The Engine

ANDREA HEWITT AT THE WIGMORE HALL The internationally famous Canadian pianist Andrea Hewitt performed works by Claude Debussy (1862-1918), Gabriel Faure (1845-1924), Paul Dukas (1865-1935) and Albert Roussel (1869-1937) at the Wigmore Hall on Friday, 25th November, 2011. The Debussy works, including Suite Bergamasque (c.1890) and L'Isle Joyeuse (1904) all typify the impressionist style of music where there is no dominant key and harmony is the most important element. Hewitt's performance was perfect in terms of tempo and was never circumscribed by critical or audience expectations. The works were played quite slowly so that the music should not become muddied and confused. Her interpretations of these works was warm, humane and forgiving, never machine-like or cold. She allowed few improvisations, however, which might have been appropriate in Golliwog's Cake Walk which needed a bit of jazzing up. Hewitt's attitude to the audience and the music was never calcul...

IMAGINARY SYMBOLS OF END TIMES: THE SCULPTURE OF BARRY FLANAGAN 1965-82 Barry Flanagan at the Tate Britain This is a retrospective of the work of the sculpture Barry Flanagan (1941-2009). Flanagan attended St Martin's School of Art from 1964-66 but his approach to sculpture isn't essentially very academic. He uses non-conventional materials such as sand, canvas, rope, sculpted cushions, installation-like assemblages resembling landscapes or even some organic entity or animal, a blue volcano topped with an aluminium object with blunted edge which may also be a face in profile (al casb 4 '67 & aaing j gni aa 1965)). A giant gourd may also resemble sagging testacles or heaped, coloured sand accompanied by two small sacks which may also be testacles stuck on an evaporating sand penis. There's also the influence of Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) and his Pataphysics, 'the science of imaginary solutions' and the work that made Jarry famous, his 'Ubu Roi'....

JOHN MARTIN: APOCALYPSE at the TATE BRITAIN  John Martin (1789-1854) was a British artist born in Newcastle into a working class family. Martin's work contrasts with that of contemporaries William Blake (1757-1827) and JMW Turner (1775-1851). Technically he was compared to Turner and his subject matter overlaps strongly with that of Blake. His reconstructions of biblical scenes offer a great urge towards verisimilitude even if there's always a hotch potch of details as in his painting The Fall of Babylon (1819). Ancient Babylon with 18th century-style ships, Babylonian soldiers in Roman uniform climbing into Victorian carriages under what seem to be Japanese bonsai trees.  Martin wanted to be taken seriously and often provided keys and appendixes to his paintings demonstrating their links to actual history. He sought to engage with Victorian populism, which was very unfashionable among the intellectual elites but also dearly wished to be taken seriously by the art es...

GERHARD RICHTER AT THE TATE MODERN  Gerhard Richter (b 1932, Dresden, Germany) typifies German suburbia, a Dresden artist who settled in Duesseldorf the middle class twin of neighbouring working class Cologne. As an Ossi who became a Wessi Richter settles on the disturbing facts of German history but also provides a commentary on perception, ways of seeing the past through unsettling images of his father, who he hardly knew, clownishly gaping at the artist through soft focus grey tones. His Uncle Rudi in Wehrmacht gear smiles endearingly at the artist/camera, for Richter early on decided upon photorealism as an art aesthetic through the then dominant medium of black & white photography. He gravitates through this to emerge into full colour abstraction as a further plausible re-invention before returning to grey photorealism in his depiction of the German autumn, the "suicides" of Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Esslin in 1977.  In a retrospective view fro...

POSTMODERNISM: STYLE AND SUBVERSION at the Victoria & Albert Museum The curators of Postmodernism have traced the origins of the so-called Postmodern movement back to the '60s, to the work of Ettore Sottsas (1917-2007) and Alessandro Mendini (1931- ). The focus on radical design and dystopian possiblities is reminiscent of some of the typical movements of the former part of the 20th century and Postmodernism does seem to be an outcrop (or a barren outcrop) of both Surrealism and Futurism (which also originated in Italy). The exhibition binds a host of diverse artists, architects, alternate movements to it's thesis that Postmodernism was a driving force in culture from the 60s onwards, eventually feeding into the mass culture of the 1980s before ultimately dissipating. Postmodernism is presented as binding together different cultural possibilities such as the typifying admixture of high art, classicism and pop culture owing aesthetic loyalty only to the next hollow cli...

THE VORTICIST MOVEMENT at the Tate Britain  The Vorticist Movement flourished in Britain in the years immediately before and during WW1, culminating in the second and last edition of Blast , the movement's journal and the death of one its major luminaries and activists, the sculptor Henri Gaudier Brzeska (1891-1915) in the Great War. The American poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and the Canadian artist Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) provided the main dynamic to the group's collective ethos which was aggressive, powerful, incendiary but also adolescent and arrogant. The hysterical manifesto prose style of Blast 1 is unpalatable, unbearably arrogant, bullish, extreme, harsh, verging on angry fascistic ravings (for Pound and Lewis were both to drift to the extreme right after WW1).  The movement is paralleled with the Russian Constructivist art movement and Italian Futurism, putatively illegitimate children of the Great War. Blast 1 is characterized by its hysterical, hilariou...

CAVE of FORGOTTEN DREAMS (dir Werner Herzog) I went to see 'Cave of Forgotten Dreams' by Werner Herzog yesterday with a friend from Belfast. It’s an interesting work in 3D but becomes a bit predictable after the initial impact although I'd recommend it, but cautiously. Interestingly those early men played the flute (constructed from a vulture's hollow wing bone) and understood the pentatonic scale. One of the researchers played The Star Spangled Banner (just like Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble...). The cave was littered with the skulls of cave bears that lived there long after those cave men came to make their cave paintings but, honestly, I was a bit confused about the time scale. Herzog was at pains to point out that the cave wasn't a fraud and that he hadn't completed the paint job an hour or so before with his many bemused Igor’s but that it was actually done tens of thousand of years ago. The lime scale that covered everything could be accurately da...

KELVIN CORCORAN: HOTEL SHADOW: SHEARSMAN BOOKS: 2010 Kelvin Corcoran is possessed of several preoccupations in his new collection Hotel Shadow. He's clearly a fan of Ezra Pound, mostly he attempts Poundian effects, assembling arcane knowledge of ancient Greek civilisation or poems just loosely imitating and/or praising Pound. It seemed to me that Corcoran is a writer with nothing to say, witless, styless with no really original style or content. The Greek stuff (Corcoran namedrops Greek thinkers and poets as if merely repeating the names Pythagoras, Socrates, Hesiod actually impresses us that Corcoran knows their thoughts or books. Why does he do this? His strategy is predictable, vain and meaningless.) is very tedious indeed and has been done better by a plethora of orthodox scholars. Furthermore, it never seems that anything happens to Corcoran the man. Does he fall in love, feel bitter ennui or even enjoy a good meal? Is he connected at all to the lives of others? ...

WATERCOLOURS: TATE BRITAIN   Watercolours are usually accorded the status of a conservative medium as opposed to oils that achieve permanence and magnificent tones and lustre. Watercolours are known for their portability, immediacy, durability.   Watercolour is a kind of early pre-camera, extending the possiblities of paint into fulfilling cartographic functions as well as depictions of terrain and fortifications. Their usage for military purposes from the late Medieval period onwards is documented in this exhibition as is their use by naturalists. Naturalists also found watercolours a convenient medium for use in the field, abroad in inhospitable or difficult terrain for pragmatic, functional purposes but they could also be quintessentially painterly in their expressive usages beyond simply mapping terrain or depicting an orchid. Watercolours also documents the use of the medium by war artists, paintings of soldiers (after Waterloo and World War 1) with grim wou...

Damien Hirst Thursday 5 April – Sunday 9 September 2012 Press release: 3 March 2011 Press Release 3 March 2011 Damien Hirst 5 April – 9 September 2012 (Press view: 3 April 2012) Sponsored by the Qatar Museums Authority Tate Modern Open every day from 10.00 – 18.00 and late until 22.00 on Friday and Saturday For public information number please print 020 7887 8888 In 2012, Tate Modern will present the first substantial survey of Damien Hirst’s work ever held in the UK. Hirst is widely regarded as one of the most important artists working today and has created some of the most iconic works in recent history. This exhibition will provide a journey through two decades of Hirst’s inventive practice. Damien Hirst first came to public attention in London in 1988 when he conceived and curated Freeze, an exhibition of his own work and that of his friends and fellow Goldsmiths College students, staged in a disused London warehouse. In the nearly quarter of a century since that pivotal show, Hir...

Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye Press release: 4 March 2011 Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye is a major exhibition which will radically reassess the work of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944). It will propose a ground breaking dialogue between the artist’s paintings and drawings made in the first half of the 20th century and his often overlooked interest in the rise of other media during that time, including photography, film and the re-birth of stage production. Few other modern artists are better known and yet less understood than Munch. He is often presented primarily as a 19th century painter, a Symbolist or a pre-Expressionist, but this exhibition will aim to show instead how he emphatically engaged with 20th century concerns that were thoroughly representative of the modernity of the age. It will feature around sixty carefully-selected paintings and fifty photographs, alongside his lesser-known filmic work. These will reveal Munch’s interest in current affairs and how his paint...

Watercolour Tate Britain Linbury Galleries Wednesday 16 February – Sunday 21 August 2011 Admission £12.70/£14.00 with Gift Aid ( £10.90/£12.00 with Gift Aid concessions) Public information number: 020 7887 8888. Press release: 14 February 2011  Tate Britain presents a fresh assessment of the history of watercolour painting in Britain from the Middle Ages through to the present day. This major exhibition shows over 200 works including pieces by historic artists such as William Blake, Thomas Girtin and JMW Turner, through to modern and contemporary artists including Patrick Heron, Peter Doig and Tracey Emin. Spanning 800 years and celebrating the variety of ways watercolour has been used, it shows how important the medium is within British art. Drawing out a grand history which traces the origins of watercolour back to medieval illuminated manuscripts, the exhibition reassesses the commonly held belief that the medium first flourished during a ‘golden age’ of British watercolo...

Joan Miro: THE LADDER OF ESCAPE: Tate Modern: April 2011  Joan Miro (1893-1983) is the least known of Spain’s twentieth-century triumvirate of great artists: Picasso, Dali, Miro. This is the first retrospective of Miro in London since 1964, quite a long time then since any notable interest in Miro’s work, but now he is clearly a part of history rather than making it. Miro’s career straddled two centuries, born in the late 19th century but living into the latter part of the twentieth, he witnessed the great conflagration of the Spanish Civil War but also the Great War and WW2.  The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and Miro’s response to it shaped his career as it did Picasso’s and Dali’s to a lesser extent. Furthermore his career went on after the fall of the Republic and his subsequent exile. Miro’s approach to art was to dissolve his own formal constraints once he had attained them, therefore his work passed through a kind of negative evolution from complexity to utter si...

SUSAN HILLER AT THE TATE BRITAIN, March 2011 Susan Hiller (born Florida, USA, 1940) is an American artist who relocated to London some thirty years ago after a brief flirtation with academia, leaving a PhD thesis on anthropology unfinished. Hiller possibly found academe too constricting, too rational for the purposes of creativity. Hiller’s work is concerned with the unconscious which was purportedly discovered by Sigmund Freud, but also seeks to relate the unconscious to art & creativity, religion, magic, the paranormal and other modes of modern discourse that perhaps exists now in an era of uncertainty when religious precepts are being overturned yet not quite convincingly replaced by the next thing. In this sense her work hardly seems more informed than does the poetry of W.B.Yeats, informed as it was by all sorts of Occult experiments, alternate, esoteric wisdom and experiments.  Items such as planchettes, ouija boards all referenced by Hiller in the various installati...

NORTHERN STAR by STEWART PARKER at the Finsborough theatre, London directed by Caitlin McLeod with Jonathan Harden, Clare McMahon, Michael Byers, Sean Pol McGreevy, Adam Best, Helen Belbin, Gemma-Leah Devereux, Mark Edel-Hunt, Anthony Delaney The Finsborough theatre is an intimate venue meaning a miniature theatre set above a wine bar and restaurant in the Kensington & Chelsea area of London. The theatre specialises in re-discovering neglected masterpieces, this is the first revival of this play in ten years, so it comes as no surprise that a late Stewart Parker play is being re-examined here in the context of Ireland's recent bankruptcy. For we can also suppose that the default will trigger another great exodus of Irish people (but where?). The play deals with the life and times of Henry Joy McCracken (1767-1798), sometime member of the United Irishmen, revolutionist, nationalist in an era before Nationalism. Firstly its obvious that the minimal resources of the theatr...

ROMEO AND JULIET AT THE ASHCROFT THEATRE, FAIRFIELD HALL, CROYDON   This production of Romeo and Juliet at the Ashcroft Theatre, Croydon, attempted to contextualise Shakespeare's great romantic tragedy within relevant, contemporary themes of knife crime and gang violence in south London. Using pop music and back projected newspaper excerpts, the director attempted to bring the play up to date, to emphasize its completely constant relevance. It largely followed in the footsteps of Baz Luhrmann's film version of 1996 but also stopped short of the baroque excesses and occasional silliness of that production. The director seemed to fail to pursue the contemporary themes throughout the play, leaving them to dangle in space at the very beginning. After this initially successful sequence the production reverted to an old-fashioned interpretation of Romeo and Juliet, thus making the bare, sparse mise en scene and contemporary dress a bit purposeless. Unlike Double Falsehood the po...

GABRIEL OROZCO AT THE TATE MODERN, February 2011 The artist Gabriel Orozco was born in Mexico in 1962, began to rise to prominence in the 1990s and now lives internationally, strung out, you might say, somewhere between New York, London and Mexico City. That sounds depressingly rootless, many of the works offer testimony to his constant shifts and possible escape acts. Some of Orozco’s works imply possible new horizons but many are rooted in art college banality. An enormous chess set with hundreds of squares, fifty or so knight pieces. The knight, uniquely, is the only chess piece that has two simultaneous moves within its single board move. In psychology a knight’s move is an attempt to connect two disparate concepts or implies the disconnected or fragmented thought process of the psychotic. Modern art, Orozco is saying, is very like psychosis in its attempt to describe chaos or fragmentariness and the connections in between without collapsing into total chaos itself. Oroz...

DOUBLE FALSEHOOD By William Shakespeare and John Fletcher Directed by Phil Willmott Designed by Javier De Frutos Produced by Ellie Collyer-Bristow for MokitaGrit in association with The Steam Industry The Union Theatre, Southwark 204 Union Street, London SE1 OLX www.doublefalsehood.org The issues surrounding the authorship of this play have been bubbling away for quite some time, since Double Falsehood was known in the 18th century to be a re-writing of the lost play Cardenio by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. The play is set in Andalucia and was originally a story told as part of Miguel Cervantes masterpiece Don Quixote. Double Falsehood was one of a number of collaborations which also included the Two Noble Kinsmen , a play which was not included in the first folio but which has come to be accepted as a work of the Shakespeare canon even though a great deal of it may be the work of Fletcher. The play was then re-written and re-presented as a lost Shakespeare wor...

SKY NEWS PROFILES PROFESSIONAL PREMIERE OF CONTROVERSIAL 'LOST' SHAKESPEARE PLAY DOUBLE FALSEHOOD By William Shakespeare and John Fletcher Directed by Phil Willmott Designed by Javier De Frutos Produced by Ellie Collyer-Bristow for MokitaGrit in association with The Steam Industry The Union Theatre, Southwark 204 Union Street, London SE1 OLX 18th January − 12th February 2011 Tuesdays to Saturdays at 7.30pm Sundays at 4pm (30th January & 6th February) Tickets: £15 £5 tickets for U21s (limited availability, first two weeks only) Box Office: 0207 2619 876 Book Online: http://www.ticketsource.co.uk/uniontheatre Cast: Adam Redmore, Emily Plumtree, Gabriel Vick, Jessie Lilley, Richard Franklin, Richard Morse, Sam Hoare, Stephen Boswell, Su Douglas & William Reay. www.doublefalsehood.org Next week Sky News profiles DOUBLE FALSEHOOD on Wednesday 12th January in bulletins throughout the day and on their website to include sneak scene previews, the reaction of one of Britain'...