The Engine

ANDREA PALLADIO at the ROYAL ACADEMY  The new exhibition at the Royal Academy is a modern look at the work of Andrea Palladio (1508-1580).  I had heard that Palladio’s architectural concepts were musical in inspiration, but I didn't see much of that beyond his understanding of proportion, the rule of thirds, incredible symmetry, his understanding of the rules of classical perspective and the perspective used in Renaissance Italy, his contemporary world. Many of his drawings are haphazard sketches clearly made on the job, while some drawings are incredibly sophisticated, many drawn by his son, who clearly had a big hand in the advertising campaigns for new designs. Palladian buildings can be found in the UK, where they influenced the dramatist and architect Vanbrugh amongst many others.  There are also examples in Russia, in America.  In fact they have been imitated everywhere and are an important single basis for modern architecture.  The emphasis of the ...

MAGNIFENCE OF THE TSARS, VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, SOUTH KENSINGTON, LONDON The new exhibition at the V & A is 'Magnificence of the Tsars', an exhibition that glories in the opulence and decadence of the Tsars, with little mention of the rest. By 'the rest' I mean the rest of society including nobles, aristocrats, boyars, civil servants, merchants, lawyers, doctors, lecturers, teachers. None of them are mentioned in the exhibition, apart from exhibitions of the cloths of servants such as Heralds and Postillions. The Russian ruling elite was very narrow indeed compared to those in Western Europe, sharing few of their extensive luxuries and comforts, who would ultimately enact a chilling revenge but firstly replacing then deposing the Tsars in their year of destiny, 1917.  Most of the garments on show here were gathered from France and other Western European countries. Essentially Russia had a scarcity of nascent culture and cultural traditions, the Tsars we...

In history as in nature, decay is the laboratory of life. - Karl Marx

Hi Simon, I've got a remarkable dvd of Slavoj Zizek and one about Derrida too. Zizek is the less lionised figure and comes across as remarkably accessible human being. Often he appears in bed talking to camera and he's making a tent with his hand as he vigorously masturbates. He's telling us he's alive, both in dialectical terms and in terms of pouring spumes of semen into the atmosphere. By contrast Derrida is rarely so candid. Often he's seen cooking a scrambled egg that never constitutes anything but its own, mere derision. At other times he's treated like a god, a twentieth-century man god who happens to be in a film too. The film is never so innovative as it fancies itself to be, but the Zizek film is the more recommended: from lacan dot com http://www.lacan.com http://www.lacan.com/lacan1.htm Slavoj Zizek Beckett with Lacan - part 1 http://www.lacan.com/article/?page_id=78 The achievement of Joyce simultaneously signals his limit, the limi...

Mark Rothko retrospective, The Tate Modern, London Francis Bacon retrospective, The Tate Britain, London Two simultaneous retrospectives of two major 20th century artists seems indulgent, also the decision to depict Rothko as a major modern, Bacon as a major Brit.  However, perhaps this division is telling and necessary. Rothko's painting is obviously hardly painting in the traditional sense but that's not the point, is it?  It's an architectural style of painting, his works sit well in large buildings like the Tate Modern or in the skyscrapers of New York, Frankfurt or Tokyo. The dimensions of his canvases are a statement of their own, his work is consistently bold and large with a masculine and legitimate bravura. But the works are essentially viewed in their context, just as the music of Mozart or Schubert (cited as influences on Rothko) need to be set in their specific contexts as well as being liberated from that by the process of analogy. It's clear in Rot...

BYZANTIUM 330-1453 ROYAL ACADEMY, LONDON This exhibition deals with the period between the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Renaissance, a period that is often called The Middle Ages, the Medieval Period or simply but not very informatively, ‘the Dark Ages’. During this time a major locus of civilisation was Byzantium and its formation from the Eastern half of the Roman Empire until its destruction by the Ottoman Turks is a story not of great, original innovations but of absolute uniformity and continuity. Essentially this was a period of retrenchment and austerity when many of the great gains of the Greek and Roman periods were consolidated but civilisation and therefore all the patterns of life including art and culture, remained essentially static. Perhaps that’s why a poet as WB Yeats writes several great poems about Byzantium, because it represents absolute perfection and utter stasis, possibly reflecting his own radical assortment of views albeit deployed in the ...

COLD WAR MODERN, VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, SOUTH KENSINGTON, LONDON  The Cold War Modern exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum is an attempt to reconcile versions of modernity represented by both sides in the Cold War. The exhibition includes a detailed Cold War chronology beginning after 1945 and then the thaw in East\West relations after the death of Stalin and Kruschev's famous speech denouncing Stalin (and his crimes of the 1920s and 1930s, including the famine in the Ukraine that was probably manipulated for political ends, the show trials and the era of the purges). There was some mention of the pre-1939 era, a prelude to the Cold War, but the chronological division also echoed the ideology of the exhibition which focused on how detonated and defused all the various legacies of the Cold War had become. Later versions of Communism in Eastern Europe, particularly in Yugoslavia, harked back to the 1917 era as a Golden Age which could be somehow recaptured only if...