Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 150
September 26, 2016
Those taking selfies with Hillary Clinton aren’t narcissists – but our best hope | Jonathan Jones
A photographer’s side-view of a political rally may not be the hellish vision of democracy’s death in the echo chamber of self-regard that it appears to be
It is a curiously grotesque image. While a tightly packed crowd all took selfies with the Democratic party’s US presidential candidate, a sly photographer slipped around the side. The resulting view is unflattering – not only to Hillary Rodham Clinton but the crowd. They all have their backs turned to her while they hold up phones to take pictures of … themselves, with the blue-suited HRC in the background. No one seems to want a picture just of the candidate. It’s a selfie or nothing. Meanwhile, waving and smiling, Clinton cuts an eerily isolated figure on her little stage, up against the wall, separated from the selfie-shooters by a railing, like a Francis Bacon Pope in his glass booth.
Related: Hillary: here’s what you need to do to ace the debate | Carla Sorey-Reed
Related: Trump v Clinton: 10 awkward debate questions to put candidates on the spot
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I Had Nowhere to Go review – Douglas Gordon's fatuous bio-doc of Jonas Mekas
The Turner prize-winning artist has turned his attention to underground film-maker Jonas Mekas, pairing ponderous images with Mekas’s memories of the second world war. The result is clumsy, confused and desperately manipulative
‘The villain is the 20th century,” says emigre film-maker Jonas Mekas in Douglas Gordon’s pompous, empty feature film about this counterculture celebrity’s early life. Cue loud explosions against a dark screen, or a gorilla staring from its cage, or one of the other momentarily impressive but ultimately futile gimmicks that substitute for any actual insight.
Mekas has led an extraordinary life and played a spectacular part in New York’s art and film worlds. As a leader of the “underground film” movement in the 1960s he founded the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque and, later, Anthology Film Archives; helped Andy Warhol become a film-maker; and shot hundreds of hours of avant garde life in his copious diary films.
Related: Douglas Gordon in Ibiza: why I'm giving the party island a gay makeover
Continue reading...September 23, 2016
Jackson Pollock, Paula Rego and Victoria Beckham – the week in art
The RA’s mega overview of abstract expressionism opens this week, along with portraits of dream worlds and pop stars – all in your weekly art despatch
Abstract Expressionism
Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning … some of the greatest art of the modern age crosses the Atlantic to awe us with its all-embracing sublimity. What’s not to like? See it several times.
• Royal Academy, London, 24 September–2 January
Five of the best... art exhibitions
Abstract Expressionism | Paula Rego | Eva Rothschild |Marc Camille Chaimowicz | Suzanne Treister
Prepare to be awed and exhilarated by some of the greatest art of the modern age. In the 1940s, a generation of New York artists who were fascinated by the psychoanalytic escapades of European surrealists and impressed by the muralists of revolutionary Mexico invented a new kind of art that was spacious, all-embracing, sublime and cosmic. Jackson Pollock was the first to become famous for his dripped and flicked curls of colour. Willem de Kooning painted his sexual demons, Mark Rothko the colours of nausea. The abstract expressionists are dark gods of painting.
Continue reading...September 22, 2016
This is not an article: why René Magritte is a timeless genius
Blending surrealist imagery with mainstream painting, Magritte’s apples and pipes appear on fridge magnets worldwide. But there’s something eerie and existentially troubling at the heart of it all
We will never stop marvelling at the art of René Magritte. This Belgian surrealist who died in 1967 is forever contemporary; his paintings have never gone stale and never will. They are insidious conundrums that can never be solved, and the 21st century just can’t resist puzzling over them.
A Magritte retrospective called The Treason of Images is about to open at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris, following major showings of his art this decade in New York and Chicago, not to mention Tate Liverpool. Why do museums keep putting on big Magritte shows and why do the crowds keep coming?
Related: Missing piece of lost Magritte painting is discovered in Norwich
Continue reading...September 21, 2016
William Kentridge review – love and propaganda on a trip through the stars
Whitechapel Art Gallery, London
Bolshevism, Einstein, a journey to the moon… the South African artist’s new show is a dazzling montage of modern times
It is a century and more since the modern age began. Dadaism started in 1916. Other movements and ideas that still shape our lives have either had or soon will have centenaries, from Einstein’s general theory of relativity (published in 1916) to the Russian revolution (1917). Where have we got to, after all those revolutions? Is art (and even science) in the 21st century any more than a retread of the innovations of the early 20th? Does the violence of modern history leave us with any hope?
Related: Out of South Africa: how politics animated the art of William Kentridge
Related: Eyes on the prize: the must-see art and design of autumn 2016
Continue reading...September 20, 2016
Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII: the most boring controversial artwork ever | Jonathan Jones
BBC4 is revisiting the hoo-ha over Carl Andre’s ‘pile of bricks’, which angered conservative art lovers in the 1970s. But the real scandal is that we’re still talking about this banal artwork
Most works of art that cause controversy are by their nature sensational. They are sexually graphic, or violent, or politically contentious. Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII is different. It is the most boring controversial artwork of all time.
Related: Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art? review – a daft idea is not art
It is not immaterial in the way conceptual art aspired to be. It is as solid as brick. It is also as stupid as brick
Continue reading...September 19, 2016
Reality is officially more powerful than art – but only just
Research finds people react more calmly to art images than real-life ones. But art isn’t about cool contemplation – it’s a red-blooded reframing of emotion
The other day I watched stuff turn into art when I saw Tracey Emin assemble My Bed, one of the most controversial readymades ever created. At the start of her installation there was a mattress on a plinth and two tables of carefully bagged objects. By the time she’d finished, My Bed was something special – it was art. But can you turn ordinary objects into art simply by saying so?
Related: Tracey Emin makes her own crumpled bed and lies in it, on Merseyside
Continue reading...Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond review – missed opportunity to truly explore mental health
Wellcome Collection, London
This jumbled exhibition tracking changing attitudes to mental illness could have been a powerful study of Bedlam and psychiatry. Instead it fails to make sense of the real place and the myth
Sir Alexander Morison stands tall and sombre with his top hat in his left hand and a white handkerchief in his right. His eyes are grey and slightly sunken, his lips thin, his face long and gaunt. He seems marked by the sadness of his profession. For Morison was an “alienist”, a 19th-century doctor of mental illness, at London’s infamous asylum Bethlem Hospital, popularly known as Bedlam, whose history and cultural significance are explored by the Wellcome Collection’s new exhibition Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond.
Related: Taking over the asylum: art made at Bedlam and beyond – in pictures
Continue reading...September 16, 2016
Burtynsky, brass bands and a divine bull-ride – the week in art
William Kentridge comes to the Whitechapel, Zaha Hadid’s successor speaks and we rule on a cultural showdown between London and Paris – all in your weekly dispatch
William Kentridge: Thick Time
Time and memory, history and politics are the stuff of the acclaimed South African animator’s recent works.
• Whitechapel Gallery, London, 21 September-15 January.
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