performance art
Jasper Rees
To begin at the end, this was an astonishing creation, a piece of street theatre of transcendental power which no one who was there at the death last night could or will ever forget. Those witnesses included what felt like the whole population of Port Talbot who filled the streets in their many thousands - 5000? Double it and then some - to witness one of their own drag a cross for two gruelling miles from the town centre to a traffic island on the sea shore, there to be crucified, there to achieve a genuine miracle: the resurrection of a condemned town. After this breathtaking act of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
At first sight there seems to be little to connect these two comics - one a performance artist who spends much of her show in her underwear, the other a self-described 34-year-old virgin - who are touring with their 2010 Edinburgh Fringe shows, except that they are both currently appearing in the same studio space at the Soho Theatre in London. But having been underwhelmed after seeing their shows back to back, I see similarities - my notes contain the common scribblings “weak material” and “overlong anecdotes” - and I'm frustrated by the realisation that both have some cracking gags among Read more ...
charlotte.macmillan
Photography is linked closely with memory. Photographs help us recall family, friends, holidays, and it can attest to an event. But one could argue that it actually serves a purpose of forgetting. As we are immersed in a digital age, the photograph becomes a series of binary numbers which doesn’t exist until it is written or printed, and which can be erased as easily as it is captured. Photographs are now as close to human recall as technology will allow. Daniel Linehan's Montage for Three last night was a perfomance piece which tried to address that.Two dancers, Linehan and Salka Ardal Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I can still remember the excitement of pounding the pavements of SoHo in the early 1970s. Nowadays, this part of downtown Manhattan is awash with expensive restaurants, boutiques and smart galleries, but then it was a scruffy industrial area of warehouses and sweatshops. The factories were closing and the container trucks leaving, though, and artists were gradually infiltrating and turning the huge empty spaces into studios where they often lived illicitly.Sleeping on a platform in the workshop of an industrial designer on Broome Street, I felt the thrill of being in the right place at the Read more ...
fisun.guner
Artist Richard Wilson says it's the best space in which he’s ever exhibited. And having ensured its long term future with a £870,000 renovation, Dilston Grove will undoubtedly prove a rewarding site for other contemporary artists to realise their large-scale projects. The Grade II listed Dilston Grove is the former Clare College Mission Church on the south-west corner of Southwark Park. Built by the original Wembley Stadium architects Sir John Simpson and Maxwell Ayrton in 1911, it’s the earliest example in England of a poured concrete construction. It was described as the finest modern Read more ...
alice.vincent
With the launch of the Wunderbar Featival this week, Newcastle continues to demonstrate just what 2008’s European Capital of Culture judges missed when they anointed Liverpool. The 10-day celebration, which starts tomorrow, is international in content but thoroughly North-East in spirit: unpretentious, clever and surprising. There are 28 free and ticketed events taking place throughout the city, from conventional cultural venues such as the Baltic, Northern Stage and Gallery North to people’s private living rooms and a plot of land in Byker. It is one of those rare festivals that makes Read more ...
mark.hudson
That artists didn't just respond to the rapacious commercialism of the late 20th century, but actively contributed to it is hardly news. That the marketing of art can be part of the art itself is something everyone now implicitly understands, even if it’s only through hearing Tracey Emin wittering about herself on television.Yet if the fact that Tate Modern has chosen to base its major autumn exhibition around such chronically over-exposed figures as Emin, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons seems at first almost incredible, such Read more ...