Warhol
Sarah Kent
Her name sounds like a brand of cigarettes, and an aura of corporate anonymity seems remarkably apt for this American artist who specialises in replicating other people’s work and sampling clips from online video libraries. Borrowed from the BBC’s Motion Gallery, the ingredients for Rock & Rap Act 3 Simulacra (2012) include a hooting owl (pictured below right), a bright green tree frog, a predatory spider, buds unfurling into gorgeous blooms, gurgling water, and a sprinter, diver and weight lifter – the kind of feel-good images often found on glossy birthday cards. They are intercut into Read more ...
josh.spero
The first room of Andy Warhol: The Portfolios at Dulwich Picture Gallery made me regret coming. The second room made me never want to leave. The first has 10 of the Flowers and 10 of the Campbell's Soup Cans, four weedy sunsets and one Marilyn in pink, purple and brown - hardly any nourishment, certainly nothing fresh. I'm a Warhol fan - 10 glowing Marilyns in a darkened room at the National Portrait Gallery is the closest I've come to a religious experience - but is there anything new to say about these overly familiar works?Luckily, there was also Birmingham Race Riot (1964) (pictured below Read more ...
fisun.guner
How long will it take for the penny to finally drop and to know we’ve been had all along? Months? Years? Ten years? Twenty? Will it really take that long before we come to our senses, and to wonder at our own gullibility? I’m talking not of Damien Hirst, who some now imagine has been conning us all for years, but of the execrable Lady Gaga. Yes, Gaga must be “exposed”! For is pap in pop really any lesser crime than art pap? You might think it is, even though, through the Nineties, both Britpop and Britart bobbed along on the crest of a Cool Britannia wave. They woz soulmates.We don’t expect Read more ...
mark.hudson
Who needs to hear or see anything more of the creepily manipulative world of Andy Warhol’s Factory? We’ve seen the films (well, bits of them); we bought the album (the one with the banana on the front); we’ve bought and dispensed with the images (in cheap repro form) several times over. We’ve seen those grainily evocative images of the Velvet Underground, Edie Sedgwick, Gerard Malanga and co looking glassily back at us so many times we almost feel we were there ourselves.Yet David McCabe’s extraordinary images will give you another angle on that undeniably charismatic, epoch-defining world. Read more ...
judith.flanders
Who or what is Jean-Marc Bustamante? This, surely, is the question we are supposed to ask of this artist of the affectless, who has skated in his three-decade-long career across the genres – first photography, then Minimalist sculpture, then a merger of the two, and for the last few years these shockingly vivid “paintings” (I use the scare quotes intentionally) on Plexiglass.In the late 1970s and the 1980s, Bustamante (b 1952) made his name with a long-running photographic cycle of C-prints, including the overarching Tableaux (Pictures). These were images taken on the margins, generally Read more ...
fisun.guner
A well-groomed, middle-aged woman walks into view and lights a cigarette. She stands, she smokes, the camera gives us a steady close-up of her face. As she appears to reminisce, her face subtly registers a range of emotions. Is she agitated, sad, irritated? She takes long drags of her cigarette. The film ends and she walks out of view. A second film begins. Same woman, same duration. A cigarette is smoked, the camera lingers on her face. She’s lost in recollection, but wait, there are subtle changes. A different backdrop.This time the sunglasses, which had been perched on her Read more ...
fisun.guner
Collecting contemporary art needn’t be daunting. Even if you’re just starting out, there are plenty of art fairs that offer a bespoke service designed for the budding collector. But if it’s insider tips from leading collectors and dealers you’re after then a course offered by one of London’s major public art galleries might be just what you’ve been waiting for. The tailor-made, five-week course begins with Whitechapel Gallery director Iwona Blazwick giving a guide to contemporary visual art from Warhol to Whiteread. And further sessions will include How to Collect, Meet the Maker and Where Read more ...
fisun.guner
What a troubled life Alice Neel led. The death of her first child, a daughter, who died of diphtheria in 1928 just before her first birthday; another daughter lost to her estranged husband’s family in Cuba two years later (as an adult and a mother herself, the daughter, Isabetta, committed suicide); life as a single mother raising two later sons on welfare in the slum district of New York's Spanish Harlem; and a neglected but always diligent artist for much of the rest of it, only achieving fame and acclaim towards the end.And yet we find her, in variously dated archive footage featured Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There are occasionally pieces of dance that you just want not to have to scribble notes about, just to watch and enjoy through your senses, not perming it all through the verbal brain. Siobhan Davies’s The Art of Touch is one of those, and when her company went into something of a creative abeyance to focus on producing a new dance community centre, this was one of Davies’s many gems of dance poetry that I feared we might never be able to bask in again.Fortunately last night Rambert turned up, under Mark Baldwin’s sensitive direction, picking up this 1995 beauty and one of Merce Cunningham’s Read more ...