The Engine

GERHARD RICHTER AT THE TATE MODERN  Gerhard Richter (b 1932, Dresden, Germany) typifies German suburbia, a Dresden artist who settled in Duesseldorf the middle class twin of neighbouring working class Cologne. As an Ossi who became a Wessi Richter settles on the disturbing facts of German history but also provides a commentary on perception, ways of seeing the past through unsettling images of his father, who he hardly knew, clownishly gaping at the artist through soft focus grey tones. His Uncle Rudi in Wehrmacht gear smiles endearingly at the artist/camera, for Richter early on decided upon photorealism as an art aesthetic through the then dominant medium of black & white photography. He gravitates through this to emerge into full colour abstraction as a further plausible re-invention before returning to grey photorealism in his depiction of the German autumn, the "suicides" of Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Esslin in 1977.  In a retrospective view fro...

POSTMODERNISM: STYLE AND SUBVERSION at the Victoria & Albert Museum The curators of Postmodernism have traced the origins of the so-called Postmodern movement back to the '60s, to the work of Ettore Sottsas (1917-2007) and Alessandro Mendini (1931- ). The focus on radical design and dystopian possiblities is reminiscent of some of the typical movements of the former part of the 20th century and Postmodernism does seem to be an outcrop (or a barren outcrop) of both Surrealism and Futurism (which also originated in Italy). The exhibition binds a host of diverse artists, architects, alternate movements to it's thesis that Postmodernism was a driving force in culture from the 60s onwards, eventually feeding into the mass culture of the 1980s before ultimately dissipating. Postmodernism is presented as binding together different cultural possibilities such as the typifying admixture of high art, classicism and pop culture owing aesthetic loyalty only to the next hollow cli...

THE VORTICIST MOVEMENT at the Tate Britain  The Vorticist Movement flourished in Britain in the years immediately before and during WW1, culminating in the second and last edition of Blast , the movement's journal and the death of one its major luminaries and activists, the sculptor Henri Gaudier Brzeska (1891-1915) in the Great War. The American poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and the Canadian artist Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) provided the main dynamic to the group's collective ethos which was aggressive, powerful, incendiary but also adolescent and arrogant. The hysterical manifesto prose style of Blast 1 is unpalatable, unbearably arrogant, bullish, extreme, harsh, verging on angry fascistic ravings (for Pound and Lewis were both to drift to the extreme right after WW1).  The movement is paralleled with the Russian Constructivist art movement and Italian Futurism, putatively illegitimate children of the Great War. Blast 1 is characterized by its hysterical, hilariou...

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...