Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 95
March 1, 2019
What to see this week in the UK
From Foxtrot to Betrayal, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
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February 28, 2019
Cradle of Magic review – Damien Hirst's lavish tribute to two men he blew away
Newport Street Gallery, London
Hirst has dipped into his own collection to deliver a heartfelt elegy to the frenzied, forgotten paintings of John Bellany and Alan Davie
Damien Hirst is like Schrödinger’s cat. Just as the creature postulated by physicist Erwin Schrödinger is both dead and alive in a box until it’s opened, so the artist in Hirst is either genuinely brilliant or absolutely terrible. Predicting if you’ll get the freaky genius or his arrogant twin is an impossible exercise in quantum criticism.
Which brings us to his hobby of collecting and curating other people’s art. At his Newport Street Gallery, Hirst puts on exhibitions from his own hoard that veer from pop kitsch to porn paintings. Yet in his latest throw of the dice, he reveals his most courageous and sensitive side. What public gallery would dedicate such a generous, heartfelt exhibition to two British artists who were far from fashionable in their lifetimes and might easily sink into oblivion now they are dead?
Continue reading...February 26, 2019
Why we can’t help but see the whale in the forest as an omen
The dead humpback whale lying in an Amazon rainforest clearing distils our knowledge that human actions have changed the climate and polluted the oceans
There could scarcely be a sadder image of nature in chaos. A young humpback whale lies flat out in a forest clearing made by its own bulk. If it had sunk in the sea, this whale would be food for hagfish and cookiecutter sharks. Instead its yellowed, sagging blubber has been pecked at by birds. What baffling force could have thrown this giant ocean mammal into the Amazon rainforest?
It’s the kind of prodigious sight that previous ages would have interpreted as an omen – and we still can’t resist seeing it that way. The sheer out-of-placeness of this poor juvenile stranded in death without the sea in sight is even more disconcerting than a pod of whales washed up on a beach or a lone cetacean in the Thames. It shows how the medieval cosmology of the four elements lodges in our imaginations: how has a creature of the water ended up on the earth? Or to put it in the more contemporary language of conspiracy theories: this dead sea mammal is very fishy. Perhaps it was taken by aliens to be probed, then dumped here. Maybe it was airlifted by the deep state for reasons of its own.
Continue reading...Dorothea Tanning, Tate Modern review – a gorgeous trip through gothic nightmares
Tate Modern, London
Her disturbing art is the climax of surrealism, but this exhibition also reveals Tanning’s appetite for the gothic and its long history of female creativity
I’m looking into a seedy hotel room. The lights are low. Bodies are sprouting from cracks in the walls. A creature straight out of a Bosch vision of hell is creeping, or is it seeping, out of the fireplace. Worst of all, somehow, is a human(ish) leg emerging from an armchair and stretching across the room. All the monstrosities in Dorothea Tanning’s 1970 installation Chambre 202, Hôtel du Pavot are made of soft stuffed fabric that intensifies their uncanny effect. These stitched-together textiles bulging with mysterious innards are queasily corporeal. This life-sized room from a fleapit Paris hotel is infected with nameless terrors and depraved memories.
Perhaps they are memories of surrealism. For Chambre 202, Hôtel du Pavot is surely the last great masterpiece of this movement founded by French poets after the first world war. Surrealism called for an art of the unconscious, inspired by Sigmund Freud’s writings on dreams and sexuality. Dorothea Tanning, who was born in small-town Illinois in 1910, was one of a generation of US artists who fell in love with surrealism and, in her case, a surrealist – in 1946 she married Max Ernst. Tanning’s late works are revealed as a sensational climax of the surrealist movement by Tate Modern’s sensitive and fascinating reappraisal of her. But this gorgeous trip through 20th-century dreams and nightmares also shows that she was never simply a surrealist, let alone a mere follower of the movement’s European founders. Something else pervades her imagination – an appetite for the gothic and its long history of female creativity.
Continue reading...February 22, 2019
A surreal stunner, human body parts and Napoleon-era Paris – the week in art
Dorothea Tanning scores for the surrealists, human beings are replaced and French society pops out to the carnival – all in our weekly dispatch
Dorothea Tanning
Not only one of the surrealist movement’s great women but also one of its last faithful exponents: Tanning’s art ranges from dream paintings to disturbing installations.
• Tate Modern, London, 27 February-9 June.
What to see this week in the UK
From Beale Street to Tommy Cash, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...February 20, 2019
Should you ever send nude pictures taken for an old lover to a new partner?
Take it from art history: if someone demands daily visual evidence of your naked bona fides, they probably have a very narrow definition of the desirable
What do you say if you send a nude selfie to a lover and they discover it was taken, say, two months ago? Is it cheating? Look, I was born way back in the 20th century. You may as well have asked the late Sister Wendy about contemporary dating. But according to Cosmopolitan, sending an explicit selfie past its stare-by date to a new lover really does pose ethical and practical dilemmas.
I can only recommend art history as the answer. Tell your incredibly shallow darling that the nude is not an accurate image of the lumpen human body. It is a gracious idealisation of our perfect imaginary form. That “out of date” phone pic is, in fact, a timeless dream of beauty. If that sounds too much like Kenneth “Civilisation” Clark, cite Picasso’s orgiastic nude etchings in his Vollard Suite or Tracey Emin’s paintings of herself naked and haunted by loneliness and grief. Art might just show someone so lacking in heart that they expect up-to-the-minute proof of a lover’s appearance that it isn’t like that. It can’t be like that. Every image with meaning is one that persists in time. That goes for naked portraits, too. Many of the paintings and sculptures soon to be unveiled in the Royal Academy’s exhibition The Renaissance Nude are still sexy after 500 years. Beauty conquers time – tell them that. A three-word text.
Continue reading...February 19, 2019
Elizabethan Treasures: Miniatures by Hilliard and Oliver review – small wonders
National Portrait Gallery, London
These tiny masterpieces, blazing with passion, desire and mystery, are among the most magical creations in British art
A young man with dark hair erupting like fire in a crest on his forehead poses with his white shirt open to expose his chest. Golden flames surround him but he is unscathed. It’s an image straight out of an Elizabethan love poem. This unknown but red-hot youth was portrayed by Nicholas Hilliard in about 1600 on an oval piece of vellum just under 7cm tall – which makes it one of his larger works. Yet this tiny masterpiece is also a key to how his miniature art functions, its purpose, and why it is still so full of life after more than 400 years.
Around his neck the ardent young man wears a gold chain, and with his left hand he fondles the ornament it suspends. Within that is another miniature – the image, surely, of the person for whom this one was painted. This portrait is a none too subtle symbol of blazing desire, given as a love token – but to whom?
Elizabethan Treasures: Miniatures by Hilliard and Oliver is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 21 February-19 May
Continue reading...Marina Abramović: The Life review – 'A pointless perversion that hurts your eyes'
Serpentine gallery, London
Why would anyone want to watch a hologram of the famous performance artist doing nothing? Abramović’s much vaunted show is tedious and trite
People are standing around with hi-tech devices strapped to their heads. I am one of them. Through the lenses that protrude from my face, I can see how daft my fellow audience members look. We’re like a bunch of drunks playing that game where you have a word stuck to your forehead. This is Mixed Reality, which lets you see a virtual image within a real physical space. In the middle of the gallery stands the world-famous performance artist Marina Abramović, wearing a bright red dress with her dark hair tied back. She paces a bit. She holds out an arm and stares at it as if mystified. Then she dissolves in a cloud of blue dots.
Abramović, you see, is present only in digital form. She has been filmed by 36 cameras to create a mobile simulation of herself. This virtual animated sculpture seems to walk on the actual floor of the gallery. At times she vanishes, leaving just her shadow to move around the room, creeping towards audience members.
Continue reading...February 15, 2019
Tokyo brothels, one-minute sculptures and a hi-tech Abramović – the week in art
The Japanese capital looks back on Edo, Marina Abramović becomes an apparition, and an Austrian joker flattens a car – all in our weekly dispatch
Marina Abramović: The Life
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