Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 91
May 1, 2019
Kathy Acker review – a voyage to hell with the pirates of desire
ICA, London
This Babylonian beast of a show crashes the New York avant garde of the 80s into today’s transgressive talents, with Acker as its visionary guiding spirit
There was something piratical about Kathy Acker. This New York poet, novelist, self-styled plagiarist and social visionary, who died as a result of cancer in 1997, gleefully sailed the seven seas of literature stealing what she wanted and leaving nuggets of savage rhetoric in her wake. That’s the impression I got from this sprawling, many-voiced, Babylonian beast of an exhibition. It begins with a TV clip of Acker on Channel 4 telling the story of the real-life 18th century pirate Mary Read. Acker celebrates Read’s gender freedom as she put on male clothes to become a pirate - then evaded the noose because she was pregnant. At the end of the show, another video shows Acker performing with the Mekons, who are all dressed as pirates in a playground-style pirate ship.
I say “begins”, “end”, but I’ve actually got no idea if I followed this exhibition’s intended route – and to impose a narrative on Acker would be a betrayal. “Do you think I write so that you can name me?” asked the philosopher Michel Foucault, whose books, covered in her annotations, are on show in vitrines. Acker turned the post-structuralist ideas of Foucault and other French academics into blistering, erotic, prophetic language. She put postmodernism on the mean streets.
Related: Sex, tattle and soul: how Kathy Acker shocked and seduced the literary world
I, I, I, I, I, I, I Kathy Acker is at the ICA, London, until 4 August.
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April 30, 2019
Artemisia Gentileschi’s great work is more at home in a GP’s surgery than a gallery | Jonathan Jones
The National Gallery is restoring the link between art and real life by sending Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self Portrait on tour
Artemisia Gentileschi rips through the barriers between art and life. This 17th-century artist is not so much an Old Mistress as our confessional contemporary. Influenced by Caravaggio, who she met when she was a child, she painted images that draw on her own struggles. Born in Rome in 1593 the daughter of an artist, she was raped at 19 by the man her father hired to teach her to paint. Her art refers to this experience and the resulting trial, at which she was tortured and humiliated, and from which her rapist walked free. In her Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, she shows herself as a torture survivor posing by the spiked wheel that was supposed to kill her.
Related: Artemisia Gentileschi’s: Self-Portrait as St Catherine of Alexandria
Continue reading...Bananas in art: a short history of the salacious, disturbing and censored fruit
Natalia LL’s 1973 artwork of a model sucking on a banana has been taken down by Poland’s rightwing government. But bananas aren’t just suggestive – they can be subversive, too
Bananas are not the only fruit but in art they are the most outrageous. The rightwing government of Poland has taken such exception to a 1973 video and photowork of a model sucking on a banana by Natalia LL that last week it was removed from display at Warsaw’s National Museum. But Natalia LL is not alone. Artists have been aroused and even troubled by this suggestively shaped fruit for more than a century. The real question here is: why has a woman been censored for getting off on bananas when men have been at it so long?
Continue reading...The Hendrix of the Renaissance: Leonardo da Vinci, pop star
His first gig at the Milan court was not to paint but to play his skull-shaped violin. A new project explores a lesser known side of Leonardo – his music
Just when you think you’ve got the measure of Leonardo da Vinci – painter, anatomist, pioneer of flight, animal-rights prophet – he turns out to have one more talent up his sleeve. On the 500th anniversary of his death on 2 May, art historian Martin Kemp has collaborated with early music singers I Fagiolini to create a tour and album centred on an aspect of Leonardo’s polymathy we can’t directly know – his musicianship.
Leonardo himself hinted why his talent as a musician would end up being the least-known of his abilities, point out Kemp and I Fagiolini’s director Robert Hollingworth, during a rehearsal at the Barbican. The trouble with music, he said in his notebooks, is that it is ephemeral – a fleeting beauty. Not even Leonardo dreamed recorded music could exist. He played a kind of fat violin called the lira da braccio, for which there were not even written scores. Playing it “was the Renaissance version of playing the blues”, says Hollingworth. You improvised on its deep acoustics while singing melancholy verses.
Continue reading...April 26, 2019
Kubrick's visions and the trouble with Italian beaches – the week in art
The many worlds of Stanley Kubrick are celebrated, Cy Twombly reaches back to Rome, and seaside hot shots sum up modern life – all in our weekly dispatch
Stanley Kubrick
Enter the mind of the man who filmed A Clockwork Orange … if you dare. Kubrick’s images are masterpieces of modern art, from Alex and his droogs in the Korova Milkbar to the blood flowing from the Overlook Hotel’s elevator in The Shining. Read our five-star review here.
• Design Museum, London, until 15 September.
What to see this week in the UK
From Avengers: Endgame to Mary Quant, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...April 23, 2019
Prince Harry v the Duchess of Cambridge: who is the better photographer?
Harry’s nature portraits show someone trying too hard. Kate’s portraits of Louis, on the other hand, show true artistry
Spring has brought forth a bumper crop of photographs by members of the royal family. No longer content to spend hours posing for professional snappers as their predecessors did, today’s young royals publish their own efforts. Prince Harry has rare opportunities to travel the world – indeed, it has been reported that the Sussexes are to be sent on an extended tour of Africa. To mark Earth Day, he has Instagrammed some of his nature photographs, including a monochrome portrait of a rhino resting its head on a fallen tree, its horned bulk majestic and vulnerable against silvery clouds.
Continue reading...April 21, 2019
Big tick energy: how a tiny flea created a revolution in British art
In 1664, scientist Robert Hooke drew a flea and created the first great work of British art. Without it, perhaps, there would be no Stubbs, Constable and Hirst
On a January day in 1665 the diarist Samuel Pepys found time to flirt with a servant, go to bed mid-morning with his friend Betty Martin (noting ruefully that he spent “2 s. in wine and cake upon her”), have a massive lunch and finally make his way through filthy streets to a bookshop, where he saw the new work Micrographia by the scientist Robert Hooke. When Pepys got the book – “which is so pretty that I presently bespoke it” – home he sat up into the small hours gazing at its pictures.
They are still astounding today. A freakishly large ant seems to crawl across a page. A pair of compound eyes glare back at you. Most startling of all, a gigantic flea escapes from the book on to a fold-out sheet. This insect, not much more than a dot to the naked eye, displays formidable armour plating, articulated limbs and a fierce face. It has spiky hairs on its smoothly segmented exoskeleton. Hooks extend from its legs. Its eye is cruel. Fleas have been the unwanted companions of humans for as long as we’ve existed. Yet no one had ever seen one like this. Hooke’s flea is both pioneering science and the first great work of British art.
While Darwin was collecting beetles, Constable was collecting types of cloud in scientific paintings of the sky
Sensations: The Story of British Art from Hogarth to Banksy by Jonathan Jones is published by Laurence King on 22 April.
Continue reading...April 19, 2019
Marxist papier-mache and Mary Quant's revolution – the week in art
Anna Boghiguian gets her first UK retrospective and the V&A turns its attention to cars and miniskirts – all in our weekly dispatch
Anna Boghiguian
Last chance to see the Egyptian-Canadian artist’s response to the industrial history of Cornwall with Marxist papier-mache, artist’s books and paintings.
• Tate St Ives until 6 May.
What to see this week in the UK
From Loro to Stealing Sheep, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...Jonathan Jones's Blog
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