Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 195
April 28, 2015
Myuran Sukumaran’s death-row paintings cry out against a monstrous inhumanity
The prison paintings signed by Sukumaran and the Bali Nine, who are facing death by firing squad in Indonesia, show the moral evil of the death penalty
Art can howl from the abyss and give a face to the judicially murdered. Remember me, say Myuran Sukumaran’s paintings done while the 34-year-old has been on death row.
Sukumaran learned to paint as part of his rehabilitation in prison in Indonesia, while fighting a death sentence for drug smuggling. As he and the others known as the Bali Nine faced an imminent death by firing squad, his distraught family and supporters showed his last self-portraits and protest paintings.
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April 24, 2015
Jackson Pollock, the one-man tornado who spattered his way to fame
In the 1940s, the poor alcoholic artist was saved by a rich heiress, Peggy Guggenheim. Now the pair are reunited in a knockout Venice show that busts all the myths about America’s noblest savage
In a black-and-white photograph taken in about 1946, they pose together awkwardly before a vast, swirling, abstract painting. She clutches pampered little dogs in each arm. He wears a suit, for once, as he looks at Peggy’s pooches with a shadowed face.
Peggy Guggenheim and Jackson Pollock were not lovers. They were not even friends. But the encounter between these two very different people changed art.
Legend has it that Pollock walked over to Guggenheim's fireplace during a polite party – and urinated into her hearth
Continue reading...Boris Johnson, the women wrestlers of Bolivia and a supermarket of neuroses – the week in art
What BoJo has actually done for London, who won the Sony photography awards, and how the Counter Terror Expo taps into our fears. Plus boozing in Ireland and skateboarding in Afghanistan – in your weekly dispatch
Theaster Gates
This genuinely subversive artist looks at the nature of freedom in his latest provocative confrontation of art and life.
• White Cube Bermondsey, London SE1 from 29 April until 5 July
April 23, 2015
Should art respond to science? On this evidence, the answer is simple: no way
Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda’s installation Supersymmetry is inspired by his residency at Cern – but signifies little more than that physics is weird. Isn’t it time we stopped expecting artists to understand the complexities of science?
Physics – it really does your head in. That seems to be the less than enlightening message the Japanese visual artist and composer Ryoji Ikeda – creator of the massive light beam Spectra that took over the sky in London last year to commemorate the first world war – took from a residency at Cern in Geneva.
Ikeda’s installation Supersymmetry, staged in the darkened uppermost level of a multistorey car park, is apparently what you get when you introduce an artist to the world’s most advanced particle research insitute and its renowned Large Hadron Collider. A lot of sound and light, signifying nothing.
Continue reading...Why don’t we care about the Hatton Garden heist victims? | Jonathan Jones
It’s time to call Sherlock. A picture of the hole drilled by ingenious thieves through the 50cm-thick reinforced concrete wall of the basement vault of Hatton Garden Safe Deposit over the Easter weekend reveals a mystery well beyond the powers of Scotland Yard. Inspector Lestrade and his men admit they are currently trying to understand how nine thieves got through a space just 25cm high and 45cm across.
Related: Hatton Garden heist gang were inside building when police dismissed alarm
Poe’s detective proves a double murder in an apparently secure room was carried out by an orangutan. Now we’re talking.
Continue reading...April 22, 2015
The death of culture: apocalyptic visions of our future underwater
The sea surging through the Louvre, opera houses and libraries destroyed for ever by floods … Pablo Genoves’ images offer a haunting vision of catastrophe that could almost be ripped from headlines
The future has a long history in art. Romantic painters loved to picture what the great buildings of their time would look like as ruins. The architect Sir John Soane commissioned the artist Joseph Gandy to paint Soane’s masterpiece the Bank of England not as it looked when spanking new, but as the grand vision of decay it would one day become. Soane’s apocalyptic fantasy of his own building was probably influenced by the French painter Hubert Robert, who in 1796 pictured the Louvre as a roofless ruin overgrown with weeds.
The art of Pablo Genovés resurrects and restages such visions of architectural catastrophe. In his series Precipitados, this contemporary Spanish photographer creates grand European interiors – opera houses, libraries, baroque palaces – in which floods of water or seas of sand push against bookcases, inundate staircases, crash into wrought-iron gates.
Continue reading...April 21, 2015
A giant paper boat? Art’s response to migrant drownings should be way more aggressive
Vik Muniz’s floating installation Lampedusa – made of newspaper articles about migrant deaths – will float equivocally beside the superyachts at this year’s Venice Biennale. With the death toll mounting, that’s simply not enough
The death of perhaps as many as 900 people in the Mediterranean this week – murdered by the prevailing European, including British, attitude towards migrants as surely as they were killed by human traffickers – comes a few weeks before one of the Mediterranean world’s most flamboyant displays of wealth and luxury starts.
Venice is on the Adriatic, but it has long been one of the great Mediterranean empires, ruling islands such as Crete and Cyprus and trading between the sea’s African, Asian and European shores. Today, the cruise ships loom over Renaissance palaces. Every two years, art collectors’ superyachts moor for the Venice Biennale.
Continue reading...April 20, 2015
Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation review – a fabulous beast
British Museum doesn’t shy from its ownership of many controversial artefacts in this wonderful exploration of Indigenous Australian tragedy and triumph
Preservation or plunder? The battle over the British Museum’s Indigenous Australian show
What is civilisation? Westerners tend to think it has something to do with Greek statues and classical music. No wonder they failed to recognise it when they saw it in the great southern continent that James Cook claimed as a British possession in 1770. The expressions of civilisation that could be clearly seen all over Australia were so different and so unfamiliar that Aboriginal culture was denied to even exist.
No people has been quite so consistently disparaged by Europeans as Indigenous Australians and Torres Strait Islanders, whose tragic story is movingly told in this thought-provoking exhibition.
It is savagely ironic that every bit of the continent Cook took for an un-owned wilderness was mapped by dreamings
Continue reading...April 17, 2015
Cave painting, kitties and a kicking for Francis Bacon – the week in art
From overlooked indigenous genius to the queen of dancing colour, artists’ obsessions with cats and a devastating takedown of Francis Bacon – it’s your favourite weekly art dispatch
Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation
This heartbreaking exhibition tells the story of how a 40,000-year-old civilisation was brutally and contemptuously shoved aside by British invaders and yet fought back to tell its own story in its own ancient ways.
• British Museum, London, from 23 April until 2 August
Something new is happening in British politics. This image captures what it is | Jonathan Jones
Oil paintings are probably the only evidence not introduced by party spin doctors as they tried to claim victory for their leaders – even the ones who weren’t there – after last night’s BBC televised debate of the 2015 general election. Yet looking at the debate’s closing image of Ed Miliband shaking hands with Nicola Sturgeon as Nigel Farage stands isolated to our far right, I cannot help thinking of some grand narrative painting of a moment in history.
Related: How did the challengers fare in the final TV debate? Guardian columnists' verdict
This is the election of a new British left – the anti austerity parties are making the running
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