Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 151
September 16, 2016
Tracey Emin makes her own crumpled bed and lies in it, on Merseyside
The artist’s renowned 1998 installation My Bed – which she always builds herself – is about to go on show at Tate Liverpool
Tracey Emin throws her knickers on to the bed. She’s not quite satisfied, so she retrieves them and has another go. It takes five increasingly athletic throws and a lot of laughing until the pale blue underwear is in just the right state of casual abandon. For this is no ordinary bed. It is THE bed.
The bed that Count Christian Duerckheim bought for £2,546,500 from Christies in 2014 and has loaned to the Tate. The bed that has become the most enduring icon of 1990s British art, now that Damien Hirst’s poorly preserved shark looks like a shrivelled nautical antiquity. My Bed, as Emin’s 1998 readymade is titled, is set to go on display at Tate Liverpool, bringing its freight of vodka bottles, used tissues and fag butts to the north-west for the first time, and initiating a unique artistic ritual.
Related: Does Tracey Emin’s bed still have the power to shock?
Continue reading...
Five of the best... art exhibitions
Tracey Emin And William Blake In Focus | William Kentridge | Wifredo Lam | Jannis Kounellis | Mike Kelley
Who knew Tracey Emin was a fan of William Blake? When Tate Liverpool decided to exhibit Emin’s infamous installation My Bed she suggested this intriguing juxtaposition. Emin’s work will be shown beside Blake’s visions of innocence and experience. Both artists use the written word, both are bold voices from outside the traditional elite, and both defy repression. “Exuberance is beauty,” said Blake: this is a chance to compare two artists of immense exuberance.
Continue reading...September 15, 2016
Philistines can keep London – we'll always have Paris
Are there a few fag butts on the streets of the Marais? Perhaps, but anyone who thinks London is more culturally vital than the City of Light is deluded
It’s midnight in Paris – at least according to the British newspapers. A plan to police the French capital with an “incivility brigade” has opened a sewer of schadenfreude as the British media portray the city as a “post-apocalyptic hellhole”. The brigade is a public relations disaster. Its very existence draws attention to cigarette butts and public urination instead of publicising the city’s strengths, while the patrols are reported to be largely absent.
Related: Paris's 'incivility brigade' nowhere to be seen
Related: 'A tortured heap of towers': the London skyline of tomorrow
Continue reading...September 13, 2016
Someone please give Alec Baldwin a history of art lesson
The actor’s ‘original’ artwork lawsuit exposes a basic misunderstanding – art glories in repetition, not least the luscious, lyrical paintings of Ross Bleckner
Ross Bleckner’s paintings are ethereal and gorgeous. They are like post-modern Monets. Whether he is painting flowers or a cerebral cortex he captures the fragility of life in bright flashes of effervescent colour hovering over nothingness. Bleckner paints tender elegies for a world that is always passing from the light into the dark.
Related: Alec Baldwin sues art dealer over $190,000 'original' that wasn't
Continue reading...Wifredo Lam review – Cuba's last of the true surrealists
Tate Modern, London
The artist’s odyssey from Cuba to Europe and back again turned him from a disciple of Picasso into a feverish painter of gods, monsters, mystery and sex
In 1941, a group of intellectuals who believed in black magic sat in a villa near Marseille shuffling tarot cards as they waited and waited for a chance of a boat out of Nazi-occupied Europe. The tarot pack did not show their futures. Instead they drew and painted on the cards, turning the arcane symbols into portraits, the portraits into dreams. Another way to pass the time was by playing a surrealist version of the parlour game Consequences, collaborating to create bizarre collages. The time hung heavily, but in the end they sailed for the New World.
It must have seemed like a voyage backwards to Wifredo Lam. This Cuban-born artist was one of the bored refugees who played with the tarots at the Villa Air-Bel, along with André Breton, leader of the surrealist movement, who would become a lifelong supporter of Lam’s work.
Related: Eyes on the prize: the must-see art and design of autumn 2016
Related: Abstract expressionism – not just macho heroes with brushes
Continue reading...Wifredo Lam review – the last of the great surrealists
Tate Modern, London
The artist’s odyssey from Cuba to Europe and back again turned him from a disciple of Picasso into a feverish painter of gods, monsters, mystery and sex
In 1941, a group of intellectuals who believed in black magic sat in a villa near Marseille shuffling tarot cards as they waited and waited for a chance of a boat out of Nazi-occupied Europe. The tarot pack did not show their futures. Instead they drew and painted on the cards, turning the arcane symbols into portraits, the portraits into dreams. Another way to pass the time was by playing a surrealist version of the parlour game Consequences, collaborating to create bizarre collages. The time hung heavily, but in the end they sailed for the New World.
It must have seemed like a voyage backwards to Wifredo Lam. This Cuban-born artist was one of the bored refugees who played with the tarots at the Villa Air-Bel, along with André Breton, leader of the surrealist movement, who would become a lifelong supporter of Lam’s work.
Related: Eyes on the prize: the must-see art and design of autumn 2016
Related: Abstract expressionism – not just macho heroes with brushes
Continue reading...September 9, 2016
Nick Serota, Martin Roth and Tracey's bed – the week in art
There’s a changing of art’s top guard (if not sheets), while Mark Zuckerberg runs into censorship issues and London is set ablaze – all in your weekly art dispatch
Tracey Emin and William Blake
Two British mavericks meet as Tracey Emin’s works, including My Bed, are mixed with those of the visionary romantic artist and poet who wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
• Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, 16 September to September 2017.
September 5, 2016
So, Kanye West has become a Famous artist overnight? Props to him
Displayed in a gallery for two days, an automaton from the rapper’s latest video is suddenly a $4m collector’s item. Just don’t call the work on show a sculpture
Is it or is it not on sale for $4m? In case it’s not obvious, I’m talking about Kanye West’s “sculpture” Famous. According to which reports you believe, his lineup of lifelike, automated models of celebrities in bed together is either going for a lot of money, or was never up for grabs in the first place. Perhaps the “creator” himself can’t decide. That’s if Kanye moulded these figures. Did he really shape that silicone – or did he just pay for it?
Famous, originally made for the video of West’s song of the same name, has been exhibited in an “exclusive” two-day exhibition at the Los Angeles gallery, Blum and Poe – thus becoming art. Because it’s in a gallery, it has to be, right? Cue the inevitable speculation that art inspires in our lofty culture: how much is it worth? Remarkably, what little of the media coverage has asked is whether Famous is a work of art (let alone a good or bad one) or in what sense West is a visual artist.
Related: Is Kanye West hip-hop's greatest cubist?
Related: Larger than life: Duane Hanson's hyperreal sculptures – in pictures
Continue reading...September 2, 2016
This ‘Sistine code’ theory is daft. Michelangelo is not a feminist hero | Jonathan Jones
It’s a lovely thought. Up in the heights of the very chapel where the all-male cardinals of the Catholic church meet in conclave to elect popes, there is a 500-year-old feminist code that mocks the misogyny of the Christian religion. A code so well-hidden and so subversive that only now can its shattering satire on Catholic patriarchy be revealed.
So claims Dr Deivis de Campos, researcher in human anatomy at the Federal University of Health Sciences of Porto Alegre in Brazil, who is the lead author of an article in the journal Clinical Anatomy which purports to identify hidden anatomical allusions in Michelangelo’s stupendous fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel.
The discovery of the Fallopian tubes was in the mid-1500s, decades too late for the Sistine ceiling
Continue reading...Oscar Wilde behind bars and a revolution at the V&A – the week in art
Steve McQueen and Colm Tóibín remember Wilde, Marcus Harvey’s grotesque images of British history are perfect for a Brexit summer’s end and shots from the seaside – all in your weekly art dispatch
Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison
Oscar Wilde’s incarceration in Reading jail after falling foul of the Marquess of Queensberry is remembered by artists and writers including Steve McQueen and Colm Tóibín at the prison itself.
• HM Prison Reading, until 30 October.
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