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New York downtown at the Barbican
20th April 2011 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree
In the midst of government cuts and predictions of collapse and decay the Barbican’s current exhibition about New York’s ‘downtown scene’ in the 1970s seems both topical and defiantly familiar – an earlier manifestation of the recessionary ghost that keeps turning up to the party. This exhibition focuses on three artists – Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown and Gordon Matta-Clark – who lived and worked in the area now known as...
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Designer stoats
3rd March 2011 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree
Kelly McCallum shifts position in her chair slightly and says in measured tones “I generally get very strong reactions.”
We’re sitting in Kelly’s studio under an East London railway arch. Our companions include a variety of stuffed creatures from a turtle to a snarling fox’s head and three French bulldogs, the latter all very much alive. Having completed two years of pre-vet/pre-med school in America and studied metalworking at the Royal... -
Shooting the revolution
23rd February 2011 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree
Taken from what looks to be the perspective of an abseiler part way through his drop Alexander Rodchenko’s photo of the Museum of the Revolution in Moscow shows a line of fluted Greco-Roman style columns, the perspective angled so the spaces between the columns are lost and the vertical bands of light and shade fuse together. A small group of people gather at the columns’ base, dwarfed by their size....
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The art of the ‘known unknown’
11th February 2011 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree
Speaking as someone who once spent several minutes circling a slightly out of the ordinary light switch, trying to decide whether or not it was part of an art exhibition (it wasn’t) , it doesn’t pain me too much to admit that I failed the same dilemma yet again at Tate Modern’s Gabriel Orozco exhibition. I swept past what seemed to be an empty shoe box abandoned on the floor,...
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Happy Valentine’s from the heart of England
1st February 2011 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree
Short of ideas for Valentine’s day? Feeling slightly nauseated by a vista of red roses, outsized plush hearts and gift boxes of chocolate lips? How about a cast of a pig’s heart from Stoke-on-Trent instead? If the latter sounds more likely to enrage rather than entrance your true love please pause for thought because this particular piece of heart memorabilia has emerged from the dark and elegant imagination of The...
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Smart fashion at the Royal Academy
17th January 2011 | 1 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree
Back in the day when I was young and it wasn’t possible to blog randomly on subjects that took your fancy my father’s godmother lived with our family. Doris was born in pre-revolutionary Russia; she was stone deaf with an agile sense of humour and an even more lively line in dancing the mazurka. She was also the owner of The Dress, a work of art in ice blue moiré...
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A National Portrait Gallery
4th January 2011 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree
Typologies, one of Tate Modern’s current exhibitions, takes the work of German photographer August Sander as its theme. Sander’s major work, People of the Twentieth Century (Menschen des 20.Jahrhunderts), spread over most of his working life. As well as being a fascinating record of social history it tests and explores photography’s unique characteristics, its capacity to repeat similar images quickly like a riff in a song and to capture, almost...
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Walid Raad’s Miraculous Beginnings
2nd December 2010 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree
Wandering around Miraculous Beginnings, a collection of work by Lebanese artist Walid Raad currently showing at the Whitechapel Gallery I think I overhead a confident voice saying “Of course it’s important to remember that this isn’t reportage or documentary but art”. This sentence lodged in my head like a commandment that became steadily more important and yet harder to obey as I encountered successive assemblies of photos, video clips, prints...
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Seasonal Shadows
11th November 2010 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree
An empty chair with the shadow of a woman who once sat in it spilt at its feet; an embroidered christening frock devoid of baby and rendered as a luminous outline like those strands ectoplasm said to be produced by mediums. These strange, double-take images are part of the charm of Shadow Catchers, a new exhibition at the V&A which seems to capture the spirit of the season as the...
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Sea Stories: Alexander Ponomarev at Calvert 22
19th October 2010 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree
To most people art and submarines don’t seem like natural companions, their one moment of closeness being when The Beatles sang about living in a yellow submarine. Alexander Ponomarev, a Russian submariner with a love of Rembrandt, sees no logic in trying to deny the technical bravado and flights of imagination that are shared by the maritime and art worlds. Like a hidden depth charge Ponomarev cracks open what might...
CONTRIBUTOR
Brigitte Istim
I've just finished an MA in print journalism but, as can be seen from my picture, I'm nowhere near as young as that makes me sound. I've done a whole mix of things in my quite long life from training as a nurse to working in a cartoon library. Obviously I'm now hoping to establish myself as some sort of writer/journalist which is easier written than done.
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