Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 179
October 16, 2015
Genital caricatures and a satsuma Sistine Chapel – the week in art
Ken Kagami offers thousands of Frieze art fair punters a free caricature of their genitals. Plus the strangest of the strange in edible art, and what life looks like without smartphones – in your weekly dispatch
Peter Lanyon
This British abstract(ish) painter’s fascination with gliding – which ultimately led to his death in 1964 – is the theme of the latest exhibition at one of the most thoughtful galleries around.
• Courtauld Gallery, London, until 17 January.
October 15, 2015
Boris Johnson’s ugly soul is visible through an unlikely window: rugby | Jonathan Jones
The London mayor is so ambitious he even wants to win a schoolboy game. But politics is not real life – and his opponents will not be so easy to tackle
Is this the famous Churchill factor that Boris Johnson has written about – the quality of leadership that sets a great politician apart? Or is it an unmistakable exposure of the kind of silliness that must have the Labour party praying Johnson becomes the next leader of the Conservative party?
Boris Johnson’s hero, Winston Churchill, fought in India and the Sudan, and was taken prisoner in the Boer war. Johnson himself recently offered to take part in a brigade of art lovers to defend antiquities in Syria. In reality, however, here he is in a set of risible images knocking down a 10-year-old Japanese boy in a game of touch rugby.
Related: I, Boris Johnson, have so much in common with Shakespeare | Catherine Bennett
Continue reading...A satsuma Sistine Chapel – and other strange edible art
For a nation on a Bake Off sugar high, a new contest to find the best food art is a delicious diversion – but it will never feed the soul like the real thing
Britain loves baking. A nation was glued to its screens to see Nadiya Hussain win The Great British Bakeoff recently, as if a TV cookery show actually mattered.
Me too. In fact, I am so down with the Great British Bake Off that I agreed to be a judge in an art homage to it, called Edible Masterpieces. The Art Fund contest challenges art- and food-lovers to create culinary tributes to artworks. It’s very much an attempt to grab some of that Mary Berry cool for art – my fellow judges this week included 2013 Bake Off winner Frances Quinn, though we gave first prize to just about the only entry that was not a bake.
Continue reading...October 14, 2015
Ann Veronica Janssens review – the artistic equivalent of an isolation tank
Wellcome Collection, London
States of Mind is a fun installation of coloured mist that feels like swimming through a painting by Monet – but it is light entertainment, nothing more
You have to enter a crudely created airlock – open one door, close it, then open the next – to make sure Ann Veronica Janssens’ installation doesn’t escape. It is a mist. Passing through that second door, you are enveloped. Steamy vapour fills the air and is impregnated with colour.
Look down and you can barely see your feet. Look ahead and it is impossible to work out where the wall is until you touch it or (as I did) bang into it. The only problem comes when you look up. Coloured lights in the ceiling sully the mystery somewhat, making the luminous mist easy to understand.
But as you move about, the colours change and merge. Pink to blue and blue to gold. It is like swimming in colour. Space has the weight of liquid in your mind, as the glowing mist gently creates twilit visions that are as much inside the eye as in front of it.
This is like being inside a painting by Monet or Turner. Light is another country and it feels different there. Monet painted Venice and the river Thames as clouds of incandescence. Janssens has created just such a mood in the real world. It is the artistic equivalent of an isolation tank. It definitely does something therapeutic to mind and body.
Unfortunately, the artist does not have much to play with. The room she has been given is a modern clean space in a well-appointed centre for art and science. It all feels a bit rational and confined. I’d love to experience a mist like this in a bigger, stranger space – a Gothic crypt perhaps. It might be more atmospheric.
Then again, other artists have created much more ambitious and disorientating light installations. Compared with the genuinely troubling optical and physical experiences engendered by James Turrell or Olafur Eliasson, this is disorientation lite.
The most damaging comparison, however, is with Monet and Turner. So this room full of mist makes it possible to walk into their light-filled, smoky spaces. The Tomb Raider ride at Legoland puts you inside an Egyptian tomb, but it is very different from actually exploring a pyramid. Monet does far more to the eye, releases much deeper colours, than the ones you can experience here. Looking at colour in a great work of art is emotional and mysterious. This gentle encounter with the mysteries of colour is mere light entertainment – typical of so much art you’ll see in Frieze week.
The new Musée de l'Homme is so much more than a racist cabinet of curiosities
Picasso was inspired by ‘primitive’ art here, and the Hottentot Venus was exhibited as a freak. Now, the famous anthropological museum in Paris has reopened – and it’s better than ever. It’s high time London got its own
Museums are not just places to look at interesting objects. They have personalities; they have history. The Musée de l’Homme – Museum of Man – in Paris, which has just reopened after a major renovation, has one of the richest and spiciest of biographies.
This is where Picasso came to look at African art. It was in the dusty, mysterious collections of its original home at the Trocadero that he – not to mention Matisse, Brancusi and Derain – formed an image of what was then known as “primitive” art. The power of carved masks and fetishes that artists imbibed in this anthropological museum pervades the masterpieces of modern art, from Picasso’s sculptures to Derain’s Dance and Brancusi’s totemic columns.
A history of nudity: Playboy's censorship is a throwback to the medieval era
Playboy’s hackneyed idea of what naked beauty is, and who it’s for, seems increasingly narrow in the selfie era, a golden age of the civilised nude
Playboy is to abolish the nude. Many people will celebrate this, even if the magazine once seen as the bible of sexual liberation is getting out of the business of soft porn because it has been outdone by the internet, and not for any idealistic feminist reason.
But don’t open any champagne until you have visited a few art museums. If you look at enough art, you may feel more like putting on a black armband. For this could be the end of civilisation as we know it.
Continue reading...October 13, 2015
Giacometti: Pure Presence review – the most profound, universal art of the past 75 years
National Portrait Gallery
The artist captures his family and his lovers in all their heroic human honesty in a formidable five-star show
In the last years of his life Alberto Giacometti got friendly with a young woman called Yvonne Poiraudeau – a wild character who hung out with prostitutes and gangsters in the Paris of existentialism and New Wave cinema. Giacometti calls her Caroline in his portraits of her.
Paintings of Caroline hang together in the formidable final room of this exhibition, her features worked over in tough spiderwebs of intent drawing and suspended in brown and grey washes. This woman – who Giacometti once tried to get released from prison on a theft charge – takes on the dignity of Queen Nefertiti. She is lost in time, ancient and monarchical. These paintings seem to have been found, not made. Caroline takes her place among Egyptian statues and bog-preserved bodies as a sublime image of the enduring and irreplaceable mystery of what a human being is.
Continue reading...October 12, 2015
White cube galleries are beautiful. They bore me rigid
Two new white-walled galleries emphasise the cliche of such spaces now. They try to confer authority and purity – but it’s all to convince collectors to shell out a million quid for a pile of plasticine shaped like a turd
Perfect white spaces are sepulchres for art. They have all the joy of a cenotaph, all the creativity of a chic shop.
This autumn has seen the opening of two spanking new white-walled art galleries in London – both created by the same architects, Caruso St John, who have sculpted Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery out of a former scenery-painting workshop in south London and designed a lofty white gallery for Gagosian in Mayfair.
Continue reading...October 9, 2015
'Renoir sucks' takes the world by storm – the week in art
Renoir’s reputation takes a bashing, plus autumn’s best exhibitions open as the art world hits London for Frieze week – in your weekly dispatch
Goya: The Portraits
The psychological penetration of Goya’s portraits is as unsettling as the acid colours of the flamboyant dresses and silk pantaloons of his 18th-century sitters are beguiling. At times, it seems the stylish Georgian portraitist Thomas Gainsborough has got together with the self-taught painter Henri Rousseau to produce pictures at once naive and sophisticated. Bold as brass and brave as a bullfighter, Goya sees people in full with humour, compassion and the force of truth. His portraits chronicle Spain from the optimism of the Enlightenment to the horror of the Peninsular war. Behold the rise and fall of reason.
• National Gallery, London, until 10 January 2016.
October 8, 2015
Oculus Rift will change the world, but can it change art?
Visitors to a new exhibition in London can confront monsters and wander woods in a dark, scary virtual reality world. But it’s not the art that’s astonishing – it’s the technology itself
I am walking down a dark and scary tunnel. If I turn my head, a headtorch illuminates the moist, rough walls of the narrow passage. Then I emerge in a wood. I turn my head to see a strange biomorphic statue behind me. Everything is real here, but none of it is real at all. The woods, the tunnel, the sculpture are completely three-dimensional and as I look around, the view changes as it does in real life. My headtorch picks out new, detailed bits of earth or bark, or a menacing shadow. This is exactly like walking in the world. But it is all an illusion.
I take off the headgear. I’m back in an art gallery. Canadian artist Jon Rafman has created the surreal landscape I just explored with Oculus Rift, the headset that is expected to make virtual reality commercially real when it is put on the market. It’s worth visiting Rafman’s exhibition to get a free taste of this astonishing new stage in the digital revolution. Back in the early 90s, everyone thought virtual reality was about to take over the world. No film was complete without someone wearing a visored helmet and waving their arm about like a fool. But it turned out to be the internet that changed the world, while games simply turned to Renaissance perspective to make the flat expanse of a screen seem deep and spacious.
Related: Oculus Rift virtual reality headset will ship in early 2016
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