The Engine

 Approximately Nowhere by Michael Hofmann (Faber & Faber) Price: £7.99  Michael Hofmann’s collection Approximately Nowhere is subversive and simultaneously conformist in its attempt to describe or enscribe modernity. A typical poem mentions the venerable and antique, and contrastingly modern vocabulary and imagery: Some kill somewhere upstate. Bud light A gutted mill, three storeys of brickwork, Mattresses and condoms, elder and sumac, Child abusers fishing for chub in heavy water.                                                             (Rimbaud on the Hudson)  My initial question was, why Rimbaud? And why, particularly the Hudson, which connotes Hudson Bay or the Hudson River? Rimbaud is a venerable French poet, with a risque reputation, his homosexuality and eventua...

  AUBREY BEARDSLEY at the TATE BRITAIN on the 20 th August 2020   Aubrey Beardsley was born in Brighton in 1872.   Beardsley lived his life with an awareness that he would not live long for he suffered from tuberculosis which was at that time incurable.   Beardsley was not the only artist to have contracted the illness.   Poets and composers like John Keats, Frederic Chopin and Carl Maria von Weber all died from TB.   The German novelist Thomas Mann wrote a study of the treatment of TB in his novel Die Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain).   Beardsley seems to have been determined to perfect his art which was reduced to the simplest materials and means, black ink on paper (there are some few exceptions where he uses colour).   His work is condensed, reduced in size and scale, yet Beardsley’s imagination was expansive, his creativity seemingly inexhaustible, playful, and boundless.   Significantly, there is no trace of self-pity to be found ...

  TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG dir Justin Kurzel   The True History of the Kelly Gang comes complete with bearded, corpulent Russell Crowe as a Godfather of crime (not a Godfather of acting although one suspects that this was his actual role).   There have been other interpretations of the Kelly legend, previously in 1970 a version with Mick Jagger as Ned and in 2003 Heath Ledge assumed the mantle of the eponymous anti-hero and bushranger, Ned (Edward) Kelly.   Heath Ledger’s interpretation of Ned is more like a western shot in Australia, Ned speaks with a strong Irish accent and his protest is coherently and vividly depicted. Justin Kurzel's film True History of the Kelly Gang concurs with the Postmodern dogma that, in the words of Nietzsche, 'there is no such thing as truth, only interpretation.'   Kurzel had previously shot Shakespeare’s Macbeth in the manner of a Sam Peckinpah flick with lots of groaningly awful slow-motion decapitation.  ...

  ANDY WARHOL AT THE TATE MODERN, 19 TH AUGUST 2020   Andy Warhol was born in 1928 in Pittsburgh, USA, the son of immigrants from Slovakia whose original name was Warhola.   Warhol began his career as a graphic designer, the clean delineation and unindividuated use of blocks of colour is unmistakable.   Warhol’s main aim was to make money from his talents, but he also wanted to be taken seriously as an artist.   He therefore sought to create an artform based on the mass production techniques of post-war American capitalism.   Warhol’s images of Campbells soup cans ( 100 Campbell’s Soup Cans 1962 by Andy Warhol, Casein paint, acrylic paint, and graphite on canvas) and coke cans ( Green Coca Cola Bottles 1962 by Andy Warhol) imply the equalising impetus of US capitalism where rich and poor consume the same products.   The repetitious banality of mass production techniques implied in such artworks as a legitimate source of inspiration and influence...

WILLIAM BLAKE at the TATE BRITAIN on the 27 th of January 2020 William Blake seems a necessary antidote to this era of Brexit, Climate Change and renewed crisis in international politics and affairs.   Blake too lived in such a time, when it seemed that cataclysmic, transformative forces were re-shaping the world.   Although his art seldomly references the external world, many of his earth-shattering images echo the tumult that surrounded him. He produced images like Albion Rose (1793) that herald the dawning of a new age of hope, optimism and resolution summed up in his dictum: ‘If the doors of perception are cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.’ ( The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ) Blake was born in London in 1757.   He lived at a time when two great philosophies dominated society, the Enlightenment and Romanticism.   Blake’s work bears the imprint of both.   The Enlightenment sought to challenge the grip on society of superst...

TROY at the BRITISH MUSEUM on the 29 TH of January 2020 The British Museum’s exhibition Troy is a history of the city and its conflict in a thousand objects.   Through the words of Homer and, later, Virgil, we first glimpse daily life in the city and the beginnings of a conflict that will envelop the region, drawing in other, disparate forces. The first window into Troy that we encounter in the exhibition are Homer’s epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey .   The words of the poet are read, both in Greek and in English.   A part of Virgil’s Aeneid is also read, since it deals with the founding of Rome by Aeneas, a Trojan prince and survivor of the fall of Troy.   Nothing about Homer is certain.   We have no birthdate or a date for his/her birthday.   We do not know Homer’s gender, sexuality, colour or even if he/she was one person or many.   However, we do know about Homer’s religion.   Homer believed in the gods who were thought to res...

Dora Maar at the Tate Modern on the 26 th January 2020 Dora Maar seems an obvious figure worthy of recognition, her role in 20 th century art a site of revision.   She is known publicly as Picasso’s muse, his portraits of Dora Maar are, indeed, included in this exhibition.   However, Picasso is not the subject here. A heroine of Surrealism and Modernism, Maar was born in 1907, the daughter of a Croatian émigré and a French mother who was also a devout Catholic.   Her father was an architect who moved the family to Buenos Aires in 1910 but returned to Paris in 1926.   Maar was born Henrietta Theodora Markovitch, in Paris she enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Academie Julien and embarked on a career as a fine artist.   She quickly traded this career for the life of a photographer, changing her name to Dora Maar, in order to exploit commercial possibilities in fashion, advertising and erotica.   Maar realised the inherent possibilities in t...