Jun 19 2018
artforum.com
Jun 19 2018
artforum.com
Jun 19 2018
The Guardian
Jun 19 2018
Ideas about what to do with the charred remains of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s range from restoration to a building ‘fit for the 21st century’
The smoke has barely cleared over the blackened carcass of the Glasgow School of Art, which was gutted by a fire on Friday night, but the architecture world is already alight with debate about what should come next.
To many, Glasgow without Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s finest work is unthinkable: his masterpiece must be reconstructed stone by stone, no matter the cost. But the extent of the destruction from the fire, which appears to have left only the stone facades standing, have led others to call for a new building to take its place.
Continue reading...EosArte.eu
Jun 19 2018
The Guardian
Jun 18 2018
From floating goons in black suits to monkeys packing heat, a new book by Fotografiska celebrates photographs that skew how we view the world
Continue reading...The Guardian
Jun 18 2018
From Judy Chicago to Margaret Harrison, this fascinating documentary tells the story of the female artists who rejected the established order in the 70s
It isn’t often that an art documentary feels like a riot, but Rebel Women: The Great Art Fightback (BBC Four) manages to convey a real sense of anarchic joy. It offers an education in the explosion of feminist art in the 1970s, at a time when female artists produced boundary-busting work that still feels radical, and certainly revolutionary.
Commissioned as part of the BBC’s Hear Her season, marking 100 years of women’s suffrage, this tells the story of women who decided not to play along with the established order. Screeching in on a soundtrack of Janis Joplin, it acknowledges that change was in the air throughout the 1960s, but takes the infamous events of Miss World 1970 as its starting point and catalyst. I wasn’t completely convinced by the idea that this particular protest was responsible for the art made by women throughout the following decade but it is as good a place to start as any and a lovely bit of archival research. To see Miss World host Bob Hope leering over the “cattle market” while feminists waved football klaxons and threw flour bombs from the crowd, to hear their brilliant chant of “we’re not beautiful, we’re not ugly, we’re angry”, is a treat for the senses.
Continue reading...The New York Times
Jun 18 2018
artforum.com
Jun 18 2018
artforum.com
Jun 18 2018
EosArte.eu
Jun 18 2018
The New York Times
Jun 18 2018
The New York Times
Jun 18 2018
The Guardian
Jun 18 2018
Serpentine, London
More rock festival stage than political statement, Christo’s giant oil barrel sculpture on Hyde Park’s Serpentine leaves our critic wondering what the fish all think
It sits out on the lake, bigly. Constructed from 7,506 standard oil drums, the London Mastaba interrupts the view. More than that, it is the view. It is unmissable. Floating on London’s Serpentine, and tethered to the lake’s shallow bottom, Christo’s first major London project is an alien presence, its sides rising at 60-degree angles from the placid waters. The end walls drop sheer. A geometric presence, a blockage, a giant toy, a feat of engineering, it is a sculpture. It is a thing.
The birds look unconcerned by the 83-year-old’s creation. Fish, often attracted to underwater structures, doubtless swim and lurk underneath. The sculpture’s footprint covers 1% of the artificial lake’s surface and rises 20 metres above the water. The sides of the barrels are painted red, with a white stripe circling their circumference, giving the side-view of the sculpture the appearance of relentless cartoon brickwork. The circular barrels’ ends are variously blue, a different red or a dusky mauve. Their arrangement seems a kind of random pixilation, though the order is meticulously copied from the artist’s working drawings.
Continue reading...artforum.com
Jun 18 2018
The New York Times
Jun 18 2018
