surrealism
Thomas H. Green
One of my formative musical experiences, small but important, was tuning into John Peel’s late night Radio 1 show, early in the Eighties, and hearing …and the Native Hipsters’ “There Goes Concorde Again”. It was, quite simply, the weirdest “pop music” I’d ever heard – lo-fi, abstract and deranged, most of it consisting of a female voice, sounding funny-farm pie-eyed, repeatedly announcing, “Ooh look, there goes Concorde again”. It had a whiff of actual madness and, setting aside Guardian-style agonising over pop revelling in mental illness, to my junior self this was thrilling. It was also, Read more ...
mark.kidel
The Hourglass Sanatorium tells the surreal story of a man’s visit to a dilapidated medical institution where his ageing father is being held in suspense between life and death. From start to finish, the film portrays a dream world in which time is constantly subverted, as if the hero were freely wandering between parallel universes.Made in 1973, this bewitching film was directed by Wojciech Has, whose other great work The Saragossa Manuscript is also being released in a restored version. The script of The Hourglass Sanatorium is based on The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Read more ...
fisun.guner
Louise Bourgeois tirelessly, obsessively documented her 32 years of psychoanalysis. Before the discovery of her secret cache of personal musings – sheaves of hand-written notes outlining dreams and psychic burdens, doodles and self-excoriating lists – nobody had any idea that the celebrated French-American artist, who’s often been associated with Surrealism, had undergone such protracted, intensive therapy, even though it’s really all there in her work in terms of its feverish Freudian symbolism.But since the discovery of her psychoanalytic writings (two boxes discovered in 2004, and two just Read more ...
fisun.guner
Yayoi Kusama, one of Japan’s best-known living artists, has spent the past 34 years as a voluntary in-patient in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. Now 82, she was part of the New York avant-garde art scene of the Sixties, making work that anticipated both Andy Warhol’s repeated-motif “Cow Wallpaper” and Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures. Her nude happenings included orgies and naked gay weddings, over which she presided fully clothed like a psychedelic high priestess.Showing just how adept she was at garnering publicity, in 1968 Kusama wrote and distributed Open Letter to My Hero Richard M Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Some theatre openings will be legendary for all time. One such was the Parisian evening of 10 December 1896 when Alfred Jarry’s character Père Ubu stepped onto the stage at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre and intoned “Merdre!” (roughly translated as Shittr!). The effect was electric, and the scandal outlasted the show's run. In Simon Stephens’s new version of the play, which opened last night, the original story has been supplemented with a longer second half that updates the action to today, and sees mad boy Ubu tried for war crimes.As an exponent of the imaginary science of pataphysics, which is Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Many have dismissed 2011 as cinematically something of a disappointment, but while close inspection may have identified more cubic zirconia than bona fide diamonds, the year glittered nevertheless. The showstopping Mysteries of Lisbon was undoubtedly the real deal - what a teasing, sumptuous and gorgeously strange film that was (even with a running time in excess of four hours). Iranian domestic drama, A Separation, was similarly sublime - if less grand - and French silent (yes, silent) comedy The Artist (pictured below right) had hard-faced movie scribes grinning idiotically at the year’s Read more ...
fisun.guner
Graham Sutherland and George Shaw have two things in common. They are both painters and both are associated with Coventry: Sutherland made his famous altarpiece work – a tapestry – for the city’s rebuilt cathedral, while Shaw grew up in Coventry’s Tile Hill, a housing estate that’s become familiar to us through Shaw’s beautiful and melancholy Humbrol enamel oil paintings.But other than these tenuous connections, you may find little common ground between the pair. Sutherland’s imagery reaches back to the 19th-century Romantic tradition through painters such as Samuel Palmer, whilst his Read more ...
fisun.guner
What a curious curate’s egg Tate Liverpool has pulled out of its hat with Alice in Wonderland. And what a complete rag-bag of minor, uninteresting artists. It starts with a disparate mix of recent works by a few better-knowns – neatly beginning at the end, as it were (Jason Rhoades’s neon-sign euphemisms for the female sex, Luc Tuymans’ dreamy Wonderland), but by the end proper we are left befuddled by the impression that any artist whose work features feeble wordplay, has some passing reference to burgeoning female sexuality, or simply contains a passing reference to a “looking glass” has Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Excepting the cows, Guernsey’s most famous resident was probably Oliver Reed, who lived there as a tax exile. The barmy This is Jinsy, the creation of Guernsey natives Chris Bran and Justin Chubb, probably isn’t a faithful depiction of the island’s life, but it’s got to be its most notable cultural export. If not that, then its most curious.Jinsy is an island. Its population is 791. Dotted about the place – in homes, too – are 1067 tessalators, surveillance devices that look like old-fashioned parking meters. The tessalators issue edicts and show TV. Living in numbered chalets, the lives of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's grin and bear it - even on occasion bare it - time at Shakespeare's Globe, which closes its 2011 season not with a bang but with a wearyingly facetious whimper. A nice idea that in differing ways evokes such previous Globe newbies as Helen and The Frontline while paying homage to the Bard's own penchant for many and varied couplings, Chris Hannan's latest aims for a giddy, carnival atmosphere that it only fitfully achieves. As for its apparent obsession with scatology, Hannan at least allows for conversational variety where least expected: "I'm shitness," our heroine Natty (Emma Pierson Read more ...
howard.male
“Oh my Gaaaad, you guys are crazy! That’s terrible. How could you say that?” exclaimed Shooting Stars contestant Brigitte Nielsen, unfortunately reinforcing our preconception that Americans just don’t get us Brits and our irony. Although it’s not really irony that Vic and Bob deal in, it’s a kind of vaudevillian surrealism. And they’ve shrewdly worked out that you can say just about anything to anyone as long as its impact is softened by its carefully crafted absurdity and the fact it’s been delivered by two loveable smirking heirs to Eric and Ernie’s twin thrones.If surrealism was, as Comte Read more ...
fisun.guner
Dalí may have the edge on Magritte for instant recognition and popularity, but how easily the Belgian beats the Spaniard as the more interesting Surrealist. Armed with his small repertoire of images – the nude, the shrouded head, the bowler hat, the apple and the pipe, to name a few – and painted in that precise, pictogram way of his, Magritte is an artist who holds back more than he gives away. Next to his restrained, meticulously tidy offerings, Dalí appears decidedly overcooked.In paintings such as The Treachery of Images (Cesi n’est pas une pipe), 1929, in which a representation Read more ...