Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 214

The meaning of the climate march's defining photo | Jonathan Jones

The architecture of corporate confidence has faded to green. Can the city that defined energy excess become a symbol of resistance to preserve the future?

Plus: Jarvis Cocker, Naomi Klein and Rebecca Solnit on the climate march

The nostalgia is as powerful as the crowds determined presence. As climate change protesters filled New York Citys Avenue of the Americas on Sunday, the red lettering of Radio City Music Halls vertical sign added its baffled chorus, a muttering bystander perplexed by these people and the crisis about which they speak and sing.

Change? What change? Whos talking about change? This auditorium built in 1932, with its hydraulic stage that can raise a nativity scene miraculously from nowhere for its Christmas show (I know, I took the backstage tour once), is a survivor from an age long before anyone worried about the climate. God knows we had our troubles in the 30s, Radio City might say if it could speak, but the rain and the sun were fixtures. Now what?

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Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy review an exciting rollercoaster ride of beauty, horror and history

Born in Germany as the Nazis fell, Anselm Kiefers back catalogue is an astonishing look at the awful burden of history

Sunflowers and Nazi salutes: the Anselm Kiefer extravaganza hits the Royal Academy in picturesInside Anselm Kiefers astonishing 200-acre art studio

Anselm Kiefer was born in Germany in 1945. A new life can rarely have started in a less promising place and time. To enter the world as the Third Reich fell was to be a baby surrounded by human ash.

Does that seem a tasteless way of putting it? Well, Kiefer is not tasteful. Ever since he posed for a photograph in 1969 giving the sea a Nazi salute, he has resurrected the terrors of the 20th-century in a shocking, pungent and explicit way that defies both the politeness of forgetting and the evasiveness of appropriate speech. He would rather you were angry than amnesiac. He will not let the ashes of historys victims blow away, but thrusts them in your face as a handful of truth.

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Anselm Kiefer, black Victorians and the weird world of Cosplay the week in art

The fearless German painter gets his first UK retrospective, plus astonishing photographs of Britains racial heritage, Zaha Hadids £252 candles and the people who dress like superheroes all in your favourite weekly dispatch

Anselm Kiefer
The most anticipated exhibition of the year. Kiefer is a true great.
Royal Academy, London W1J, from 27 September until 14 December

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Chinooks away: Fiona Banner's terrifying homage to a helicopter

Yorkshire Sculpture Park
A mighty chopper has swooped down in the tranquil hills of Yorkshire as a savage reminder of Vietnam, Apocalypse Now and the monsters of modern war

Yorkshire Sculpture Park is a peaceful place. On a misty autumn day, its loping hills nestle in isolation from the worlds troubles war, pestilence, referenda and its to this tranquil place that artist Fiona Banner has brought the hum of danger.

Wide and weighty blades turn overhead, gathering speed and pushing gusts of air to the edges of a hangar-like gallery. Through the glass wall you can see trees in the milky mist, the safe stuff of rural England. In here, the chopper blades conjure up Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, 1970s Northern Ireland, or whatever place of troubles fills your imagination; anywhere the double sets of blades of the Chinook military helicopter have hovered above shell-shocked cities, deserts, farmlands.

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Northern lights: the tartan art-house illuminating the referendum

The Projector Club art collective has dressed a West Lothian farmhouse in tartan. But its not as nationalistic as it might at first seem ...

As the vote of our lifetimes approaches for anyone who lives in Britain, whether in Scotland or not the last political artworks of this very art-rich debate are appearing. A group of digital artists have just projected a glorious tartan lightshow on to a farm in West Lothian. Leyden Farm has turned entirely tartan. Looks lovely. Another iconic piece of publicity for the yes vote or is it?

In fact, the artists claim that it is not intended to promote either yes or no but simply to celebrate Scotland at this dramatic moment. And in fact, theres nothing especially political about many of the most evocative markers of Scottish identity, including tartan.

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Ming: 50 Years that Changed China review misleading and unhelpful

British Museum, London

Reframing a short period in Chinese history as the birth of modernism is ridiculous. Why must the British Museum persistently talk down to the public?

This is the new world that Christopher Columbus dreamed of. And yet it is a world lost in time, adrift from understanding.

When Columbus sailed from Spain in 1492, he was not looking for a continent in the west, but a route to China. By then Europeans had fairly accurate knowledge of what this distant land was like. They knew it was a mighty empire of stupendous wealth. The Venetian merchant Marco Polo went there and wrote about its wonders in the 13th century. But it took him three years to get to China overland. Columbus was looking for a quick route by sea.

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The renegade art school proving that painting is not dead

As conceptual art becomes the academic orthodoxy, the new Turps art school is fighting for the place of painting in contemporary art

I thought painting was supposed to be dead. It seems impossible to nail into its casket. Wherever I look this autumn, paint is being splashed about. From Turner and Constable to Rembrandt, Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter, great painters are strutting their stuff.

Even Marcel Duchamp, inventor of the readymade and, some would say, the artist who knocked painting off its pedestal, is examined in a less familiar light as a painter by the Centre Georges Pompidou this autumn. Duchamp proves its an empty cliche to think painting is irreconcilable with the multiform art of today. Painting has such a diverse history encompassing such varied phenomena as Chinese landscapes on silk, medieval frescoes and Jackson Pollock that it obviously has the capacity to evolve in infinite ways as the world changes.

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Jasper Johnss Regrets review: love and loss as death comes knocking

In his most explicit show yet, the enigmatic artist takes inspiration from the death of his friend Lucian Freud and his lovers Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg

The American artist Jasper Johns has a reputation for reticence. The man who changed modern art for ever when he made a US flag from layers of collaged newspapers and waxy paint almost never gives interviews, and when he does, reveals little. Why did he paint a flag in 1954, he was once asked? Because he dreamt about one. Go figure.

Johns, whose small but emotionally fathomless exhibition Regrets has just opened at Londons Courtauld Gallery, has been in the news lately because an assistant who worked for him for 30 years confessed to stealing artworks from his studio and selling them for millions. That a long-term member of staff should turn to such blatant crime seems strangely telling about the remoteness of the image Johns presents to the world.

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Ming bling and Apocalypse Now the week in art

The V&A launches a blockbuster exhibition of amazing artefacts from the Ming dynasty and Fiona Banner is inspired by Francis Ford Coppola. Plus Mad Men, the birth of the worlds best-loved logos and vomiting dogs all in your favourite art dispatch

See China on the eve of the first major encounters between east and west in this blockbuster epic that fills the vast new exhibition gallery of the British Museum with everything from portraits of eunuchs to a ships bell from the fleet that China sent to Africa.
British Museum, London WC1B, from 18 September, until 5 January 2015.

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Anthony Caro: The Last Sculptures review dazzling disappointments

Annely Juda, London

Although they are undoubtedly impressive for a man in his final days, these works by the one-time king of modernism feel fussy and kitsch

The last works of the widely revered British sculptor Anthony Caro, who died a year ago at the age of 89, are dazzling disappointments.

At first it is an almost overwhelming pleasure to walk among these constellations of unexpected materials and textures, rusty metal cut through with translucent green or blue plastic, or a sheet of steel moulded and painted so it looks like floppy brown clay.

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