contemporary art
Florence Hallett
The title has it about right: no matter what it is they are busily acquiring, collectors seem to be an obsessive bunch, and their obsessions can achieve quite magnificent proportions. The stereotyped image of the collector as a socially challenged monomaniac doesn’t really fit with the popular understanding of the artistic temperament, though. All that beavering away, categorising and ordering things seems so regimented, blinkered and above all uncreative, and yet the two occupations are intimately linked, the Renaissance sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti the first in a long line of artist-collectors Read more ...
fisun.guner
A sci-fi special would be incomplete without the profoundly influential figure of JG Ballard, a writer who, when he began his career in the late Fifties, fully subscribed to the notion that “sci-fi is the literature of the 20th century.” Unlike the “Hampstead novel,” he once said, “the sci-fi novel plays back the century to itself.”But as much as he had embraced it, no one genre could really contain him. He was sui generis, and something of a visionary with it, acutely alive to the evolving hyper-real present and its dystopian possibilities. Environmental catastrophe, mass media, the Read more ...
fisun.guner
In a tavern somewhere in Tokyo, two Japanese macaque monkeys work a daily, two-hour shift (under Japanese law, these hours are regulated). Dressed in miniature uniforms, the monkeys’ main task is to deliver hot towels to amused customers before drinks orders are taken by a human. The customers tip the monkeys in boiled soy beans. A search on YouTube throws up quite a few of these monkey-waiter skits. Who knew? Perhaps all the footage comes from the same restaurant, since it seems unusual enough to have warranted a jolly “strange but true” item on Japanese news. One segment of this news Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
In China there are more than 100 million fans of Manchester United. At least that’s what I’m told when I get to the the city's National Football Museum. And in a sartorial decision unusual in the art world, we are greeted by artist Chen Wenbo wearing an Arsenal football scarf. In sport, as in contemporary art, the Chinese are often playing the same game as us.The Asia Triennial Manchester hosts the UK’s largest exhibition of contemporary art from south of the Great Wall. Harmonious Society, who make up the bulk of the triennial, has a display co-ordinated by the Centre for Chinese and Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It could be an aircraft, hastily covered with some very inadequate wrappings and squeezed into the great hangar of the Turbine Hall. Or perhaps an eccentric sort of bird, its bedraggled wings missing chunks of orange plumage, in contrast to its plush, red body. Or perhaps it is part of a stage set with extravagant swags of red fabric carefully arranged to look, fleetingly, like theatre curtains, or pieces of scenery either under construction or partially wrapped, ready to be put away.Pulled and gathered at points, the towering red central section of this vast new sculpture sometimes resembles Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Ashes is a two-part exhibition. The darkened gallery at 3 Duke Street, St James’s is filled with the onscreen image of a young black man sitting on the prow of a small boat with his back to us (main picture). He turns occasionally to smile to camera; he stands up and balances precariously as the boat bobs up and down on the swell; he falls overboard, climbs back on and stands silhouetted against the blue sky, grinning down at us.With his lithe young body, bleached dreadlocks and disarming smile he seems very amiable and laid back; it's impossible to imagine him in any sort of trouble. And Read more ...
fisun.guner
The crusty old Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay died in 2006, but there’s a new art work by him at this year’s Folkestone Triennial. You won’t be able to see it with the naked eye, but you can through a pair of binoculars. If you peer through a viewing tower from Folkestone’s disused Harbour Pier you’ll see one of Finlay’s enigmatic phrases come into focus: “WEATHER IS A THIRD TO PLACE AND TIME”. The words are written on the grey façade of a lighthouse in that gorgeous shade of midnight blue the artist favoured. The work was realised in collaboration with Finlay’s estate, and though I Read more ...
caroline.boyle
Like a canny political campaigner, the Edinburgh Art Festival offers “something for everyone”. In this singular year for Scotland, the festival weaves together strands concerning the independence referendum, the Commonwealth and the centenery of the beginning of the First World War. It also provides an introduction to a host of other ideas and artistic worlds. It's contemporary art that takes centre stage and its flagship is Generation. This multi-venue show takes over the imposing rooms of the Royal Scottish Academy and the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art and is part of a Scotland-wide Read more ...
David Nice
In a near-perfect, outward-looking Swiss city sharing borders with France and Germany, on a series of cloudless April days that felt more like balmy June than capricious April, anything seemed possible. The doors of perception which had slammed, I thought, irrevocably shut for me 45 minutes and four chords into the first act of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha could well open again in two concerts – London is to get three on a UK tour this week - around the musical Minimalist theme from Dennis Russell Davies and the excellent Basel Symphony Orchestra. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if the Read more ...
fisun.guner
In 1920, Man Ray, now better known for his solarized photographs, produced a sculpture made from found objects. L'Enigme d'Isidore Ducasse, named after the 19th-century French poet who used the pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont, is a sewing machine wrapped in a wool blanket and tied with string. The title refers to the poet’s evocation of the strange, even threatening beauty of familiar objects in startling juxtaposition, and is a line later adopted by André Breton to suggest Surrealist dislocation. With regard to Man Ray’s sculpture, we have to take it on trust that it’s a sewing machine Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Those French and their grand projects! Not the least of them is the division of the country into 23 areas who acquire their own collections of international contemporary art, supplemented by a national loan collection, all under the rubric of FRAC, Fondation Régionale d’Art Contemporain. This 30-year programme has just opened a massive six-storey gallery as a brand new public face for the regional collection of the Nord-pas-de-Calais in the slightly forlorn city of Dunkirk. Supported by FRAC, it has so far amassed some 1,500 works of contemporary art, French and international.The seaside post Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
At first it looked like a joke. But, as each muscle spasm, set off by an electric shock, did appear to produce a pained expression in the performer and a subsequent note, one slowly had to accept that these four string quartet players were indeed being electrocuted into performance. The Wigmore Hall, it wasn’t. Sonica, it certainly was.This was the second year of the four-day festival that, each November, takes over Glasgow's galleries, theatres, warehouses and shop windows and runs amok, stretching the meaning of music to its artistic, intellectual and technological limits. Cross-pollination Read more ...