The Engine

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (Artificial Eye, 2010, director – Sophie Fiennes)  I braved the rain tonight and went to the screening of Over your Cities Grass will Grow by director Sophie Fiennes which turned out to be a documentary and bio-pic of the artist, Anselm Kiefer (1945 - ).  In 1993 Kiefer left his home in Buchen, Germany for La Ribaute, a derelict silk factory near Barjac in France, which happens to be near Montelimar, Avignon and Nimes, the region also known as Provence. Director Sophie Fiennes has clearly enjoyed the films of Stanley Kubrick and employs the music of Gyorgi Ligeti featured in Kubrick's film, 2001; A Space Odyssey . She obviously wishes us to understand that Kiefer's artworks are as monumental as the visionary themes of Kubrick's films.  Kiefer is busily transforming the derelict site of La Ribaute into a theme park or installation, using bull dozers, drilling machines of all kinds, cement mixers and just all kinds of mechanica...

GRACE KELLY, STYLE ICON at the VICTORIA and ALBERT MUSEUM, SOUTH KENSINGTON, LONDON, AUGUST 2010 This exhibition is a retrospective view of the style icon of the 1950s, Grace Kelly (1929 - 1982), tracing her personal evolution from New England Irish Catholic girl in white gloves to make believe princess of the silver screen to her marriage to Prince Rainier of Monaco. Kelly thus lived out Hollywood's typical self-fulfilling prediction, that it can make fantasy become reality for a very few. Kelly’s career began in modelling. She was able to transpose some of the skills of dress, make up, hairstyle and care to the silver screen and beyond. The exhibition traces Kelly's do it yourself approach and improvisational elan through her career as an actress with directors such as Alfred Hitchcock. If anything it’s the conventional person she was that shines through the glitz that seems to have summed up her later career. The early costumes enable her to appear both as a voluptu...

EXPOSED: VOYEURISM, SURVEILLANCE AND THE CAMERA: THE TATE MODERN,August 2010  Exposed is a contrasting mess of disparate effects combined with some coherent strands, a formula the Tate Modern seems to be now quite adept at. The exhibition wants to ask the central question: is intrusion inherent to camera technology? It does this with reference to examples from both private and public life. Voyeurism is examined as a celebration of prying, then as a kind of dirty yet enjoyable perversion, then as something lurid leading to its eventual criminalisation (2003 in the UK).  The exhibition examines celebrities and celebrity culture. The exhibition makes us ponder over the celebrities contradictory need for the oxygen of publicity versus the needs of a private life with reference to images of Taylor and Burton enjoying some intimate, yet public moments; Kim Novak sitting down in a train's diner compartment, all the men's eyes suddenly turn to the right; Jack Nicholson in an i...