The Engine

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...