Tate Modern
judith.flanders
The show opens with his iconic 1991 piece, My Hands are My Heart, a double photograph of Orozco’s naked torso. In the first photograph his hands clutch a hidden object at chest-height; in the second the hands splay open to present to the viewer a piece of clay, now impressed with his fingermarks in the shape of a heart. In two simple images, Orozco encapsulates the artist’s act of creation, and then of offering the creation to the viewer. It is simple, and touching in its simplicity.Much of his work relies on this type of essentialism: he uses found materials, recycled objects, to make Read more ...
josh.spero
If you found yourself thinking that you were watching Mission: Impossible rather than Imagine, you could have been forgiven. Alan Yentob had clearly been banned from meeting Ai Weiwei in China, and so one of their interviews was conducted over a webcam, with Yentob sitting in the dark, like some spymaster of the arts.This was even before Ai had been put under house arrest to prevent him from attending a party he arranged to celebrate the demolition of his studio in Shanghai (a studio which the Chinese Government had asked him to put up in the first place...). All of which prompts the question Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A snaky conga of women in white pantsuits snuggling their loins together in a Spanish dance, and wiggling their way along a wall behind a Joseph Beuys installation may well be one of the indelible sights of my dance year. Mine, and that of only a few dozen other people, who happened to be in the right Tate Modern gallery at the right moment when this extraordinary little event took place.Trisha Brown is much less well known here than her colleagues Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp and of course Merce Cunningham, but like Cunningham Brown was a child of the countryside in Washington State, and like Read more ...
fisun.guner
Howard Jacobson, fresh from his Booker Prize triumph, was on an admirable mission last night: to rescue the good name of the Victorians. He wanted us to stop caricaturing our 19th-century forebears as prudish, self-righteous, pompous and hypocritical - you know, the sort of people who were so repressed that they went about covering piano legs in case thoughts should turn to the sensual curve of a lady’s well-turned ankle, but who were also notorious for sexual peccadillos involving underage maidservants, and worse.In other words, so maligned and misunderstood did he think the Victorians had Read more ...
fisun.guner
Three days after its closure, and just a few days after opening, Tate Modern is still to make an announcement over the future of Ai Weiwei's interactive Turbine Hall installation. Will the closure of the dust-emitting artwork be permanent? Or are the Tate perhaps thinking of issuing dust masks to the public, which may, in fact, add a thrilling "danger zone" dimension to the experience?
It may be remembered that Tate Modern faced similar fears when it opened a decade ago. With the high number of visitors, it was suggested that the untreated wooden floors were creating enough dust to cause Read more ...
judith.flanders
Gauguin has always been the poor relation in the art-legend sweepstakes. Unlike Van Gogh, there is no heartwarming story of overcoming lack of technical facility; no ghoulishly enjoyable story of genius crushed by madness. Instead, there is a story that veers from irritating to deeply unattractive: a businessman and Sunday painter, Gauguin acquired his technical skills across a range of art forms with almost insolent ease, before abandoning his wife and children in poverty to flee to ever-more exotic locales, where he lived with a succession of (in today’s terms) underage girls, some Read more ...
judith.flanders
In 1994, Francis Alÿs joined the regular hiring-line in the central square in Mexico City. Standing next to plumbers and carpenters with their hand-lettered signs touting their skills, his sign read "Turista", as he offered his ability to be an outsider looking in. Three years later, he returned to the square, the centre of city life, and the site of the annual Independence Day parade, and the "Grito de Dolores", the patriotic ringing of the bells at the National Palace which up to half a million people attend. For Alÿs's own Patriotic Tales, his parade is smaller, as he walks around the Read more ...
sue.steward
In the week that Sarah Ferguson was caught on a secret camera receiving a stash of $40,000 from News of the World journalists, Tate Modern launched this ambitious and excitingly diverse photography exhibition. Had the meeting been earlier, the incriminating images would have been perfect for the show. Instead, the Royal Family is spied on in Alison Jackson’s unusually generous parody, The Queen Plays with her Corgis. Spread across 14 rooms, the collection holds over 250 still images and several short films, and includes work by legends from the early years and 20th-century icons (from Read more ...
fisun.guner
Since its millennium opening, Tate Modern has managed to transform the landscape for the contemporary visual arts in Britain. This week it celebrates its 10th anniversary by inviting 70 of the world’s most innovative, independent art spaces to take over the Turbine Hall. No Soul for Sale – a Festival of Independents will see an eclectic mix of art, performance, music and film throughout the weekend. Organised in collaboration with Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan (most famous for his dead Pope John Paul II struck by lightning), the weekend promises visitors a chance to experience a Read more ...
fisun.guner
Last year, visitors to Tate Modern’s Artists’ Rooms could see a room dedicated to Jannis Kounellis. It was filled with some of his most resonant work: a door filled up with drystone walling; burlap sacks of grain, rice, pulses; metal bells. For a founder-member of the Arte Povera movement, it was surprisingly bucolic.Now, in the bowels of the University of Westminster, past a car park and in what was probably once a series of machine rooms, the other side of Kounellis is on view. As always, he is working with everyday materials, but these are now industrialised – coal, metal, steel, and Read more ...
fisun.guner
Arshile Gorky found it almost impossible to finish a painting. Something would always call him back. So he would go back and would add and retouch and tinker around over several years - sometimes over the course of a decade or two. “When something is finished,” he once said, “that means it’s dead, doesn’t it? I never finish a painting, I just stop working on it for a while. The thing to do is... never finish a painting.”His early paintings, his figurative still-lifes, particularly - not the late, softly fluid, lyrical abstractions that would profoundly influence the course of American art - Read more ...
fisun.guner
Modernist art movements are a lot like totalitarian regimes. They produce their declaratory manifestos, send forth their declamatory edicts, and, before you know it, a Year Zero mentality prevails: the past must be declared null and void. Seeking to overturn 1,000 years of Western civilisation with a universal aesthetic utopia of brightly coloured squares and boldly delineated lines, a confident Theo van Doesburg, founding member and chief theorist of the Dutch movement De Stijl, wrote, “What the Cross represented to the early Christians, the square represents to us all. The square will Read more ...