Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 253

Artist sends new moon into orbit for a year – via FedEx

Katie Paterson is boldly going where art hasn't been before. But is her idea too earthbound?

Artist Katie Paterson is to put a new moon into orbit. Excited? You might not be when you read the details.

Paterson plans to send a fragment of moon rock, borrowed from the Great North Museum in Newcastle, around the world by delivery service. So it will "orbit" the earth for a year. Sort of. Presumably, the highest it will get is in a jet plane.

For a moment there, I thought contemporary art was getting to grips with the revolutionary science of our time. Paterson has been acclaimed as an artist who deals with space and the sublime scale of the cosmos, but this work seems to me imaginatively as well as literally earthbound. The idea speaks the language of the art gallery and art magazines – and says more about the limitations of that language than about the wide open spaces of astronomy.

In the same week the shortlist for Astronomy Photographer of the Year was unveiled, it's time to ask why the nature of art has become such that it defines real images of the stars and solar system as less interesting than such brittle, absurd meditations about space.

It wouldn't be hard to send a work of art into proper orbit: there are enough missions, enough interested scientists, surely. So why so introspective? It's as if art has become too small in its concerns to take on the big stuff. When it does, it seems in this case to obsess about the process of the artist imagining science, rather than engaging with actual scientific enquiry.

It will be possible to track Paterson's "satellite" on an iPad, but I would rather look at images of the real moon – or, for that matter, go outside at night and contemplate it.

Art about space is a very exciting field – but not if it just ends up being art about art.

ArtThe moonAstronomyJonathan Jones
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The Sun's wraparound: a cunning mix of cliche, surprise and commerce | Jonathan Jones

As the Sun tries to lure its readers online, this collage sells the paper as a mover and shaker for the digital age, not a 70s relic

The Sun has gone surrealist. Or possibly dadaist. The Sun goes dada gaga! Today's edition of the well-known tabloid comes in a wraparound picture cover in the cut-and-paste tradition of Max Ernst and John Heartfield or the British magazine Heartfield sometimes worked for, Picture Post. It looks as if the picture editor sat down with scissors and glue to create this crazy collage of British landmarks, icons, treasures and eyesores although of course, presumably, it was all done on screen.

It's easy to mock – but the Sun gets its jokes in first, with such silly touches as a tiny figure of the Queen peering over the giant S in the headline "THIS IS OUR BRITAIN", and the Loch Ness monster swimming next to the Angel of the North. It is obvious, too, that it is invoking the Olympics opening ceremony, Danny Boyle's green and industrial land.

In fact, the Sun's visual history of Britain's past, present and future is in many ways more witty and perceptive that you would expect. At the bottom, above those white cliffs, the megaliths of Stonehenge represent the prehistoric bedrock of the landscape, shaped ever since by people who cultivated and built. Their creations dot the super-green fields, from cooling tower clouds to the glittering Shard, from a stately home to a fish and chip shop. It's a cunning mix of cliche and the unexpected. You expect a football on front of the Sun – but the art of Anthony Gormley?

The Sun is about to launch its Sun+ paywall across all platforms, and inside it seeks to redefine itself through a grandiloquent statement of values that reads a bit like Citizen Kane's manifesto for his newspaper. I particularly like its statement on politics. Roughly translated, it says "we back the one that looks like a winner".

The wraparound, however, sells the Sun much more effectively as a modern mover and shaker for the digital age and not, after all, a survivor from the age of Carry On films (British comedy is represented in the collage by Mr Bean rather than Sid James).

It strikes me that newspaper websites seem superficially more leftwing and more culturally savvy than their print editions as they try to capture a passing digital trade perceived as youthful and therefore liberalish in outlook: if you only read Mail Online and the Telegraph website, you might imagine these newspapers to be well to the pink side of Genghis Khan.

The Sun suggests quite effectively, in its wraparound imaginary landscape, that it has heard of modern architecture – the Building Formerly Known as the Millennium Dome makes an appearance so that's Richard Rogers covered as well as Renzo Piano. You want literature? Hogwarts castle floats in the greenwood. Youngish people might be pleased to see the Glastonbury Pyramid stage. And an Easyjet plane flies past a spitfire – a more subtle image than it might seem as it defines Sun readers as up-to-date independent travellers rather than traditional package tourists.

So this British fantasy is neatly geared to market the digital Suniverse as a place for good, clean, modern fun. There are no Page 3 girls in it, by the way. But it is thoughtful. Yes, it's patriotic, unashamedly addressing this summer's nationalistic, Tory turnaround in British self-images. But there's a question being asked here, visually – how does it all add up? Is this a dream or a nightmare?

The mad collisions of past and future have an almost hellish quality at times, as if this were a painting by Bruegel. But the Sun puts in lots of reassuring images of continuity: the Houses of Parliament, a Victorian marvel built to look medieval; cricket on the village green; Edinburgh.

All stuff and nonsense, you say? And yet as the Sun writes, we are now in the age of "science fiction". It's natural for people to be scared as well as thrilled. It's reasonable to want to hold on to what the Sun calls its "values" – and in the absence of articulate alternatives, a love of Britain, its history and landscape might be the easiest source of stability on offer to many people. The Sun's soaraway art cover manages to embrace the new while confessing how strange and troubling this escalating age can seem.

If you could judge a newspaper by its cover this one might shake a few assumptions about what lies within – until you get to the promotion for the new digital version of Page 3.

The SunNewspapers & magazinesNational newspapersNewspapersPaywallsDigital mediaJonathan Jones
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Marina Abramovic: 'I am not a vampire'

The renowned performance artist has bared all in an 'Ask me anything' online chat, from her baking soda baths to why she never wanted kids – and the secret of her eternal youth

Marina Abramovic abolishes all boundaries between art and life. In the 1970s she pioneered "performance art", but the reason I have put that well-worn term into inverted commas is that it is too narrow a description of her, even if it's one she chooses. The exciting thing about Abramovic is that she makes art into life and life into art. This was made very apparent when she went on Reddit this week to converse with her fans in an "Ask me anything" session.

Her love life, her money life, her age (and whether she comes from a long line of vampires from Montenegro) – the questions covered all these, and Abramovic gave disarming answers.

In the 1970s she collaborated with the artist Ulay who was also her lover. Their personal and working relationship ended with a performance on the Great Wall of China that culminated in a last hug. So one Reddit question was: how did that last hug feel? Here is her answer:

"One of the most painful moments of my life. I knew this is over, I knew it was the end of a very important period of my life. I just remember I could not stop crying."

It's an answer that says more about Abramovic than a pile of textbooks on contemporary art might express. This is what she does. She makes art that is directly emotional, in which her entire being is at risk: her work with Ulay was a massive part of her career, so when their relationship ended they risked shattering their artistic legacy as well as their lives. She tells another questioner why artists should never fall in love with artists: "I have done this three times, and each time I had the heart broke ..."

And another still on why she doesn't have children:

"I never wanted to ... I never had the biological clock running like other women. I always wanted to be an artist and I knew that I could not divide this energy into anything else. Looking back, I think it was the right decision."

This is more like an audience with a famous soap opera star (or character?) than a conventional art seminar. Abramovic is asked how she appears never to have aged (she was born in 1946) – is she a vampire? She replies that her grandmother and great-grandmother both lived to more than 100 and kept their youthful looks.

Like a crazy soap opera, this has an impossibly dramatic climax. Abramovic is asked what it felt like when Ulay came to her 2010 performance The Artist Is Present at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City: "Entire life of our 12 years together went like a fast forward film ..."

You can see this moment on video. In her MoMA performance, Abramovic simply sat there for 700 hours and people were invited to sit opposite her, looking into her eyes. Most of them ended up crying. But she was caught in a drama of her own on the day Ulay arrived and sat with her. It's an amazing thing to see – a soap opera of MoMA's own.

Yet when she was asked what keeps her going after a bad day, she replied: "I'm not attached to a bad day or good day. We always know after the rain the sun will come. It is a law of nature. When it is a really, really bad day, I take a long bath full of Kosher salt and baking soda, soak for 30 minutes, and I feel better."

It's easy to see why pop stars like Lady Gaga and Jay Z court this woman who makes art so universal and human.

Marina AbramovicPerformance artArtJonathan Jones
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Holy smoke! Take the Catholic church gay art tour

With the Pope's recent statements about homosexuality, the time is right for the Catholic church to take pride in its gay artists

The Pope has uttered some common sense words about homosexuality – and about time, too. While stopping well short of a full recognition of gay rights, his declaration that he does not "judge" is at least the start of a better approach by the Catholic church.

If Pope Francis wants to think more about this issue, he could do worse than take a tour of churches and galleries in Rome and the Vatican where, for centuries, gay artists have created the glories of the church.

In the Vatican museum he should contemplate Leonardo da Vinci's St Jerome in the Desert. An ascetic sits in anguished thought in a rocky wilderness in this unfinished masterpiece. It is a great, introspectively spiritual work of religious art whose creator was well known for his love of young men. Leonardo surrounded himself with good-looking assistants and painted a subversively gay icon of male beauty, his bronzed Saint John the Baptist. When da Vinci was in his 20s, he was formally accused of sodomy.

Brooding on these facts, the Pope might walk into the Pauline Chapel, to look upon Michelangelo's frescoes there. This chapel is in a private part of the Apostolic Palace not open to the public, but I don't think the Pope would find entry difficult. There, looking at the suffering of the saints, he might consider how Michelangelo courageously expressed his love for men, even as he created some of the most eloquent art of the church.

Is there no escape from this issue? Remembering that some art historians deny the so-called "calumny" that Caravaggio and his clerical patrons were gay, perhaps the Pope might visit the Roman church of San Luigi dei Francesi to look on this master's paintings of St Matthew. But the demons of desire cannot be suppressed. The naked male flesh in Caravaggio's paintings tells its own story. By the time Caravaggio came to Rome in the 1590s, Leonardo and Michaelangelo – not to mention the aptly named Italian painter Il Sodoma – had already blazed a gay trail through the art of the Holy City. Caravaggio made art dangerous and exciting again by taking that homosexual impulse to new extremes.

The history of art is inseparable from the history of sexuality. Artists were adventurous characters in the past just as they are today. To make great art you have to take great risks. The Catholic church in its golden age knew this, and it commissioned the boldest and best, whatever the artist's personal lives.

Perhaps the honesty of Pope Francis will renew art history, for pious timidity blunts understanding of great art. In particular, the myth that gay sex did not exist in the past, or was too risky, or could not be imagined, is nonsense. By the 18th century, gay clubs existed across Europe. The gay scene in Georgian London was intense. Is it really plausible that all this was going on in 1700 but unimaginable in Caravaggio's Rome in 1600?

It is daft to deny the obvious homoeroticism of Leonardo or Caravaggio, and sophistry to claim that it's irrelevant to their art. The British Museum is leading the way by drawing attention to the gay content of its collections. The Pope should urge the Vatican to do the same. Let the church take pride in its gay artists.

Pope FrancisArtLeonardo da VinciMichelangeloMichelangelo Merisi da CaravaggioJonathan Jones
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NYPD attempts to censor anticipated Park Avenue art project

An artist's protests over his New York art installation raises the question of how to play nice in public spaces

How free should free speech be? This question currently bedevils the internet, as misogynist comments, even rape threats, pollute Twitter. Yet a work of art about to go public in New York praises complete liberty of expression.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is turning the Park Avenue tunnel in New York into a reverberating sound and light installation that celebrates free speech. From 3 to 17 August, this tunnel will be closed to traffic and open to visitors for Voice Tunnel, part of New York's Summer Streets festival. You walk into the middle of the tunnel, where a silver intercom awaits your remarks. Speak a short message and it will pulse through the tunnel in waves of sound and light.

If you've ever sat in a cinema in Manhattan and enjoyed the continual stream of jokes and comments with which New Yorkers give a film instant feedback, it's easy to imagine some salty, witty and creative words shaking the Park Avenue tunnel. In fact, the New York Police Department had serious anxieties about what kind of words might be spoken. The NYPD asked the artist to install a time delay so messages could be regulated. Lozano-Hemmer refused, theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Celebrity passport photographs – a picture of true glamour

Everyone has to obey the rules of passport photos but Marilyn Monroe must have melted the photo booth, and Muhammad Ali punched his personality through the page
View our gallery of celebrity passports here

The passport picture is the most democratic form of portraiture. Everyone has to obey the same rules: eyes forward, no grinning. But, as these passports of the stars reveal, even the brutality of the photo booth cannot dim true glamour.

The machine must have melted when Marilyn Monroe fixed her gaze on it. As for Andrey Hepburn, the passport office appears to have accepted an artful publicity shot. And Muhammad Ali just punches his personality through the document. The British passport office is a bit stricter, to judge from Alfred Hitchcock's mugshot. But then, the great director probably savoured the joke that he looks like a criminal. Johnny Cash really would shoot a man in Reno just to see him die, looking at his photo, which resembles an inmate record from Folsom Prison.

Only Whitney Houston and Albert Einstein surrender to the banality of the passport photograph, as most of us do when we're gearing up for our holidays.

CelebrityJonathan Jones
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Farewell Walter de Maria, force of nature who lit up the art world

From a room full of earth to a desert full of lightning, this ecological artist who once played drums for Lou Reed leaves an awe-inspiring legacy

Walter de Maria, whose death is being reported, knew how to take hold of imaginations – not with cheap shots, but profound encounters.

It does not matter if you have never visited The Lightning Field, an array of 400 steel rods in the New Mexico desert that he installed in 1977. Of course, it is worth a pilgrimage to experience it over time, with or without lightning, as the artist intended. But the briefest glimpse of it in colour photographs, the sky illuminated by streaks of electricity drawn to the vast field of attracting rods, communicates so much, so eloquently.

Here is a romantic vision of nature that uses modern means – the almost clinical arrangement of a grid of poles – to achieve the awe-inspiring effects the American Hudson River school of landscape painters sought to elicit with paint.

In her recent book, Picturing the Cosmos, art historian Elizabeth A Kessler argues that US physicists processing photos from the Hubble Space Telsecope are influenced by the sublime grandeur of the American landscape – the idea of the open spaces of the west is so deep in American culture that it shapes Nasa images of the stars. That same sense of natural grandeur gripped Walter de Maria. He found a new, mind-blowing way to reveal the majesty of nature. For it is not a picture of land and sky that he exhibits in The Lightning Field. It is the phenomena themselves.

At a time when the human destruction of nature was becoming ever more visible – and we're still in that time – De Maria teased into being a spectacle that displays the power and mystery of our planet. The Lightning Field is an ecological masterpiece.

He brought nature inside, too, in his series of Earth Rooms, one of which survives and can be viewed in New York. In Kassel, Germany you can see – or rather, not see, except for a small metal circle – his Vertical Earth Kilometre, a 1km-long brass rod planted upright in the earth.

This artist, who once played drums for Lou Reed and John Cale, has left a moving legacy. His art urges us to cherish the earth we inhabit and its sheltering sky.

ArtJonathan Jones
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Why the British fall prey to tales of big cats on a country estate | Jonathan Jones

It's summer so it must be time for a monster animal snap. We crave the wild and are easily swayed by blurred photos of enigmatic predators

A loping black shape moves through the long grass of an English field. It might be a big cat. The way it lowers its shoulders does resemble a feline stalking posture. It makes me think of Henri Rousseau's painting Surprised!, in which a tiger with similar hunched shoulders hunts in an imaginary jungle.

But there's the key word – imaginary. Is this big cat real or is it an illusion? The blurred photograph (why so shaky, was it fear or fake fear?) reveals what genre this picture belongs to. It's summer and the monster animal snaps are here. Remarkably, the warm summer has not yet produced any sightings of great white sharks off Cornwall or kraken near Anglesey, but here's an animal mystery to spice up those country walks. Beware the possible puma!

Somerset landowner Sir Benjamin Slade claims this less than crystal clear picture shows a dangerous wild cat on his territory, and says animals have been killed by Something Out There. He warns visitors to his estate to be on their guard against The Beast. Perhaps a rival claimant to his baronetcy has cooked up a plot like that invented by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in The Hound of the Baskervilles. The terrifying black dog that was kept hungry and raving on the moors to wipe out an aristocratic lineage has perhaps been replaced by a spooky cat in the long grass. Yet long before Conan Doyle wrote his definitive tale of a monster beast at large in the English countryside, we were imagining eerie intruders from a realm somewhere between nature and nightmare. The Old English poem Beowulf tells of a monster from the moors murdering men in the mead hall.

Britain is a land that loves nature, the home of some of the greatest poets and observers of the living world. But our experience of nature on these shores tends to be frustratingly domestic. There are no wolves in our woodlands, and shark experts are puzzled that in spite of ideal sea temperatures, there is still no proven visit by a great white.

Maybe that is why we crave every clue that something strange is in the hedgerows. Nature red in tooth and claw haunts the British imagination. This hunger for exotic creatures to liven up our quiet landscape once drove Victorian geologists to discover, in the rocks of Lyme Regis, the first properly understood fossils of giant reptiles of the Jurassic. Of course, the American west turned out to have bigger and better dinosaurs. Why is the wild always elsewhere?

Today, the British craving for the marvellous takes the shape of blurred photographs of enigmatic predators. Our tranquil countryside is a magnificent setting for monster stories. Come on, you beasts, and gore our minds.

WildlifeAnimalsPhotographyJonathan Jones
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Reekie pipes, blue cocks and drone warfare – the week in art

In Edinburgh, Sarah Kenchington fashions a new wind instrument from old organs, while the new boy on London's fourth plinth and war art cause a stir – all in your art roundup

Exhibition of the week

Sarah Kenchington: Wind Pipes for Edinburgh
This is the 10th anniversary of the Edinburgh art festival, stuffed with new public commissions including Sarah Kenchington's homemade music machine, an interactive wind instrument assembled from scrap that makes sweet music when enough people pump the bellows. Her assemblage of decommissioned organ components is installed in a 15th-century church that was moved to make way for Waverley railway station.
Trinity Apse, Edinburgh EH1 from 1 August until 1 September

Other exhibitions this week

Daughters of Decayed Tradesmen
Christine Borland and Brody Condon collaborate to explore the idea of decay in an installation spookily housed in a watchtower built to guard against graverobbers.
New Calton Burial Ground, Edinburgh EH7 from 1 August until 1 September

Real Life and How to Live It in Auld Reekie
Ross Sinclair explores the idea of Edinburgh as a fantastical theme park of Scottish identity.
Locations throughout Edinburgh from 1 August until 1 September

Doppelgänger
Peter Liversidge revisits a fetishistic tale of a lady's glove that was told in prints by the 19th-century artist Max Klinger.
Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh EH8 from 1 August until 21 September

Omer Fast
The first in a new series of contemporary visions of war takes apart the myths of drone warfare.
Imperial War Museum, London SE1 from 29 July until 29 September

Masterpiece of the week

Georges Seurat, The Channel of Gravelines, Grand Fort-Philippe, 1890
Off to the seaside? I hope it doesn't look too much like Seurat's majestically bleak and empty bit of French coastal no man's land.
National Gallery, London WC2N

Image of the weekWhat we learned this week

That a big blue cock was erected in London's Trafalgar Square to give Nelson the bird – and what Boris Johnson makes of it

That Francis Bacon's brushes are expected to make £25,000 at auction

That the Roundhouse in London is about to turn into a giant sundial

What a drone's eye view looks like

Why the camera has always lied

That DIY design (customised lemon squeezer, anyone?) is likely just a fad with no legs

What life's like in the most inhospitable places on the planet – ice labs in antarctica

That there probably is point crying over spilt soup – as Andy Warhol's legacy gets messy

And finally ...

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ArtSculptureEdinburgh festival 2013Edinburgh festivalFestivalsJonathan Jones
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Why the art of war is hell

A new series of exhibitions at the Imperial War Museum highlights the place of contemporary art in interpreting conflict

The most powerful piece of contemporary art about war is not about a real conflict. It is a vision of atrocities performed by toy soldiers on other toy soldiers.

As the Imperial War Museum opens a contemporary art programme, it is worth asking what are the best responses to war in today's art. For my money the modern masterpiece of war is Jake and Dinos Chapman's Hell. Small plastic Nazis brutalise each another in a model landscape that combines the nerdy verisimilitude of a Hornby railway with the fantastic horrors of Bruegel.

The Chapmans make the war art of our time that truly matters, because they recognise that war today is imagined by non-participants – and maybe some participants as well – through the conventions of cinema. Hell is a surreal distillation of old second world war films, re-enacted by boy's toys.

No artists are less worthy, less concerned with being taken seriously, than the Chapmans. Yet their images of war speak deeply of the way war is now. They see atrocity as war's true nature. If modern conflicts from Iraq to Syria have taught us anything, it is this terrifying truth. Recent images from Syria of a rebel commander apparently cannibalising an enemy evoked comparison with the Chapman's sculpture based on a Goya print, Great Deeds Against the Dead.

Another artwork that went to the heart of conflict was Jeremy Deller's display at this very museum of the remains of a car destroyed by a car bomb in Iraq. Its red, twisted metal had the pathos of a blasted body – a piece of the war and its aftermath, brought home.

Yet artists often seem to say the most about war when they are trying to say something broader about the human condition. When Douglas Gordon made his film 10 ms-1 he was not trying to document war. At the time it seemed almost incidental that he used a slowed-down piece of first world war footage of a shell-shocked patient to make this eerie sequence of images. Yet as the world has become more war-torn, his slow, painful film of a soldier's breakdown speaks eloquently of the madness of conflict.

The Imperial War Museum programme starts with a work about drones by Omer Fast. But do polemical pieces actually make the most enduring and compassionate war art? I've a feeling we will be looking at Hell when more well-meaning protests are forgotten.

ArtSyriaJake and Dinos ChapmanJeremy DellerMuseumsJonathan Jones
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