Visual arts
igor.toronyilalic
It's often more fun on the margins. The pickings are richer. The view is clearer. You can take aim easier. The AV Festival has spent more than eight years here, on the counter-cultural edges, delving into the divisional cracks between art, music and film. This year, with the Cultural Olympiad swallowing up everything for its year-long national pat on the back, independent artistic thinking is at a premium. AV, however, have not only escaped the Olympiad's clutches but have upended the boastful spirit of 2012 with a theme that is about as co-optable for national self-aggrandisement as a Read more ...
josh.spero
Group shows can be strained: the rubric can be so narrow that it has to be stretched to accommodate the artists at hand. That is one reason why Haunch of Venison's new show, Mixed Media, is so pleasing: it features contemporary sculpture with an emphasis on the varied materials in use today, a capacious but not unlimited mission. The other reason is that the work is just damned good.The gallery, which has just extended its premises from Haunch of Venison Yard through to Bond Street, where its new entrance sits, inaugurated this engorgement with some of its most revered and freshest artists. Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Ever since we moved into an apartment building round the corner from Ground Zero a couple of years ago, I’ve been keeping an eye on One World Trade Center, formerly known as the Freedom Tower, soon to be America’s tallest building. Now it’s reached 92 of its eventual 105 floors at the rate of one floor a week, its octagonal steel panels covered in blast-resistant glass soaring skywards, and Condé Nast and J Crew have signed up as some of its future occupants. But although I pass 1 WTC almost every day on the way to Wholefoods or the Gee Whiz diner, the area is cut off by forbidding fencing Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Two superb exhibitions at Tate Modern bring into public view the work of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama and Italian conceptualist Alighiero Boetti; their work is not in any way connected except that, with their singular voices, each deserves much broader recognition.Conceptualism often gets a bad press because people associate it with those artists who, more interested in ideas than products, rely on others to translate their concepts into objects. The approach is seen by many as a dereliction of the relationship between an artist and their materials, which some consider crucial if an object is Read more ...
judith.flanders
A show about lines: my tiny minimalist heart goes pitter-patter. And with good cause. Lines can be a bit blah – a quick scribble, and you’re on to the next thing. But they can also by their very simplicity, their irreduceability, lay bare some fundamentals, can draw a line under (yes, lots of “line” jokes available: line right up!) what really matters.Two of the artists at the core of minimalism set the tone. Sol LeWitt produced instructions for wall drawings of lines which were invariably minutely detailed, yet also magically permitted great freedom for the person actually “transcribing” his Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
A remarkably tidy parade of thousands upon thousands of objects, neatly grouped into their categories – soap, plastic bottles, cooking pots and utensils, empty cardboard boxes, shoes, flower pots, gloves, string, to name but a few – Waste Not is a deeply disturbing yet affecting display of the obsessive accumulation of sheer stuff. These are the household goods of Zhao Xiang Yuan, the mother of the Chinese conceptual artist Song Dong, collected over five decades of family life. Xiang Yuan and her family suffered the usual outrageous reversals of fortune common to most of the Chinese Read more ...
ash.smyth
So Homeland is here, and mid-ranking-CIA-operative Claire Danes is chasing Marine-Sergeant-and-possible-al-Qaeda-double-agent Damian Lewis all over the shop (but really only in their heads, so far), and neither of them is getting anywhere fast, so Claire goes home for a kip and sticks on some relaxing music, and would you Adam ‘n’ Eve it? – another bloody jazz nerd!Seriously, has anyone done research into the neurological links between analytical thought and jazz? Or whether the CIA does the bulk of its recruiting in Manhattan after-hours clubs? Or whether all spy dramas are now just Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In a year of centenary celebrations paying homage to Captain Scott and the men who accompanied him to Antarctica at the end of the Edwardian age, two exhibitions in London have assumed pride of place. The Natural History Museum places a spotlight on the scientific achievements of the Terra Nova expedition. At the Queen’s Gallery two photographic archives capture with remarkable immediacy the sheer splendour of the polar regions. A smaller exhibition in the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff focuses on a less familiar aspect of the iconic story: the fact that Scott’s expedition had a strong Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Superficially it's the very picture of innocence. A boy clings to his wooden steed, one hand clutching the neck, the other flying free. Few Fourth Plinth commissions will be more easily co-opted for official public duty. Hope, youth, the exultation of the ordinary: the state will be able to do plenty with this. Already Boris Johnson has tried to make an Olympic mascot of the boy. Joanna Lumley, who unveiled the work earlier today, hoped his gold-plating boded well for the Summer. But as with all the best public art, Elmgreen and Dragset's new sculpture might outwardly bow to its commissioners Read more ...
fisun.guner
As he readily acknowledges himself, Jeremy Deller can’t paint and he can’t draw, so he never went to art school. For many artists of his generation (he’s 46), this lack of traditionally based skills seems not to have presented a problem. But Deller clearly isn’t one for trying to be good at things he’s so self-evidently bad at, so instead of going to art school he studied art history, and then began to follow his interests. Luckily for him, and us, all the stuff that interests him falls within the periphery of what one might call art.Deller’s interests are diverse, but are primarily based on Read more ...