Visual arts
Jasper Rees
Since winning the Turner Prize in 1996 with Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Douglas Gordon (b. 1966) has lived in Germany, France, New York and Germany again. But in accent and attitude, he remains a Glaswegian. Those roots are being reaffirmed at the moment: as part of this year's Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, one of Gordon's most celebrated works is back on display in the city where it was first shown.24 Hour Psycho plays the entirety of Hitchcock's classic on a pair of screens, but reduced to two frames a second. First mounted at the Tramway in 1993, the work Read more ...
fisun.guner
Acts of wanton destruction appear to have taken place at Camden Arts Centre, as canvases lie crushed, ripped, crumpled and broken. Monochrome and minimalist works have had their stretchers, their very backbones, ripped and cracked in two, and their once taut, painted surfaces hang, in some instances, like flayed skin. Their broken carcasses are arranged in a seemingly haphazard fashion, hanging precariously from walls or stuffed into corners. They lie forlornly on the floor, or are pushed with some force into armchairs. The gallery looks like the scene of a crime, as if we have chanced upon Read more ...
Ismene Brown
"Russia has a remarkable and ancient tradition of wooden buildings that dates back to the tenth century, with the remains of Medieval fortresses demonstrating the sophistication of the Nordic wooden construction methods employed across Russia and Scandinavia at the time. In the 18th century Peter the Great’s policy of broader cultural engagement between Russia and the rest of Europe stimulated cultural influence both to and from Russia, finding its way into the rich urban and architectural language of the time. Rather than destroying local traditions - which has happened with the prevalence Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Vladimir Story's 1917 brochure for patterns for building Russia's traditional wooden country houses - called dachas - has been rescued from oblivion by the chance discovery of an ancient copy of it in Georgia. Now reprinted, The Art Nouveau Dacha: designs by Vladimir Story reveals with marvellous detail a unique house-building tradition full of details and requirements that are as modern nearly a century later. Read the story of this book in theartsdesk's Books/Art section, and enjoy a selection of reproductions from everything from a grand "English-style" mansion to a whimsical little Read more ...
fisun.guner
How might a portraitist, working in oils, describe Martin Freeman's face? If one were a novelist, heavy with description, perhaps the following: fleshy, boneless features; pasty Northern European pallor; flesh the texture of sweaty suet pudding. Not, then, conventionally handsome, but still, we have those plaintive, expressive eyes and that rumpled yet quietly dignified presence. All perfect, actually, for put-upon Tim, the frustrated paper-clip-arranger in The Office who dreamt of better things and was played with touchingly eloquent bemusement by Freeman.And it's also a face that is Read more ...
fisun.guner
The notion of women’s work has undergone a revolution, and yet that revolution has, in many ways, come comfortably full circle. We may now celebrate the work of generations of women who, limited to the domestic realm, were perhaps also liberated by the creative potential of the domestic crafts, and specifically, needlecraft. Which is a fairly radical notion in itself.When you encounter the many examples of exquisite craftsmanship (the interpretation of gender bias within that term is duly noted) on display in Quilts, an exhibition exploring the social history of quilt-making in Britain, you Read more ...
Joe Muggs
A little revolution is taking place at the top of the pop charts. UK artist Tinie Tempah's rap track “Pass Out” has had two weeks at number one, and at the time of writing looks very much like it may successfully fight off Lady Gaga & Beyonce's spectacularly-hyped “Telephone Thing” to make it a third week on top.Now this might not seem revolutionary in itself: over the last year or two it has become commonplace to see black British rappers from the formerly underground grime scene in the “proper” charts. However up until now, with the exception of Dizzee Rascal – who has always been a one Read more ...
fisun.guner
Richard Hamilton, the true father of Pop art and spiritual descendant of Duchamp, is not a particularly prolific artist. Rather, he sticks to an idea and works on it over several editions and in different media, so that we get a large body of work repeating the same image in paint, in collage, in photography and in mixed media. For Hamilton, now 87, in so much of what he has done over the decades the key idea cannot be conveyed by a single unique work of art, because the key idea is often to do with the multiplicity of images: in other words, the medium is the message.Modern Moral Matters, Read more ...
josh.spero
What emerges from tonight’s Culture Show on Henry Moore, which examines how the sculptor exploited the media (and vice versa), is not the difference between the media of sculpture and television but the similarity. Rather than a simple programme on Moore’s career – one fawning talking head after another – to coincide with the retrospective of his work at Tate Britain, Alan Yentob has instead chosen the meta-route, talking about TV talking about art. It is a topic which resonates today, where the one thing we love as much as looking at art is hearing people discuss art, and is well chosen Read more ...
doro.globus
From Floor to Sky looks at a relatively little known, but pivotal, moment in the development of British sculpture: the period in the late 1960s and early 1970s when tutors and students at St Martin's School of Art and the Royal College worked together in challenging traditional attitudes to the medium. New ways of teaching and thinking about sculpture were evolved, and new materials such as fibreglass and plastic introduced. This exhibition focuses on the students of one particular tutor, Peter Kardia, whose radical teaching methods brought politics, theory, perception and perspex into the Read more ...
sue.steward
A 1986 documentary about the USSR’s new modernist city, Chernobyl, featured a five-year-old boy kicking a football through landscaped gardens, past blocks of clean, elegant flats and inside the soon-to-be opened funfair in the workers' town of Pripyat. A brilliant propaganda tool for the new status symbol Nuclear Power Plant, the film was intended to convey the message around the Soviet empire that the nuclear age implied a safe, happy future. The film was never shown; three weeks later, the plant exploded in the world’s worst ever nuclear disaster and Chernobyl’s almost 40,000 inhabitants Read more ...
alice.vincent
The description of the AV Festival’s closing event was vague in the promotional material. Going only by the promise of “music/performance,” and the undeniably odd combination of Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair with performance musicians including the guitarist from drone doom band Sunn O))), expectations were hard to form. The organisers must have realised the mystery - four sheets of A4 were thrust into our hands last night by ushers upon entry as a means of explanation, although the itinerary was hardly kept to.
Geordies like few things more than to be told how great their locality is by Read more ...