Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 38

Larkin goes pop, Freud goes deep and rhinos go on the prowl – the week in art

The poet’s pop-culture tastes are laid bare for shoppers, while Turner’s wondrous colours hit Edinburgh and Manchester is bathed in light – all in your weekly dispatch

DJ Roberts: An Enormous Yes
Among the bookshops of London’s Charing Cross road, this is a diverting break for Christmas shoppers that celebrates the pop-cultural passions of poet Philip Larkin.
• 58 Charing Cross Road, London, until 21 December.

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Douglas Gordon review – pop is a light that never goes out

Gagosian Davies Street, London
Using snatches of illuminated song lyrics, Neon Ark cleverly shows how words that aren’t our own can be intimately felt

The craft of neon sign-making is a dying art, according to Douglas Gordon, who has commissioned a dazzle of glowing texts that shine through the gallery window into the winter twilight. You could equally say Gordon, whose video installation 24 Hour Psycho made him a star in the 1990s, as did his winning the 1996 Turner prize, embodies a dying “craft” – the art of the readymade.

Invented by Marcel Duchamp, rediscovered in the 1980s as “appropriation art”, and taken to new heights of bare-faced cheek by Gordon’s generation, the readymade is not the lingua franca of modern art that it once was. Many younger artists depict their own experiences in authentic, direct ways including paint and figurative sculpture. But in this exhibition, Gordon quietly demonstrates why nicking other people’s work can still be a good way of making your own. Perhaps he goes further and asks what authenticity is, anyway? Can we really be sure we voice ourselves, however heartfelt our neon cries?

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Turner winners of the future, Mr Turner himself and our favourite dinosaur returns – the week in art

The ones to watch from the class of 22, Turner’s masterpieces get an immersive soundtrack and female printmakers take centre stage – all in your weekly dispatch

Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2022
Spot the Turner prize winners of the future in this showcase for young artists fresh out of college.
• South London Gallery until 12 March.

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Veronica Ryan is a sensational choice as Turner prize-winner

The Montserrat-born sculptor’s mature, meditative works are the opposite of the brash art that usually impresses the judges – and cap the first Turner worth caring about in years

Veronica Ryan is much too good to win the Turner prize – I feared. Or rather, too good for what it so often seems to be, a brash, loud, sensational crowd-pleaser.

She is none of those things. Ryan’s sculptures are meditative and poetic, their meanings maturing over time instead of hitting you in the face. Her room in the Turner show at Tate Liverpool is startling in its sheer intelligent beauty. In a space whose yellow walls seem to melt and yield to your gaze, her sculpted objects are spaced out like the notes of some minimalist score. It’s a lesson in what art really is, and can do.

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A bit of rough: books, music, art and more to help with a hangover

You’ve had a big one, but what goes up must come down. From gentle piano to breezy laughs, our critics offer salves for sore heads

Scottish composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Erland Cooper is frequently lauded for his exploration of psychogeography: finding connections between place, memory and nature. If you have connected a little too hard with your night out, however, his soothing soundbaths also work detoxifying wonders. Over eight tracks of classical piano, the gentle beauty of his 2022 album, Music for Growing Flowers, unfolds with the same cathartic appeal of petting a quiet puppy in the middle of a duvet fort, asking very little of its listener as it soothes and swoons. Dim the lights, grab an ice-pop for slow, sugary hydration, and press play: this one will even out any lingering hangxiety in no time. Jenessa Williams

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Neon wonders, sex scandals and the horror of modernism – the week in art

Light relief from the 24 Hour Psycho creator, York becomes sin city, and the dark heart of modernist architecture is exposed – all in your weekly dispatch

Douglas Gordon
The dark imagination behind 24 Hour Psycho sees the light with a show that celebrates neon.
• Gagosian Davies Street, London, until 14 January.

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Incoherent, creepy and deceptively gorgeous: six leading British artists making art with AI

Artificial intelligence is creating increasingly sophisticated images. But what does it mean for the art world? Gilbert and George, Gillian Wearing, Mat Collishaw, Elizabeth Price, Polly Morgan and Lindsey Mendick found out

For more than 30,000 years we have been the only art-making species on Earth, give or take the odd paint-throwing Neanderthal or chimpanzee. Art is the oldest and most spectacular triumph of human consciousness, from Lascaux to the Sistine Chapel. But a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) art software may be about to end that. It will whip you up a Picasso or a Turner in an instant, or apply their styles to any theme you picture, from Liz Truss dancing in a supermarket to a brawl in a 1970s disco.

Stable Diffusion and competitors such as DALL-E 2 go far beyond previous claims for AI art. Easily accessible online, and in that sense open to full public scrutiny, they create precise, rich, convincing images in response to a typed-in text – for example “a sad cat in a mountainous landscape in the style of Turner”, or whatever combination of styles, keywords and subjects takes your fancy. Or you can ask more sidelong and existential questions, such as my request for “a photograph of a human”, which produced a bare-chested man who could be a museum exhibit of early homo sapiens – except for his mysterious earphone-like cables. For the expert there are others: “I’ve been experimenting in Wombo Dream, Midjourney and Google Colab/Disco Diffusion,” says the artist Mat Collishaw.

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Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s enigmatic figures, sensational seeds and a heavyweight four-way face off – the week in art

Mysterious portraits of fictitious people, the roots of colonialism and the works of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and friends – all in your weekly dispatch

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Impeccable and fascinating paintings that create mystery and leave you haunted, like the covers of novels that are yet to be written.
• Tate Britain, London, until 26 February.

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Harland Miller’s dreams, Ken Kiff’s sensuality and the magic of Gainsborough – the week in art

Dream paintings of book covers, Magdalena Abakanowicz’s tangles, the art of Ken Kiff and a restored museum in Suffolk – all in your weekly dispatch

Harland Miller: Imminent End, Rescheduled Eternally
Paintings of book covers that evoke the reveries of readers who dream of writing.
• White Cube Bermondsey, London, until 22 January.

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What next, petrol on a Picasso? Threatening art is no answer to the climate crisis | Jonathan Jones

It’s arrogant of the activists who attacked a Klimt to assume anyone who cares about art doesn’t also care about the planet

Another day, another gallery: the attacks on art in the name of climate action have become a headline-hogging obsession with a hideous escalating logic. The nastier the treatment a famous masterpiece gets, the bigger the media coverage.

Now, members of Letzte Generation Österreich (Last Generation Austria) have smeared “non-toxic fake oil” all over the glass covering of Gustav Klimt’s Death and Life, a colouristic vision of pink and gold intertwined human bodies menaced by the grim reaper. Not that you can see much of that in the disturbing images of the attack at the Leopold Museum in Vienna: a black and purple stain all but obscures the delicate picture. The aggression of the attack takes this wave of action a step further than tomato soup on Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers and mashed potato on a Monet. But a step further to where?

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