The Engine

THOMAS HOPE, REGENCY DESIGNER: VICTORIA & ALBERT MUSEUM, SOUTH KENSINGTON, LONDON Thomas Hope (1769-1831), eminent Regency period designer and visionary, is given a makeover at the V & A Museum. What's interesting about Hope giving his life and work a very modern inflection is his eclecticism, travels through the former Ottoman Empire, willingness to experiment, to create fusions and juxtapositions of the different cultures that captivated him. In this sense his work is thoroughly Post-Modern (but Post-Modernism seems also to be so retrograde). Recreations of his travels, rooms at Duchess Street off Portland Place, London and mansion at Deepdene, Surrey complement this exhibition. Hope is portrayed at the entrance to the exhibition in Ottoman gear. Themes of exoticism and orientalism are entwined in his design, something that had begun to surface in Europe as a fashion or fad at this time. For instance, in Mozart's opera Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail the Tur...

The Story of the Supreme s from the Mary Wilson Collection, Victoria & Albert Museum, South Kensington, London 1.) Strange Fruit The background to the story of The Supremes, the history of America in the 1960s, the era of the fight against racism and segregation in the deep south. Berry Gordy jnr, head of Motown records, sought a black group that could crossover, appealing to black and white audiences simultaneously. The Supremes, the group with more number ones than any 60s band apart from The Beatles, managed to do that, and they did it with an admix that guaranteed a wholesome, positive image and appeal which also catered to the black community in the US that desired positive images but also criticised The Supremes for ‘not being black enough’. This retrospective offers plentiful historical background information about the period, including material about the legitimate face of black liberation represented by the Reverend Martin Luther King and more confrontational move...

PROMETEO by Luigi Nono (1924-1990) If you know the works of Ligeti and Stockhausen, then you can imagine what Luigi Nono's (1824-1990) opera PROMETEO is like. The evening was fantastic and surely very like the premieres of Wagner's DAS RHEINGOLD or Mozart's DIE ZAUBERFLOTE although the Royal Festival Hall was almost half empty. (shame on you British music lovers, do you really exist at all?) However this didn't detract from the importance of this event, the UK premiere of PROMETEO by Luigi Nono. It's taken 20 or more years for this work to be premiered in the UK, which tells you something about how much Britain lags behind the continent in its appreciation of the artistic avante garde. In Germany alone there have been 56 performances of this work since then. The libretto is obviously derived from the well-known legend of Prometheus, but the text itself is incomprehensible to the ear, if not to the eye. I had the text before me, it was part of the programme, b...

NEW CHINESE DESIGN at the VICTORIA & ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON China is huge. China is becoming topical. Yet China remains a mystery to most people in the West. ‘Made in China’ has become a familiar tag, but the spectacular creative energy in modern China is barely known. During the last twenty years, the Chinese have rediscovered their pre-socialist past and begun to combine their own traditions with global influences to produce a cultural rebirth. At the heart of this lies a new culture of design. This exhibition will take you on a journey along China’s coastal cities to experience the country’s creative landscape. The journey starts in the far south, where graphic designers in Shenzhen began to explore new directions in the early 1990s. Next we move up to Shanghai. Here consumerism and urban culture have combined to produce astonishing fashion and lifestyles. Finally, we travel to Beijing, where monumental architecture for the Olympic Games is transforming the skyline of this ancien...

French (and Polish) cinema resurrected some of its bete noires in the 1980s, hence the makeover of 'Camille Claudel' (1988) in that decade with Adjani and Depardieu. Camille lived in the shadow of both her brother Paul, the sculpture Auguste Rodin, who purloined all her major art thinking and works. She was committed by her mama to the booby hatch where she festered for years. I remember especially in that decade, and this was just before the Communist implosion, the film 'Danton' by Andrzej Wajda (1983) with Depardieu, especially at the end when Danton is executed, Robespierre covers his head with a cloth. Its almost saying, this is the blackest day of all, darkness at noon, but it is also meant to say that Robespierre implicitly knew he was next. Danton the libertine, Robespierre the thin-lipped, narrow-minded fanatic, engulfed by the forces he set in motion. "The revolution, like Saturn, devoured its children." The film was very keen to be seen to ...

CAPOTE (2005) Dir Bennet Miller, starring Phillip Seymour Hofmann and INFAMOUS (2006), dir Douglas McGrath, starring Toby Jones, Sandra Bullock etc Capote is (yet another) bio-pic of an American hero, this time novelist Truman Capote, author of classic works Breakfast at Tiffanys and In Cold Blood , comes under the microscope. After Capote's success with Breakfast at Tiffanys , the author began to experiment with an innovative new form, which he called 'the non-fiction novel' (something of an oxymoron). This novel is concerned with the horrific slaying of a family of four, the Clutters, in Kansas by two white drifters. The film details Capote's first interest in the case, his travels backwards and forwards by train to Kansas from New York with his childhood friend Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird . His increasing absorption in the case and the ensuing trial of would-be murderers Perry Smith and Richard Hickock. Capote gathered copious notes and man...

The Painted Veil (2006), dir John Curran, starring Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, Diana Rigg and Love in the Time of Cholera (2007), dir Mike Newell, starring Javier Bardem The Painted Veil , adapted from a Somerset Maugham novel, is a moving tale of a love affair played out before the backdrop of a cholera epidemic in China sometime in the early 20th century. The film depicts the horrors of cholera, the beauty of the Chinese landscape, the trials and tribulations of Walter and Kitty Fane’s relationship. Love in the Time of Cholera , (another adaptation from the novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, adapted by Ronald Harwood) shares with The Painted Veil the theme of Europeans in a non-European locale, coping, or failing to cope, with cholera. In The Painted Veil , Walter Fane (played by Edward Norton, an American actor with a high art reputation), a British medical official sent to a remote Chinese Province to help control a cholera epidemic is estranged from his wife Kitty, who has be...

Al Gore's film leaves another inconvient truth in its wake: was this film worth making in the light of its own not insubstantial carbon imprint? I think the answer is yes, but only just. The film is at least an attempt to put across all the issues in an accessible, quite amusing and entertaining way. Gore's own religious (some would say lunatic) views shine through, although he hardly has to constantly justify them. But he is always addressing a certain audience of would-be moralists in the US who really don't think that anyone in America should move an inch to do anything about the issues that Gore depicts. Gore doesn't mention it directly, but this film is really about American exceptionalism, why it feels it can remain outside the international consensus, outside the Kyoto agreement on global warming. This film is at least a relevant, timely contribution to the debate on climate, fossil fuels and all the rest of the environmental issues that have been revolving ...