modernism
Sarah Kent
Robin Rhode’s animations are pure pleasure; there’s perfection in their simplicity. They are so perfectly tuned, so light on their feet, that one simply wants to enjoy them; but because they are multilayered, they offer more than momentary pleasure. Rhode was born in South Africa and, in many ways, he is the Banksy of Johannesburg. In the late 1990s he began using the scruffy walls of the city as a canvas on which to make drawings which he describes as a “dreamscape to the impossible”.But whereas stealth is crucial to Banksy’s modus operandi – he disappears into the night, leaving Read more ...
judith.flanders
Fred Sandback is one of the great overlooked of the Minimalist movement that developed in the 1960s. Both those words are important – “great” and “overlooked”: his work is genuinely great, and part of its greatness is the way it has overlooking built into it.At its most basic, Sandback created geometrical shapes out of string (pictured below right: photo, Fred Sandback Archive). Using mostly an acrylic yarn, slightly fuzzy, and coloured as appropriate, Sandback “built” sculpture with volume but without mass, sculpture that, unlike traditional works, had no interior. Instead, the yarn builds Read more ...
mark.kidel
John Cage, the focus of an adventurous three-day mini-festival in Bristol, is possibly one of the most influential figures in 20th-century culture. As much a practical philosopher as a composer of note, he made artists, writers and musicians think about the nature of chance, our place in nature and the role of the subject in the creative process.Cage has often been dismissed as a latter-day Dadaist, intent on taking the piss out of the establishment. There are links with Dada – not least a friendship with Marcel Duchamp, who shares with Cage the reputation for being a conceptual radical Read more ...
stephen.walsh
This latest BCMG concert had its pleasures; and it had its irritations. Among the pleasures was a pair of works, one of them newly commissioned, by the under-performed Japanese composer Jo Kondo. The irritations were of the BBC variety: long pauses between short works while technicians in headphones faffed around with microphones and music stands, in sovereign disregard for the convenience of a large paying audience.Finally Oliver Knussen, who has himself always done difficult things without palaver, brought the players on for Birtwistle’s Silbury Air while the technos were still faffing. Read more ...
mark.hudson
The latest exhibition from Beirut-born, sometime Turner Prize-nominee Mona Hatoum – best known for sending a camera through her inner tubes and projecting the results – explores themes of displacement and geographical and political tension. I know this because since I signed up to review it a fortnight ago, invites and reminders concerning this exhibition "exploring themes of displacement and geographical and political tension" have been hitting my mailbox with hectoring insistence.It isn’t that White Cube are particularly aggressive in their marketing (they’re reticent by the standards of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Being a composer of contemporary classical music is a treacherous business. It's about the only art form in which stylistic choices can still force a creator into permanent exile. Two composers who have fallen foul of the British house style in recent decades and have sought musical asylum in America and Europe, Brian Ferneyhough and James Clarke, were receiving an extremely rare London premiere of their new string quartets at the Wigmore Hall last night. And you could see why Britain had shown them the door.James Clarke's Second String Quartet (2009) was thrillingly, almost treasonably, un- Read more ...
fisun.guner
Austere, elegant, impressive. Edwin Lutyens’s Whitehall Cenotaph is a thing of beauty, a monument that embodies permanence in the face of all that is impermanent, and solidity in the face of all that is ephemeral. It’s an inspired decision to bring it indoors, for inside a hushed gallery, away from the rush of traffic and stripped of its flags and sculpted wreathes, Lutyens’s memorial can at last be properly admired as a work of art.Of course, it’s only a replica, three-quarters the size of the original. But it seems less of a reproduction, more of a ghostly doppelgänger, its sheeny Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The Birmingham Contemporary Music Group does star concerts, which fill (or nearly) the CBSO Centre; and they do old-fashioned New Music concerts, which don’t quite empty it, but leave one wondering who exactly – if anyone - some of the works being played are intended to reach. Their latest offering was of this latter kind. The performers came and went, the audience clapped politely, the electric keyboard went wrong, luckily near the start of Enno Poppe’s Salz, so that we didn’t have to hear too much of it twice. The instrumentalists, brilliant players as one knows, communed with some pretty Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A 70-minute song cycle for soprano and violin, the Kafka Fragments is the magnum opus (the irony of its miniature forms seems entirely deliberate) of György Kurtág, a composer known for the inscrutability of his music. His lines arrive at the ears fully armed, unwilling to surrender their meaning. A performance of the Fragments at the Tanglewood Music Festival in 2008 famously drove a musically literate audience from the room, so can Peter Sellars's staged interpretation really offer a more engaging experience? Up to a point.The fragment: embodiment of an absent presence, Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Glaswegian James Dillon (b 1950) is one Britain's most critically acclaimed living composers. Early detours as a drunken and drug-taking wastrel gave way to what he calls "musical terrorism". By which he means his blistering career as one of the most intoxicating and uncompromising of the New Complexity school of composers. His music has won awards (an unprecedented three from the Royal Philharmonic Society) but few British establishment friends or commissions, which has forced him into almost permanent exile. Now, for his 60th birthday, he makes a rare return to Glasgow for one of the Read more ...
fisun.guner
Camera-less photography isn’t, as some might think, a 20th-century invention, discovered by experimental Modernists such as Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray. Thomas Wedgwood, before the invention of the camera and at the very beginning of the 19th century, made paintings on glass and placed these in contact with pieces of paper and leather which had been rendered light sensitive with chemical treatments. Where the painted areas blocked the light, the image left its trace. Unfortunately, since Wedgwood lacked knowledge of how to fix the images, the results vanished almost as soon as they appeared.From Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The first phrase of the first piece by Georges Enescu - silken, expressive, rounded, breathed to perfection - established a very good case for Håkan Hardenberger being the greatest living trumpeter. The rest of his Wigmore Hall recital established a pretty equally watertight case against.Probably the most impressive thing about the impressively impassioned account of Enescu's great single-movement tone poem Légende was Hardenberger's control of dynamic at both ends of the spectrum. The expressive feel and sweep of this late-Romantic work was perfectly communicated by both Hardenberger and Read more ...