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...

The Sacrifice (1986, dir Andrei Tarkovsky, starring Erland Josephson, Susan Fleetwood) I went to the Arsenal in Potsdamer Platz on Monday 12th of July to see the former Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky´s last film ´The Sacrifice´. It was unbelievably hot in Berlin, but cool enough in the cinema (which obviously must have been air conditioned). The programme began with a charming Tarkovsky short from his earlier period working in the Soviet Union, The Waltz and the Violin. The film demonstrates Tarkovsky´s story-telling capabilities and ability to depict character in a shorthand of disparate images. The film is not typical Soviet propaganda nonsense, but a sensitive depiction of childhood. The main feature, Tarkovsky´s final film ´The Sacrifice´, dating from 1986, therefore wedged in between the final years of the Cold War and the beginning of the era we live in. ´The Sacrifice´ is a concoction of constricted art house pretentiousness and visionary epiphanies that aim to revea...

PRESS RELEASE VENICE: CANALETTO AND HIS RIVALS 13 October – 16 January 2011 Sainsbury Wing Admission charge Sponsored by Credit Suisse ‘Antonio Canale…astounds everyone in this city who sees his work, which is like that of Carlevarijs, but you can see the sun shining in it.’ (Alessandro Marchesini, painter and adviser to collectors, July 1725) This landmark exhibition presents the finest assembly of Venetian views by Canaletto and his 18th-century rivals to be seen in a generation. Bringing together around 50 major loans from the public and private collections of the UK, Europe and North America, Venice: Canaletto and His Rivals highlights the extraordinary variety of Venetian view painting, juxtaposing masterpieces by Canaletto with key works by artists including Luca Carlevarijs, Michele Marieschi, Bernardo Bellotto and Francesco Guardi. Featured works span the 18th-century, from one of the first accurately datable Venetian views by L...

FREDERICK CAYLEY ROBINSON: ACTS OF MERCY 14 July – 17 October 2010 Sunley Room Admission free Supported by the Wellcome Trust Frederick Cayley Robinson (1862–1927) is one of the most distinctive yet elusive British painters of the early 20th century. This will be the first exhibition of his work to be shown in the United Kingdom for over 30 years. The four central paintings on display are the summation of Cayley Robinson’s artistic ambition. Executed between 1916 and 1920, his masterpiece, Acts of Mercy, comprises four large-scale allegorical works commissioned to adorn the new Middlesex Hospital, rebuilt between 1928 and 1935. Combining modernity with tradition to remarkable effect, the artist emulates the spiritual integrity and methods of the Old Masters he encountered in the National Gallery. Alongside Cayley Robinson’s modern works, National Gallery paintings by Piero della Francesca (The Baptism of Christ, 1450s), Sandro Botticelli (Four Scenes from the Early Life of Saint Zen...

Buried Child by Sam Shepard at the English Theatre, Luftbrücke Platz, Berlin, 1st May 2010 There´s a fundemental distinction in all art, poetry, film, theatre between showing and telling. Perhaps ´Buried Child´ crosses the line, becoming too didactic as any work made in a time of economic depression tends to (John Steinbeck´s ´The Grapes of Wrath´, echoing in itself ´The Battle Hymn of the Republic´ which more or less goes ´the Lord will smite those our enemies down with much wailing and gnashing of teeth...´. There´s a deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth in ´Buried Child´ though.) An aged patriarch, Dodge, decays on the sofa pickling himself with a conveniently hid bottle of whisky. His sons are: the imbecile Tilden who gathers vegetables from the fields, Bailey who has been left crippled in an agricultural incident. So there´s paralysis, emasculation and a buried child. I mean why would anyone bury a child? Children are born in order to be loved by their parents. The clue to...