The Engine

Revanche (dir Gotz Spielmann, Austria, 2008) Revanche (Revenge) is a film from Europe looking very like an old Hollywood western. The storyline, for the film is narrative driven, concerns a couple, one a Ukrainian prostitute (Tamara), the other a craggy Austrian ex-con (Alex) who plan to go on the run after leaving Vienna and attempting a heist in a small village, then running over the border to lawless Spain (standing in for Mexico). The whole plans seems quite naïve (for an experienced ex-con) and the heist goes predictably wrong, as the local cop, a man with a true shot and a big conscience gets the girl in the back. The film evolves out of a Vienna which is not like the Vienna of apfelstrudel and Mozart but more the Vienna of Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s The Third Man , a dark, sordid dive of a place replete with awful brothels, Russian lapdancers with their horrid, seedy pimps, awesome dumps looking, indeed, like awesome dumps. There’s a neat division between the city and the...

Arshile Gorky at The Tate Modern, February 2010  After the recent retrospective of the work of Mark Rothko there is an attempt to resuscitate yet another lost American Master, Arshile Gorky. Lost because of his tragic early death, but also lost because his influence is now indecipherable as he basically established the conditions for the rise of Abstract Expressionism and then Pop Art. The central focus of the exhibition is Arshile Gorky’s portrait, taken from some extant, discovered photograph, of the young artist with his mother. She was a victim, for the exhibition is very quick to establish Gorky’s victim status, of a historical footnote, the 1915 Armenian genocide of which Adolf Hitler once declared: “who remembers the Armenian genocide?” His mother’s starvation at the hands of the retreating minions of the Ottoman Empire, his subsequent flight to America with his sister to be with their father is the stuff of romance fiction, yet Arshile Gorky nevertheless maintains a tra...

CHRIS OFILI EXHIBITION AT THE TATE BRITAIN Chris Ofili's work replaces actual art with a reliance on gimmicks. The gimmick for the early canvases presented here is a lump of elephant dung set into each painting and further pieces serving as base props for the canvas. This might be stimulating if it were done once or perhaps twice but it is simply done ad nauseum, representing a tremendous heave (for the elephant) and a tremendous sigh of relief for the visitor leaving behind this awesome stool. Ofili might be better served finding a Daliesque moustache or some other actual gimmick, tic or identifiable sign. Try growing a silly tache, dying your hair some weird or wonderful colour etc etc etc. There's nothing weird about Ofili's further work which is largely to do with the female nude, thus confirming the salient fact that Ofili is a man like any other man, not some effete South Ken woofter. (That's fine Chris but do we really need to see that nude over and over...