Visual arts
Jasper Rees
There’s a lot of art currently happening under the wing of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. The common denominator, if there is one, is showstopping ambition and the concept of the inclusive spectacle. What there isn’t much of, whisper it softly, is art inspired by sport.Agreed, they tend not to mix (especially when it comes to football). A stage version of Chariots of Fire plus a couple of films about running (Personal Best, Fast Girls) have track and field covered. Visual art in particular lags behind the mobile art forms. There’s a new show about horses at the British Museum, and the Read more ...
fisun.guner
“I realise how lucky I am coming from Margate. It’s a most romantic, sexy, fucking weird place to come from. I didn’t come from the suburbs.” Tracey Emin’s relationship to her hometown mirrors a familiar trajectory. Like all difficult relationships, it has chipped away at her psyche for years. Not surprisingly, we’ve sensed it played out in her work: first defiance and rejection, then a kind of ambivalent reconciliation, and finally a deep affection.What is arguably her best work, the 1995 video, Why I Never Became a Dancer, which must surely be read as a modern-day, cult-of-celebrity fairy Read more ...
Steven Gambardella
In the cool, dim, municipal modernist interior of Hornsey Town Hall you’re confronted with a neon sign: And Europe Will be Stunned. It's the title of the trilogy of films at the heart of this Artangel-commissioned show by Israel-born Yael Bartana. The films are split in location around the building in an exhibition which includes neon slogans and posters which can be taken away, bearing manifestos in different languages.The first film, Mary Koszmary (Nightmares) (2007), sees a young politician walk into the derelict and virtually desolate Decennial Stadium to deliver a contentious speech Read more ...
Anne Blood
After a £9.2 million renovation of its new home on Ramillies Street by the Irish architects O’Donnell + Tuomey, the Photographers’ Gallery re-opened to the public on Saturday with a slick new look and an expertly curated exhibition of works by the veteran Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. Although just before the renovations began there were whispers among the photography community that the Gallery had begun to lose its relevance and critical edge, the new space and exhibition programme will surely allay any such fears.The original Victorian warehouse has been extended by two storeys, a Read more ...
Graham Rickson
It’s cold, grey and damp. Welcome to Leeds. The city centre has grown more homogenous, less distinctive since I arrived here in the 1980s, but there are still delights to be found.There’s an art gallery with a very decent collection of 20th-century British art, adjoining the Henry Moore Sculpture Institute. At the other end of the city centre, on a site once occupied by an enormous utopian housing development, sits the West Yorkshire Playhouse. The building looks more like a large branch of Tesco than a theatre, but it’s thriving, and does attract a broad audience. The lovely old City Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Queen is the first mass-media monarch, and still probably the most ubiquitously depicted person in history. Her 60 years on the throne is only exceeded by Victoria, and her reign has coincided, of course, with photography, film and television. The profusion of royal imagery is exaggerated and exacerbated by the cult of celebrity and the new technology of the internet and social networking. This has led to an overwhelming sense that the public has the right to know the most intimate details of the lives of public figures.The Queen however has, one way or another, escaped the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Prunella Clough, 1919–1999, was one of the most idiosyncratic and original British artists of the postwar period. Her art is reticent, shy, subtle - yet in both life and aesthetics she was a free and generous spirit. Now there is a fine selection of works large and small, but all domestic in size, on view in the West End, marking the publication of a magisterial new biography by Frances Spalding.Although Clough has been widely exhibited her art remains curiously unknown and unappreciated on a wider scale. Her peer group, including the postwar Neo-Romantics, have been positively scrutinised Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Wordsworth would not be happy. The bard of Grasmere once wrote a poem deploring the new-fangled habit of tourists wandering about the lakes with a book in hand. “A practice very common,” he harrumphed, before crossing out the whole poem. The preference, as he saw it, should be to engage directly with the landscape rather have one’s responses fed to us through the prism of literature. Writing Britain goes one better (or worse): a tour of the whole island and its islands as seen through its writers, you can travel from Daphne Du Maurier’s Cornwall to Dr Johnson’s Hebrides entirely through the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
From Caro at Chatsworth and now de Waal at Waddesdon, the grandest of the stately homes are invigorating their historic collections with seasonings of the contemporary. Like Chatsworth, Waddesdon also has a growing permanent collection of contemporary sculpture housed in its famous gardens, from Michael Craig-Martin to Richard Long, as well as a small group of Lucian Freud indoors, including a portrait of the current Lord Rothschild.The impulse is understandable: to enliven, enhance and underline the historically frozen displays. If the intellectual aesthetic framework complements and Read more ...