Crea8 -Fashion, Media, Arts & Creative Network
March 14, 2011 Filed under Yu Shanshan
Event information
Event name:Crea8 -Fashion, Media, Arts & Creative Network
Host:FC Club (Beijing) – Fortune Connection Club
Event type: Meetings – Networking
Location:北京希尔顿酒店 中国北京市朝阳区东三环北路东方路一号
Time & Place
Date:March 15, 2011
Time:19:30 – 22:00
Neighbourhood:朝阳区(Chaoyang) District
Phone:139 1109 8002
E-mail:eventbj@fcclub.com
Event Description
You are cordially invited to a networking evening for the Hospitality, Media, Marketing, Advertising, P.R., Glamour, Fashion, Luxury and Creative Industries which will be held on Tuesday 15 March at the Zeta Bar, Hilton Beijing.
This evening opens a door to a world oft not seen – the “behind the scene” scene. Please feel to dress to impress or be simply creative. An evening specifically designed to forge new connections with industry peers, consumers and these industry professionals who all too often toil tirelessly behind the scene. These evenings normally attract between 120 to 140 foreign and English speaking Chinese. Please feel free to dress to impress or be creatively simple.
Date: Tuesday 15 March
Time: 7:30 – 10:00 pm.
Venue: Zeta Bar, Hilton Beijing.
Price: 90RMB – 150RMB.
This evening mixes consumers and clients with the people who, each in his or her own special, influences our daily life and help us to define our self-image. An evening to forge new connections with the secret army that toil night and day to ensure that we know what’s hot and what’s not.
Networking is an art; Be not afraid to start!
To register simply click the RSVP Button or email eventbj@fcclub.com and provide the following information:
. Event Name + Date:
· Your Name + Surname:
· Company name:
· Work Title:
· Mobile phone:
· Email:
Register before 7:30pm on Monday 14 March and only pay 90 RMB.
The non-discount price is 130 RMB.
The entrance fee includes:
. A Free Drink. – Soft Drink, Beer, Cocktail or Wine
· Happy Hour until 10:00pm – 50% discount.
· Canapes (please eat before you come !).
· Participation in a Lucky Draw including a bottle of wine from the Hilton Beijing, 200RMB voucher (x 2) from C. de France, a 420RMB Teeth Cleaning and Polishing Voucher (x2) from Joinway Dental a state of the art dental clinic that combines a warm and friendly environment with highly professional and well trained bi-lingual staff, and 2 Tell Me More six months language learning (either American English, British English, French, German, Spanish, Italian or Dutch) each worth 4,000RMB.
A friend of a friend is a friend, so join us and meet old friends, make new friends and empower your personal network.
Address:
Zeta Bar, Hilton Beijing, 1 Dong Fang Road, North Dongsanhuan Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100027
北京希尔顿酒店 中国北京市朝阳区东三环北路东方路一号 100027
Hotel’s phone number: (010) 5865 5000
Map available on request.
Sponsors: Agenda, Localnoodles and the World Health Store.
Main Sponsor: China Expert International Ltd. – Destination and Relocation Services for Expats and Solutions for Doing Business in/with China http://www.china-expert.org
Artist of the week 121: Phoebe Unwin
January 13, 2011 Filed under Uncategorized
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jan/12/artist-week-phoebe-unwin#
(The Guardian)
Experimenter with paint whose skill in combining detail with abstraction has caught the eye of British art’s opinion-formers
Everyday events become transformed in Phoebe’s Unwin’s paintings. A girl waiting on the telephone, water spraying from a showerhead, a key clutched in cartoonish fingers – all simple, fleeting details that appear in her multi-layered works. Exploring the overlap between figuration and abstraction, she draws attention to the complexity of small, subtle moments, while also pushing the boundaries of what paint can do. Her works feature thick pigment, smoky charcoal and flat hazes of spray-paint.
The 32-year-old British artist has won many fans. Not long after she graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art MFA programme in 2005, she was staging a solo show at Milton Keynes Gallery, with her work coveted by the likes of Charles Saatchi and tipped for greatness in numerous art magazines. It was a rapid ascent. Yet, as is evident in her consistently experimental output – seen most recently in Saatchi’s Newspeak and the major survey show British Art Show 7 – she has clearly been able to cope with the attention.
Unlike many of her peers, Unwin doesn’t work from photographs, preferring to build her images from memory. Her painting Self-Consciousness (2010) is a good example of her gift for conjuring what the eye can’t see. It depicts a shadowy figure whose head is shown in triplicate, as if caught by a shaky camera. The silhouette is black, but the figure’s belly is a riot of hot pink, orange, lime and cobalt paint, while clouds of gauzy white spray cover the background. It suggests both inner retreat and self-awareness, brought on by an awkward, perhaps embarrassing collision with physicality.
Why we like her: Aeroplane Meal (2008) features a banal plastic food tray, calling to mind both the magic of air travel and the suspended time and boredom that goes with long-haul journeys. Unwin renders the tray as a flat white spray-painted series of circles, oblongs and squares, while the backdrop is a mesh of midnight blues and dirty oranges, like passing landscapes.
California dreaming: Colour is all for Unwin, who often collides buzzy fluorescents with a darker palette. She puts her love of the bright stuff down to early years spent on America’s perenially sunny west coast.
Where can I see her? Phoebe Unwin’s solo show Man Made is at Wilkinson Gallery, London, from 13 January until 6 March. Her work is included in British Art Show 7, which runs from 16 February to 17 April at the Hayward Gallery in London and then tours the UK.
Fay Godwin at the National Media Museum
January 10, 2011 Filed under Uncategorized
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jan/08/margaret-drabble-fay-godwin
(The Guardian)
Throughout her long career, Fay Godwin – with her portraits of authors, bleak landscapes and scenes of urban dereliction – was the most poetic of photographers, writes Margaret Drabble.
Fay Godwin is very much a writer’s photographer, in more senses than one. Poets and novelists are drawn to her work, and she worked closely with several. She is remembered now as a landscape photographer – a career celebrated in a new exhibition of her work, Land Revisited, at the National Media Museum in Bradford – but her connections with writers go back a long way, to the days when she was the wife of the influential and dynamic bookseller-turned-publisher, Tony Godwin. They married in 1961, and I met them both in the 1960s when Tony was publishing my work, first with Penguin and then with Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
They were a memorable couple – small, slight, wiry, somewhat elfin, and charged with energy. In those early years Fay took some remarkable portraits of authors, including John Fowles, Angela Carter and Ted Hughes, but she was later to say that had she not been a young mother with two small children she would have preferred an adventurous life of photojournalism to bread-and-butter commercial portraiture. Domestic responsibilities and conflicts constrained her, as they did so many women of that period, and she appeared to adapt to her role. But her life was to change dramatically. In 1969, her marriage broke up very suddenly, and in 1973 Tony, equally abruptly and unexpectedly, departed to work in New York, where he died three years later of asthma-related heart failure at the age of 56.
Fay was now on her own, and able to develop and explore a new dimension of her art. From an urban life as a 60s north London wife, mother and hostess, she set out on a long journey into the wilder landscapes of Britain, sometimes in company, sometimes alone, often on foot, and built up over time a body of work that reflects a deep sense of place and the poetry of place. In 1970 she met Ted Hughes, with whom she formed a creative partnership which was to result in his lament for the Calder Valley, Remains of Elmet (1979). Perhaps the best known of her collaborations, this volume was very much poem-led. She responded strongly to his vision of the ruined mills, the “melting corpses of farms”, the Satanic majesty, the sluttish subsidy sheep, the black chimneys, the cemeteries, the millstone grit, the willow herb. It was through Hughes, she said, that she got to know England.
Her roots were not English. She was born in Berlin, the daughter of a British diplomat father and an American artist mother of Scottish ancestry, and her childhood was peripatetic. She had learned to enjoy walking as a girl in Austria, and joined the Ramblers’ Association in England in the mid-1950s (she was to become its president in 1987). Liberated by divorce from some of her domestic and social duties, and with growing children, she now began to walk again more seriously, discovering the history of Britain, its prehistoric megaliths, its Roman and medieval roads, its field systems, its crofts and kilns. She developed a keen sense of space and topography, patiently waiting for the light or the sky to respond to her needs, learning to battle for permissions to enter forbidden or forbidding terrain. There is a deep loneliness in some of her images, a sense of desolation, some of which may well have been acquired during her apprenticeship with Hughes. She turned away from portrait photography with a vengeance.
There are no people in most of her landscapes (and none in this exhibition), only the traces of people, the remains of people. She documented ancient trades – the drovers’ roads, the whisky roads of Scotland, the oil riggers of Shetland, the shepherds of the Lake District – but her landscapes are marked by emptiness. Simon Armitage commented that her portraits of sheep-farmers bear witness to a sense of “collective good” and “commonwealth”, but this sense of the human is unusual in her work.
One of her early major collaborative publications was Islands, a portrait of the Scillies with a text by John Fowles, published in 1978. Fowles had been much impressed by her 1975 work (with JRL Anderson) on the Ridgeway, and his long essay rambles quirkily and knowledgeably through the history and mythology of the islands, giving the highest of praise to Godwin’s art, diligence and physical endurance: “British photography has not had a more poetic interpreter of ancient landscape, of its lights and moods and forms, for many years.” This volume, unlike the Hughes collaboration, is image-led: Fowles as author extemporises on the images Godwin brought to him, while admiring from a distance her “formidable walks in pursuit of remote subjects”.
This was a period in which topographical work was beginning to enjoy a new vogue, foreshadowing the environmentally aware “nature writing” of the last decades by authors such as Richard Mabey and Roger Deakin. Richard Long was creating walking sculptures and earth sculptures, and Andy Goldsworthy was beginning to try his hand at working in ice, stone, river and leaf. WG Hoskins’s landmark The Making of the English Landscape, first published in 1955, reached a much larger audience in 1976-8 through his television documentaries. Topography was part of the zeitgeist.
The subject of my own landscape book, A Writer’s Britain, first published in 1979, was suggested to me by the distinguished Polish-born photographer Jorge Lewinski, who had independently been taking photographs of writers’ houses – Abbotsford, Knole, Haworth – and needed some extended captions and text to go with them. I happily agreed, but soon found that the houses in themselves were not nearly as interesting to me as the landscapes that had formed the imaginations of poets and novelists – Egdon Heath, Gordale Scar, Tintern Abbey, the Potteries – and I found myself writing what was in effect a history of the way writers have shaped our vision of the land. Lewinski went along with this change of direction. He did the driving and saw the places, while I, more house and family bound, sat at home and read the books.
Godwin also worked on text and author-led publications, notably on a 1983 volume called The Saxon Shoreway which follows the indefatigable and map-loving Alan Sillitoe as he takes a nine-day walk munching on rye bread and Polish sausage round the Kent shore from Gravesend to Rye. Some of these images are to be seen in Bradford now.
Godwin pursued her own pathways, building up an international reputation for her art and her polemics. She was much helped by the freedom bestowed by a major Arts Council bursary awarded in 1978. The images in her 1985 exhibition and the accompanying book, Land, were largely the result of this public encouragement and support, and many of these appear in the Bradford retrospective. She was able to travel to the Scottish Isles and to Sutherland, the land of her mother’s ancestors, and her photographs of lochs and glens and standing stones with solitary sheep are hauntingly memorable.
They have a Wordsworthian timelessness, a sense of the Wordsworthian sublime. Her imagination, like his, was attracted by the barren, the grand and the bleak. These archetypal landscapes are probably the most enduring tributes to her great talent, and they are enduring in every sense – she catches the spirits of places that have been worn and weathered, deserted and abandoned, and yet still speak to us.
Godwin also benefited, in 1987, from a fellowship in Bradford, at what was then known as the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television. This connection seems to have sent her work in a slightly different direction, away from the remoteness of wilderness and towards urban and suburban landscape and post-industrial dereliction – subjects which had long preoccupied her, but to which she now returned, experimenting with colour as well as working in her customary black and white. These Yorkshire images bring to mind the work of another lone woman landscape artist, Prunella Clough, whose paintings also dwell on the offbeat view, the telegraph pole, the cement block, the fence, the broken wiring, the litter and the plastic bag.
Godwin became increasingly concerned with our connection with the earth and our assaults on it, by the way we mess up our rivers and canals, our shores and embankments. From the 70s onwards, she had been recording subjects such as rotting cars lying in lagoons, a hawk hovering threateningly over a bunker on Dover cliffs, sheep lining up to stare over a military canal, shacks and caravans littering the countryside, pill boxes marching along the beach, Keep Out and Private and No Fishing notices thwarting the rambler. Godwin had been captured by the visual impact of these messages, but she was also concerned and outraged.
She was a pioneer of organic food and farming, distressed by the impact on land and landscape of fertilisers and factory farming, and persuaded that her recovery in the 1970s from what she described as “advanced cancer” had been aided by her naturopath doctor’s advice to commit herself to an organic diet. (It has to be said that, to some, her advocacy of raw turnip was challenging.) Our Forbidden Land (1990) is an impassioned attack on the destruction of the countryside. The text is strongly argued, and the photographic documentary of what the Ministry of Defence, bad planning, guard dogs, greed and neglect are doing to Britain is eloquent. The volume is illustrated with poems from Ted Hughes and Adrian Mitchell, Frances Horovitz and Thomas Hardy, James Fenton and Seamus Heaney. Nearly all her work has poetic reference; she also worked with the poet Patricia Beer on the National Trust book Wessex, from which Bradford is showing a few images. Her early experiences of the literary world inspired her all her life. She had moved far beyond the publicity shots of literary figures with which she had begun her professional photographic career. And she did manage through her involvement with the Ramblers and other environmental organisations to satisfy some of that early desire to become a campaigning photojournalist. She succeeded in shaping her own future.
Prunella Clough’s later work sailed off towards abstraction, and so in some ways did Godwin’s. Fowles had remarked that she managed “to lend a paradoxical air of the abstract” to many of the shots of the Scillies, and in her last years she photographed objects found on the beach and worked on studies of foliage. But a certain grand austerity remained central to her vision. She did not take pretty pastoral pictures.
Since her death in 2005, photographers have been finding their access to both public and private land more and more problematic, more expensive, and legally restricted. In Our Forbidden Land she wrote about the dilemma of access to Stonehenge, a site mass marketed by English Heritage which charges substantial sums to everybody, from individual artists to wealthy advertising companies. She foresaw a time when “the only photographs we are likely to see of the inner circles of Stonehenge will be those approved by English Heritage, generally by their anonymous public relations photographers”. Our common land would be the copyright of others. We are fortunate that she made her journeys round the British Isles when she did, before even more of our landscape was fenced off or built up. Philip Larkin, in a poem titled “Going, going”, oddly enough commissioned by the then Department of the Environment, gloomily concluded that
. . . before I snuff it, the whole
Boiling will be bricked in
Except for the tourist parts –
First slum of Europe . . .
It hasn’t happened yet, but, as Godwin and Larkin warn us, it may.
Artist of the week 119: Huma Bhabha
December 31, 2010 Filed under Uncategorized
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/dec/30/artist-week-huma-bhabha
(The Guardian)
Drawing together influences spanning millennia, this Pakistan-born sculptor’s work speaks loudly to our own times
Huma Bhabha’s sooty statues built from cork or Styrofoam look like lost treasures from an ancient civilisation. Then again, her lumpy skins of clay built over half-exposed chicken-wire frames like shattered, melting bodies might just as easily be left over from a nuclear blast. Sometimes these sculptures are simply outsize heads with giant eyes and gaping mouths; other times they resemble tribal deities or comic-book space creatures. Monster faces stare out from Bhabha’s drawings too, while her ink drawings over photographs conjure dark phantoms.
Born in Pakistan in 1962, Bhabha emigrated to the US in the 1980s, where she studied print-making, discovering sculpture after graduating from art school. In recent years she’s become one of a new generation of artists exploring figurative sculpture, with a couple of knockout solo shows in New York and inclusion in the Whitney Biennial. The references feeding into her alien forms span the globe and stretch over centuries: from the sci-fi novels of Philip K Dick to the gnarled flesh of Giacometti’s existential nomads, the masks of Picasso or African art and ancient works like the Greek Kouros whose parted, advancing feet heralded a giant step for sculpture. Yet Bhabha’s hybrids, limping along or with legs missing, also speak to concerns that are very much our own.
Though the artist rarely makes specific political references, she described one of her very first works with clay, Untitled (2002), as a kind of memorial to the victims of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars: a lump of clay shrouded with a black plastic sack, perhaps a burka covering a praying figure, perhaps a body bag.
Bumps In the Road, the centrepiece of her current London show, sets two figures on a stage-like plinth – a square of charred landscaped. One is a head of clay and wire whose melted lip hangs pathetically over giant teeth, while eyes extend from dark sockets. Though static, it seems to hobble. The other is but a pair of legs built from wooden planks with railings for feet. Although this couple stand side-by-side, they seem lost to each other, intent on a singular, inscrutable journey.
Why we like her: Bhabha’s 2009 sculpture, Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World, gave wood and Styrofoam a post-apocalyptic makeover, transforming them into a kind of blackened, blasted Pharaoh.
Foot fetish: There are plentiful feet in Bhaba’s work, bursting out of shoes in drawings or as clumpy sculptures. She puts it down to three influences: the feet of the Kouros, Van Gogh’s paintings of his shoes and a violent film she saw as a child, in which a man was blown up, leaving just his trainers.
Where can I see her? At the Stephen Friedman Gallery, London until 15 January.
Huma Bhabha at the Stephen Friedman Gallery, to 15 January 2011.
Huma Bhabha’s sooty statues built from cork or Styrofoam look like lost treasures from an ancient civilisation. Then again, her lumpy skins of clay built over half-exposed chicken-wire frames like shattered, melting bodies might just as easily be left over from a nuclear blast. Sometimes these sculptures are simply outsize heads with giant eyes and gaping mouths; other times they resemble tribal deities or comic-book space creatures. Monster faces stare out from Bhabha’s drawings too, while her ink drawings over photographs conjure dark phantoms.
Born in Pakistan in 1962, Bhabha emigrated to the US in the 1980s, where she studied print-making, discovering sculpture after graduating from art school. In recent years she’s become one of a new generation of artists exploring figurative sculpture, with a couple of knockout solo shows in New York and inclusion in the Whitney Biennial. The references feeding into her alien forms span the globe and stretch over centuries: from the sci-fi novels of Philip K Dick to the gnarled flesh of Giacometti’s existential nomads, the masks of Picasso or African art and ancient works like the Greek Kouros whose parted, advancing feet heralded a giant step for sculpture. Yet Bhabha’s hybrids, limping along or with legs missing, also speak to concerns that are very much our own.
Though the artist rarely makes specific political references, she described one of her very first works with clay, Untitled (2002), as a kind of memorial to the victims of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars: a lump of clay shrouded with a black plastic sack, perhaps a burka covering a praying figure, perhaps a body bag.
Bumps In the Road, the centrepiece of her current London show, sets two figures on a stage-like plinth – a square of charred landscaped. One is a head of clay and wire whose melted lip hangs pathetically over giant teeth, while eyes extend from dark sockets. Though static, it seems to hobble. The other is but a pair of legs built from wooden planks with railings for feet. Although this couple stand side-by-side, they seem lost to each other, intent on a singular, inscrutable journey.
Why we like her: Bhabha’s 2009 sculpture, Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World, gave wood and Styrofoam a post-apocalyptic makeover, transforming them into a kind of blackened, blasted Pharaoh.
Foot fetish: There are plentiful feet in Bhaba’s work, bursting out of shoes in drawings or as clumpy sculptures. She puts it down to three influences: the feet of the Kouros, Van Gogh’s paintings of his shoes and a violent film she saw as a child, in which a man was blown up, leaving just his trainers.
Where can I see her? At the Stephen Friedman Gallery, London until 15 January.
Analog – review
December 28, 2010 Filed under Uncategorized
(The Guardian)
Riflemaker gallery, London W1
Richard Nicholson spent three years photographing commercial photographic darkrooms in London. When he began his project in 2006, there were more than 200 thriving darkrooms dotted around the city; when he completed it in 2009, there were 12.
“When I started as a young photographer about 10 years ago,” he says, “I’d go to Photofusion in Brixton or Joe’s Basement in Soho and these places would be bustling with young photographers. Often, you had to book days, sometimes weeks, in advance. Now the darkrooms that have survived are quiet and business is slow. The London labs where you could drop film off have all but disappeared – Joe’s Basement has gone and so have Primary [Colour], Metro Soho, Ceta, Sky and countless others. We are really witnessing the end of a photographic era.”
The coming of the digital camera has swept all before it, making the whole process of photography simpler, less labour-intensive, less costly and more technically creative. But as has been the case with music production, something has also been lost along the way, something intangible but powerful that the music writer Greg Milner called “presence”: the human element in the production of sound and images.
A small group exhibition, entitled Analog, opens at the Riflemaker gallery in London on 11 January. Its subtext is “presence”: the human ghost in the machine. The show includes Nicholson’s photographs of the last-surviving London darkrooms alongside an installation by Lewis Durham (of the young rockabilly group Kitty, Daisy & Lewis) in which he has recreated a reel-to-reel, multitracked tape studio, as well as works by interactive design duo Zigelbaum + Coelho and artist Clare Mitten, who has constructed laptop and mobile phone-like sculptures from packaging and stationery.
Analog is a kind of elegy for the pre-digital era of sound and photographic production and Nicholson’s prints are the most elegiac components in the mix. He has photographed each darkroom on large format film, working in total darkness with a flashgun. The result might have been what Nicholson calls “a detached typology of modernist industrial design” in which the enlarger stands at the centre, strangely human in its form. Except that these darkrooms are also human dens, full of the clutter of human endeavour – Post-it notes, piles of prints, boxes of paper, toys, rulers, marker pens and batches of photographs pinned to boards.
“I had a few epiphanies while doing this project,” says Nicholson, a soft-spoken, thin, bespectacled, ex-philosophy graduate, “and one was the realisation that the world of work, particularly a craft like darkroom printing, has becoming utterly homogenised in the digital era. Even just a few years ago, every profession had its own machinery, its tools, its language; now all we have are computers.”
I accompany Nicholson to BDI on Old Street, one of the last commercial darkrooms in London. The owner, Brian Dowling, a dapper 62-year-old Londoner, has been working here for 32 years and has printed colour photographs for the likes of Anton Corbijn, Nick Knight and Juergen Teller. His darkroom looks much like it does in Nicholson’s photograph of it, except that it is a lot smaller than I had expected and even more cluttered. On one wall, there is a signed picture of Naomi Campbell, probably procured for Dowling by Nick Knight; on another, a triptych of the late comedian Tommy Cooper. It’s a lived-in space, but it has that palpable sense of belonging to another times, recent but already distant.
“At an age when I’m about to retire, I’ve had to adapt to survive,” says Dowling. “We do digital printing and retouching now but it ain’t like it used to be. Magazines and advertising firms don’t have the budgets for film. Contact sheets are becoming a thing of the past like Polaroid film and the rest. Only a handful of people still shoot on film. Anton is one of them – he’ll never change. But the world is digital now and I’m having to find a home for all my old equipment.”
Dowling plans to give his big, bulky machinery to one of the photography colleges that still teaches darkroom techniques. “A lot of my work comes from students these days. They are still taught how to shoot on film, thank God, but darkroom printing isn’t really a going commercial concern anymore. It’s over. I’ll give it five years at most.”
What will be lost, of course, is not just the presence that film and printing possessed, but the process that went with it, a kind of analogue alchemy that often helped turn the raw material into art. Before I leave, Nicholson remembers a quote by the great Ansel Adams that seems appropriate. “The negative is comparable to the composer’s score and the print is the performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.”
Whatever else digital photographic post-production is, it is not a performance. “Making a complex print in the darkroom is physical activity and it is often accompanied by a burst of adrenaline as the printer races against the clock,” says Nicholson. “With digital, there is post-production interpretation, but it can’t be called a ‘performance’. Photoshop work is non-linear and is not time-restricted. And, once that work is done, each print is identical.”
Perhaps the world is simply too fast-forward now for the craft and the clutter – the roll of film, the negative, the chemicals, the contact sheet – of old-fashioned photographic printing. Perhaps, too, the darkroom and photographic film will go the way of the analogue recording studio, the cassette player and the vinyl record and become beloved by a relatively small group of obsessives. There is, as Nicholson points out, “a melancholy beauty” that is all too human about these wonderfully cluttered spaces full of large, looming and once state–of-the art machines.
And there is something magical too about the darkness in which craftsmen like Brian Dowling do their highly skilled and once highly valued work. Richard Nicholson’s evocative photographs of the last darkrooms are a testament to that skill and that magic, even though, ironically, they are digital prints.
That Lady With the Scales Poses for Her Portraits
December 16, 2010 Filed under Uncategorized
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/books/16justice.html?_r=1&ref=arts
(NY Times)
In ancient Egypt she was known as Maat, the goddess of harmony and order, depicted in the Book of the Dead as a kind of personified jeweler’s scale, weighing a human heart against a feather to determine a soul’s fate in the afterlife.
In Greece she became Themis, sister, wife and counselor to Zeus, and the Romans then rolled her and her daughter Dike together to form Justitia, the only one of the cardinal virtues to have a signature look in ancient art. But the look of the grande dame we have come to know as Lady Justice — as interpreted by artists like Giotto, Brueghel and Reynolds — has been as changeable as a catwalk model’s.
She has strode forth naked and clothed, shoeless and shod, sword wielding and weaponless. She has been accompanied by a dog (for fidelity), a snake (for hatred) and a whole menagerie of other sidekicks that would befuddle the modern courthouse visitor, including an ostrich, whose supposed ability to digest anything was seen by the ancients as a useful attribute for the machinery of justice.
As the Yale Law School professors Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis show in an unusual new book just out, “Representing Justice” — an academic treatise on threats to the modern judiciary that doubles as an obsessive’s tour of Western art through the lens of the law — Lady Justice’s familiar blindfold did not become an accessory until well into the 17th century. And even then it was uncommon because of the profoundly negative connotations blindfolds carried for medieval and Renaissance audiences, who viewed them as emblems not of impartiality but of deception (hence the early use of the word hoodwink as a noun, meaning a blindfold or hood).
“Sight was the desired state,” Professors Resnik and Curtis write, “connected to insight, light and the rays of God’s sun.” Even in modern times the blindfold continues to fit uneasily in Lady Justice’s wardrobe, used as a handy prop by political cartoonists and a symbol of dysfunction by others. “That Justice is a blind goddess/Is a thing to which we black are wise,” Langston Hughes wrote in 1923. “Her bandage hides two festering sores/ That once perhaps were eyes.”
It might convey some idea of the depth of Ms. Resnik and Mr. Curtis’s mutual interest in the art life of Lady Justice that their examination of the history of her blindfold alone takes up one whole chapter and part of another in the book, following ideas of sight and veiling through the philosophy of Locke, Diderot and Bentham. The book traces the remarkable ubiquity of the figure of justice around the world, from the statue at the Supreme Court of Canada in Ottawa to one presiding over a constitutional court in Azerbaijan to others in Zambia, Iraq, Brazil and Japan.
She sits atop City Hall in Manhattan and the Old Bailey in London. For a few months in 2002, on the campus of the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, where Charles M. Schulz was raised, she took the shape of Lucy van Pelt, blindfolded, with sword, scales and a big smile.
“They’re all over,” said Ms. Resnik, who specializes in the United States federal court system and who along with Mr. Curtis, her husband and sometime collaborator on legal publications, grew fascinated more than two decades ago with the visual history of justice and the judiciary. It led them to write a 1987 law journal article together and to spend countless hours among the renowned stacks at the Warburg Institute at the University of London following threads of classical scholarship they hoped would lead to discoveries about the evolution of Justice in art and architecture.
“We’ve always been working on this,” Ms. Resnik said in a recent phone interview along with Mr. Curtis, who finished her thought: “It seems like forever.”
Several years ago they began work on an ambitious academic study looking at the central role the judiciary has played in the development of democracies and warning of an increasing international movement away from public adjudication toward private dispute resolution, bureaucratic hearings and closed courts. And they saw a way to put their art leanings (“We’ve been going to museums of virtually any kind as long as we can remember,” Mr. Curtis said) to work as a means of telling that story.
The book charts how the iconography of justice has both reflected and influenced the development of courts and national governments and how that imagery is now often no longer able to carry the weight of the legal demands of the modern world. “The precepts of good democratic governance encoded and iterated in the symbolism of Justice are far too narrow,” the authors write. And along with the triumphal architecture of modern courthouses themselves, the images can end up masking the problems that lie beneath what they are supposed to represent.
“On many a day,” they write, “the austere hallways of various grand courthouses on both the national and international levels are empty.”
As a legal tome the book is probably the only one ever to mingle Supreme Court citations with interviews with contemporary artists like Tom Otterness, and Jenny Holzer, both of whom have created permanent art installations for federal courthouses that tweak conceptions of justice. (Mr. Otterness, known for putting wickedly playful sculptures in unusual places, made Lady Justice into a fat bird perched in a tree, concealing her sword behind her back. Ms. Holzer inscribed granite paving stones with various phrases from legal history, including a wicked aperçu from Justice Felix Frankfurter: “It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.”)
While the book includes several examples of the abstract representations of justice that modernism has bequeathed, the one prominent display of non-Lady-Justice courtroom art that Mr. Curtis and Ms. Resnik feature is one they came across six years ago on a trip to speak at a conference in Minnesota. They drove by a courthouse in Grand Marais, a small town 110 miles north of Duluth and stopped, finding a probation officer inside.
“Explaining our interest in courthouses and their iconography,” they wrote, “we asked if we might take a look around. When we inquired what (if any) icons of justice were displayed, he did not hesitate to bring us to the courtroom on the second floor, a modestly proportioned room with a judge’s bench, flags and computers.”
On one wall hung a memorial to a dedicated local lawyer, James A. Sommerness, who had worked as a public defender in the court for more than 20 years. Instead of his portrait, the court had framed the battered corduroy jacket the lawyer had always worn while arguing cases, a humble monument to the grand ideal of public justice for everyone.
“We’ve seen a lot of representations of justice over the years,” Ms. Resnik said, “but that one will always be pretty hard to top.”
Mona Hatoum and the 6ft cheese-grater
December 14, 2010 Filed under Uncategorized
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/dec/12/mona-hatoum-interview
(The Guardian)
She started out as a performance artist infuriating the tabloids. But it’s Mona Hatoum’s large-scale sculptures that are really unsettling
Meditation on urban architecture … Mona Hatoum’s Current Disturbance.
Mona Hatoum’s art is frightening. She has made giant wire cages lit by naked flickering bulbs, and a 6ft cheese grater that could slice off a hand. She has hung metal whisks, colanders and spatulas from washing lines and sent electricity coursing through them. She has even had a miniature camera inserted into her major orifices, to film her body from the inside.
So meeting her is a daunting prospect, not least because Hatoum does not, by her own admission, enjoy interviews. In Under Siege, her 1982 debut performance piece at the Aspex gallery in Portsmouth, she writhed around inside a transparent plastic box smeared with brown clay. A tabloid storm ensued. “Nude has ticket to writhe,” said the Sun. “Taxpayers outraged.” Ever since, she has been cautious in her dealings with the press.
Today, however, Hatoum smiles as she strolls into a bright, wide-windowed room at White Cube, the London gallery that represents her. With her umber lipstick and dark curls, she looks softer-edged than I had expected, but she turns serious as we sit down. “I do get angry,” she says, “when people ask me stupid questions.”
Duly warned, I try one about her 1996 work Current Disturbance, about to go on display at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, part of its Keeping It Real series. It’s the first time this room-sized installation – in which lightbulbs flash on and off inside a grid of wire-mesh cages, to the amplified whine of the electric current – has been shown in Europe. Is it strange to see a work made 14 years ago back on display? “Not if I still like it,” Hatoum laughs. “I like the fact it’s a very experiential piece: you walk in and you’re assaulted by the sound. I hope the gallery will play it loudly.”
Hatoum made Current Disturbance in San Francisco – where people strongly associated it with prisons, perhaps, she thinks, because of the proximity of Alcatraz. “At the Whitechapel, it’s going to have a different feel,” she says. “People will read something more into it about cities, perhaps.”
Hatoum meant the work as a meditation on urban architecture and the surveillance methods used to police it, themes that began to preoccupy her after she moved to London in 1975 from Lebanon. “It’s part of a body of work looking at council flats and architecture as prison – basically, architecture as control. When I came to London, there were all these cameras. I felt like I was in Big Brother-land.”
Hatoum was born in Beirut in 1952 into a Palestinian family; her father worked as a customs official in Palestine, and then for the British embassy in Beirut – where he acquired “a very strange Queen’s English, spoken with an Arab accent, which I always admired”. She grew up with an interest in western art, and recalls poring over tiny reproductions of old masters printed at the back of her Larousse dictionary. But her father was deeply opposed to her becoming an artist, fearing she would find it difficult to support herself. So she trained as a graphic designer, and worked in advertising. “Sometimes people say to me, ‘What is your biggest regret?’ And I say, ‘Wasting five years of my life before doing what I really wanted to do.’”
Hatoum was 23 when she first came to London, on holiday; during her stay, the Lebanese civil war broke out, so she stayed on, under the UK passport her father had acquired for the whole family through his embassy job. She studied at the Byam Shaw art school and then the Slade, going on to create performance pieces such as Under Siege, and video installations such as Corps Étranger, featuring the footage shot inside her body; the latter earned her a 1995 Turner prize nomination.
When Tate Modern put on a major exhibition of her work in 2000, the Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said wrote: “No one has put the Palestinian experience in visual terms so austerely and yet so playfully.” Yet she resists attempts to attribute political intentions to her art. “There is definitely a political awareness that filters through my work,” she says, “but I’m always trying to do it through the form of the work, not as a political agenda. I don’t like it when people hear, ‘Oh, she’s Palestinian,’ and think this must be what the work means. It’s a reductive, myopic way of looking.”
What does run through Hatoum’s art, however, is an interest in the body and its functions, illustrated most graphically in Corps Étranger. She was still a student when she had the idea, and the doctors she consulted were wary. Funding the project proved hard, and it didn’t go ahead until 1994, with the backing of the Pompidou in Paris. It was completely painless. “They give you a drug called a ‘truth serum’,” she says. “You get high and then you start talking, ‘Yak yak yak.’”
This fascination with the body, she says, partly comes from the contrast between Britishness and the less self-conscious attitude to physicality that she was used to while growing up. “The British have this physical reserve. Arab culture is very different.” And that, she adds, is why the Arab world has so many rules and restrictions about the body. “Otherwise people would go crazy!”
Len Lye: The Body Electric – review
December 13, 2010 Filed under Uncategorized
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/dec/12/len-lye-body-electric-review#
(The Guardian)
Ikon gallery, Birmingham
‘The irreducible joy of movement’: a still from Len Lye’s Rainbow Dance (1936) at the Ikon gallery.
The most exhilarating show of 20th-century art to be seen in this country right now is by the New Zealand artist Len Lye. To describe his works as energetic would be true, but insufficient. Everything Lye created – from the pioneering films made without the use of cameras to the fabulously cool kinetic sculptures that sashay and vibrate to their own self-made music – is by all accounts a direct reflection of the man himself: great dancer, sprightly poet, free spirit.
For sheer joy, for example, not much beats the film that opens this show – a continuous stream of high-coloured abstraction that appears to move to the rhythms of the Cuban rumba on the soundtrack. Polka dots, lassos, twisting ribbons, grids of gyrating diamonds, washes of colour that leap, dance and undulate so compellingly that you can’t take your eyes off the screen, A Colour Box moves in mysterious ways. In no time at all, viewers are unconsciously swaying before it.
And then, out of the blue (vermilion and orange) comes a trio of letters – GPO – and a succession of printed facts. Parcel post has suddenly become cheaper, it seems – 3lbs for 6d, 15lbs for a shilling, and so on. The effect is hilarious, like a band marching in the wrong direction in some magnificent parade, yet also rather touching; as if cheaper postage could ever be as exciting as art.
Who was promoting whom? The very idea that the Post Office could have hired Len Lye, as it did for several years, to put over its “post early, post often” messages is inconceivable now. This was nothing less than the sponsorship of the avant garde. For Lye’s film, made in 1935, is not just extraordinary in its animation of abstract art, it is actually painted directly on the celluloid like a flowing Japanese scroll. A Colour Box is effectively one continuous painting.
Lye’s own life is as surprising as his work. Born in Christchurch in 1901, he moved to Australia and then a remote Samoan island before buying the papers of a deserting sailor and taking his place on a steamship to England in 1926.
In London he associated with Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas and Ben Nicholson, exhibiting with the Seven and Five Society, but eventually settling in Manhattan. He designed a sequence for Hitchcock, shot documentaries and made a war film, before producing sculptures, drawings and paintings that were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art.
So when Time magazine described him as the English Walt Disney in 1938, it was wrong on both counts. Lye’s work certainly had a huge influence on the animators of Fantasia, but the New Zealander was no Walt. His films were one long experiment in advanced art.
That this is the first comprehensive retrospective of Lye’s work in Britain may have something to do with his fast-moving, shape-shifting career. Len Who?, the title of a 1972 New Zealand documentary about him, became the question that followed him as he skirted the limelight all over the world, constantly trying to invent new forms of art.
At the Ikon gallery, for instance, you can see Lye’s Trade Tattoo (1937), which splices found footage of dock workers and mail sorters in an electrifying collage overlaid with abstract forms inked and etched on the stock, its jump-cuts cued to the escalating pace of the music. It’s like Humphrey Jennings crossed with hip-hop crossed with Ferdinand Léger, all wired up to the national grid.
And here too is the hallucinogenic Rainbow Dance, made by shooting the dancer Rupert Doone in black and white, leaping, pirouetting and gliding across the globe like a leaner Gene Kelly, then isolating the silhouette and filling it with saturated colour. Around him flows a constant procession of images – people, places, climates – like a film within the film, seamlessly worked out of paintings, animations and reportage.
Ostensibly a film about getting out and about, it is no stretch to say that this free-form fantasy both describes and exemplifies the irreducible joy of movement.
Motion was clearly Lye’s lifelong obsession, but what is so remarkable is how he shifted from one medium to another. Where other artists after the war saw a natural progression from still to moving pictures, Lye became fascinated with sculpture instead – not as a static 3D object but as a movable form, capable of creating ever-changing shapes and of generating its own sounds; capable of something like spontaneous movement.
An immense bouquet of steel reeds sways and sings in a gigantic vase, sending out a silvery music as the individual rods collide, dispersing the light from above in a constant play of quivering shadows on the floor, its motion instigated, but not controlled, by electricity.
A steel ribbon the size of a tractor tyre somehow supports itself in a wobbling band that rolls tidally back and forth, almost brushing the wooden ball that dangles like an apple above; a beautiful skit on anticipation and (eventual) climax.
These grand silver sculptures from the 60s stand the test of time. They ought to look as dated as kinetic art often does, but instead they appear gleamingly new. This has something to do with Lye’s classical precision – the poised geometry of cones, spheres and cylinders – but also to do with his evergreen spirit.
The motion he loves is spry continuity. It is there in his films, with their marvellous ideas and images growing out of each other like live doodles, in his paintings of trees seeding themselves by night, in his comical sculpture of a silver plank and a wooden ball working themselves into a rhythm so euphoric that the vibrations keep coming in the form of music, long after the motion has ceased.
Above all, it is there in what feels like his seminal work, the short 1929 film Tusavala. Animated out of hundreds of thousands of black-and-white drawings, it presents a fabulous myth of origin in which quixotic forms, male and female, couple and proliferate – one line generating two, two circles breeding a chain of winking bubbles and so on.
The whole cycle of life appears condensed in a few minutes of pure graphic joy: the act of creation made literal and metaphoric. And for one startling moment, it looks as if the screen itself is ready to hatch.
Works by Van Gogh and Hockney mark London gallery’s 200th birthday
December 3, 2010 Filed under Uncategorized
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/dec/02/dulwich-picture-gallery-200th-birthday
(The Guardian)
Twelve paintings that ‘would knock your socks off at 50 paces’ feature in Dulwich Picture Gallery’s anniversary celebrations
As birthday presents go, they are quite something: 12 of the most jaw-dropping paintings in any gallery anywhere, courtesy of institutions across Europe and the US including the Uffizi, Prado and Met.
The Dulwich Picture Gallery, England’s oldest public art gallery, today announced it was marking its 200th anniversary in 2011 by displaying specially loaned paintings for a month at a time by artists such as Velázquez, El Greco, Rembrandt, Constable and David Hockney.
“We wanted paintings that would knock your socks off at 50 paces,” said Ian Dejardin, the gallery’s director, who admitted he has been thinking about the bicentenary since he joined five years ago.
“This is a very important date in the history of all museums in this country and if you’re going to celebrate, then you might as well do it all year. If you haven’t heard of Dulwich Picture Gallery by the end of the year then you’re deaf.”
The south London gallery opened 200 years ago to house a remarkable collection that had been built up over five years for the King of Poland, who wanted to build a royal collection from scratch.
His abdication in 1795 left two London-based art dealers with some fine paintings which, in turn, led to the creation of what is one of the world’s oldest public galleries. Then it charged sixpence to keep riff-raff out. Today the riff-raff are welcome, but they must pay £5 to see a permanent collection that is one of the most important collections of old masters anywhere.
It is this reputation and history that had galleries saying yes to Dejardin’s request for loans. One of the most eye-catching is the self-portrait of Van Gogh – he’ll be Mr July – from the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. It was specifically requested by Dejardin, not least because a 19-year-old Van Gogh walked from central London to the gallery in 1873 and made a mess of the visitor’s book by blotting ink all over it. Unfortunately all that is known of his experience, said Dejardin, is that he “had a nice day”.
Dejardin said the loans were like “a year-long advent calendar of your dreams”. It kicks off with a Sir Thomas Lawrence portrait of Sir John Soane in January and is followed by a Velázquez portrait from the Prado in Madrid – “one of the most extraordinary portraits by the most extraordinary painter in the world,” said Dejardin.
March sees the loan of a Vermeer from the Queen; then an El Greco from New York; a Veronese from Florence which comes to the UK for the first time; and a portrait by Rembrandt of his son Titus from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
August brings an Ingres from New York’s Frick Collection; then comes a Gainsborough from Washington; Constable’s The Leaping Horse from the Royal Academy; Hockney’s Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy from Tate; and finally a perfect Christmas card image – Domenichino’s The Adoration of the Shepherds from the National Gallery of Scotland.
Dejardin also announced a summer exhibition in which he had “high hopes for fisticuffs” from the visiting public, in that it will examine two artists as stylistically different as it is possible to get – Cy Twombly and Poussin.
Penelope Curtis: beyond the oil painting
December 2, 2010 Filed under Uncategorized
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/nov/30/penelope-curtis-tate-britain-interview
(The Guardian)
Glaswegian Penelope Curtis is the first woman ever to run Tate Britain. So what’s she planning? Fewer blockbusters and a bigger, bolder gallery, she tells Charlotte Higgins
There are moments, talking to Penelope Curtis, the director of Tate Britain, when I feel 18 again. There is something about her – her well-organised and formidable intellect, her straight-backed neatness of person, the donnish precision of her conversation – that reduces me to the condition of disorganised undergraduate. In the British art world, she is respected and liked, as well as famous for her tactlessness, which might be understood as a certain blunt literalness. For example, when I ask her about being the first woman to sit in this particular chair at Tate Britain – meaning being the first woman director of the gallery – she replies that these are new chairs. And her donnishness seems particularly in play when I ask which is her favourite work in Tate Britain: “I’m not going to answer that,” she replies, as if disappointed that anyone could ask such an unsophisticated question.
Curtis, 49, became director of Tate Britain in the spring, but this is her first interview. The collection is currently being rehung and a £45m redevelopment plan, announced yesterday, will smarten the galleries and increase the amount of publicly accessible space. She was hesitant, she tells me, about applying for the Tate job at all. She had been running the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, “where I had had a lot of independence and creative freedom. I was worried about what I would lose if I came here.” She knew the Tate from the inside; she had been one of the first curators at the Liverpool gallery when it opened. And have her worries been justified? “Everything takes longer. You need more hours in the day,” she says.
What made her willing to take Tate Britain on – after headhunters had persuaded her to apply – was, she says, the fact that “I realised that I could think about Tate Britain in a similar way to the Henry Moore Institute but on a bigger scale. So, if we asked, ‘What is sculpture?’ there, at Tate Britain we can ask the question, ‘What is British art?’ and think about how we can widen people’s understanding of it.”
Curtis was raised in Glasgow, though you wouldn’t know it from her English-accented voice; her father was a biologist at Glasgow University. As a girl, she says, “I always liked rehanging my parents’ paintings.” Her grandmother was a painter, so there were plenty in the house. She didn’t go to galleries seriously until she was 20, on a study trip to Germany. “I travelled up and down the Rhine and tried to make sense of the art I was seeing, without being able to read German. I just had the name of the artist and the date.” After studying history at Oxford, she went on to do an art history MA at the Courtauld Institute in London, and then a PhD, “mostly in Paris”. At the time, the Musée D’Orsay was being planned, and she cites witnessing the “curatorial energy” of a museum in the making as a formative influence.
More grace than Tate Modern
One of the major challenges of Tate Britain is, frankly, that it is not Tate Modern – the latter museum, in the decade since its foundation, having been one of the great British cultural success stories of all time. The visitor figures are eloquent: last year, Tate Modern attracted 4.8 million, Tate Britain only 1.6 million. Curtis, needless to say, bats away the idea that Tate Britain is a poor relation. “It’s quieter and that means you can see art in more comfort. If you want to go to one of London’s most iconic visitor sites, then Tate Modern is there. If are interested in looking at art, you might well prefer Tate Britain. It has more grace,” she says – rather an elegant putdown of the museum downstream.
In any case, Curtis has ambitions for Tate Britain. “I want it to be bolder about what it is: a museum of British art that comes up to the present day,” she says. That will involve displaying the old alongside the new in a “more wholehearted way”, and showing contemporary British art in “real depth”. Nor is it a case, she says, of cynically cashing in on the popularity of the contemporary, or using it as a pretext to lure visitors towards older work – which she concedes has been an “overfamiliar route” for museums of historic art in recent years. She says she wants to make more of what is at the museum’s heart – its collections.
Curtis envisages a future where there will be less emphasis on getting people through the door with the lure of blockbuster shows, and more on getting people in to see imaginative displays of what the museum already has. She hopes that any resultant loss in income from ticket sales to those big shows will be made up for by more visitors, and concomitant increase in spending in the shops and cafes. (Part of Tate Britain’s redevelopment plan is to introduce a snazzier cafe, with a terrace and summer tables in the garden.) She adds that in future, there may be charges for some of the displays created from the collection – but is a firm adherent to the principle of free entrance to national museums.
The full scope of her vision will not be seen until 2013, when the redevelopment is due to end, but her approach is being trialled in some of the galleries now. The idea is to create a route through the collection that tells a chronological story of art from the 16th century to the present. These rooms don’t have grandiose thematic titles, and the works have minimal labelling – just the name of the artist and the date – in contrast to the rather bossy, some might say reductive, information boards that have been seen in the galleries in the past.
From high society to the street
Interspersed with these broad-brush rooms will be more focused displays – detailed micro-studies of a particular idea, such as a room titled William Blake and Physiognomy, or a display on Naum Gabo that is being prepared now. Curtis also wants the exhibitions programme to be more imaginative – bringing together curators of historical and contemporary art to investigate ideas such as migration or iconoclasm rather than mounting mostly single-artist shows. She would like to see more sculpture in the galleries, perhaps on long-term loan from the V&A or the Royal Collection, and can envisage showing textiles or costumes to broaden out understanding of British art from the confines of the oil painting.
The key, according to Curtis, is that the galleries should give “pleasure”. She says: “I do really believe it’s about the eye. If we can’t allow people to enjoy looking here, where can it happen?” She takes me to one of the recently rehung galleries, where she points out an Eileen Agar sitting next to a Stanley Spencer. “They speak to each other rather well, I think,” she says – though the connection is visual, rather than any notion that the English surrealist shared ideas or methods with the visionary of Cookham.
Another Spencer – the famously fleshy nude self-portrait with his second wife – is hung next to the entrance of the room. On the other side of it is a glossy society portrait of the Duchess of Argyll by Gerald Brockhurst, painted six years earlier in 1931. The duchess is as self-consciously dressed, in finery, powder and red lipstick, as the Spencers are naked. On the other side of the duchess is another lady with shingled hair and crimson lips, but from a quite different milieu: this is The Snack Bar (1930), by that poet of the urban streetscape, Edward Burra.
Standing in this harmonious clamour of pictures and sculpture, I let my eyes, as Curtis suggests, do the work, and find it’s like being at a party with apparently incompatible guests who find themselves getting on rather well. If Curtis succeeds in her aim to rejuvenate Tate Britain, it’s a party that everyone else will want to be at, too.
