The Engine

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'...

Do you not hear this horrible scream all around you that people usually call silence? - George Buchner

CANALETTO AND HIS RIVALS AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON Sponsored by Credit Suisse  Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal 1697-1768) was an Italian Rococo era painter whose views of Venice have come down to us as the epitome of view painting (vedute). They seem mathematically precise as to be miraculous, seeming to be the highest point of development of this technically exact genre. Was Canaletto really just a hack, churning out genre pieces for aristocratic clients in foreign countries (the artist was especially popular among English milordi)? Or is his work really an exploration of Venice, a city of poverty, squalor, disease, and his, Canaletto's, own place in society and all the social relations implied by his art?  Canaletto began his career like his rival and slightly younger contemporary Michele Marieschi (1710-1743) as a theatrical scene painter. This explains his willingness to tweak perspective, alter viewpoints or move buildings. He was given instruction in sc...

PAUL GAUGIN: MAKER OF MYTH: AT THE TATE MODERN  This exhibition offers us delights about the life and times of Paul Gaugin (1848-1903). These are structured thematically but not necessarily temporally: self-portraits, still lives, Breton landscapes, reclining nudes in Tahiti. Gaugin was a man essentially alone, undergoing a journey from conventionality to outrageous infamy, the pain of total isolation and death. Gaugin’s paintings exhibit pastel tones of indigo, vermilion, magenta. Relaxed, cheerful, invigorating, joyful. The paintings are about openness to experience: suffering, rejection, the misunderstanding of an ignorant, uncaring world. Gaugin persistently refers to himself as a suffering Christ in his paintings, as in his 1889 painting Christ in the Garden of Olives ; alone, rejected by everyone. Christian themes absorbed him and he seemed to need a moral arbiter of his own actions.  The influence of Christianity and conventional morality was one he sought ...

TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY: DIAGHILEV AND THE BALLET RUSSE AT THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM Diaghilev's creation of the Ballet Russe, an amalgamation of talents from diverse backgrounds, was a response to the drying up of creative opportunities in Russia in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War (1905) and the subsequent revolution of that year. Diaghilev began to move westward in order to exploit those opportunites to be found in Paris and other Western European capitals. The Ballet Russe was eventually to tour Western Europe and North America, but seems to have been especially popular in countries like Spain (where the show visited every large city) that lagged behind the rest of Western Europe and North America economically, but not artistically. Likewise the composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) also moved to Paris, where he came under the influence and the spell of the music of Claude Debussy (1862-1918). Stravinsky synthesised the music of his mentor, Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1...