Reviews of exhibitions in London and beyond, as well as books and performances related to the visual arts. 

You can hear it in my accent when I talk

An Englishman in New York: Photographs by Jason Bell, National Portrait Gallery, London

The real highlights of the exhibition are the small cultural insights of the sitters New York stories displayed beside the stunning photographs. Their concerns and motivations highlight what it means to be English, to be an immigrant and where the two intersect.

Art on your wall

Walls are Talking: Wallpaper, Art and Culture, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester

Where Warhol leaves little to the imagination, some of the best pieces here are intricate and detailed montages of startling images and often highly-sexualised motifs. Hirst’s minute reproductions of bottles of pills, which look from afar like a computer circuit board, is actually laced with Biblical sayings. Religion as a drug, anyone?

A new perspective unveiled

Tuareg: People of the Veil, Horniman Museum, London

Unlike in other cultures, it is Taureg men who cover their faces with the cloth. A boy is given his first veil once he reaches puberty, marking his cross over from childhood to adulthood. The veil can also be tied in various ways, which is used to reflect the different regions, social class, age, and tribal affiliations within Tuareg society.

Look who’s watching now

Exposed: Voyeurism, surveillance and the camera, Tate Modern, London

What is truly your own private space?  Is this the space of a lodger in a communal bunk house, at home or in a park making love, or can it be on a bus pondering the day ahead? What about those social but private liaisons?  How do you regard the strip joint, couple’s kissing in the cinema or a Wall Street brothel. And what about what’s public - anarchists in city square, assassinated individuals, dead soldiers on the battlefield?

More than skin deep

Skin, Wellcome Collection, London

In this exhibition, skin is exhibited not only in terms of scientific facts, but in a much more personal and spiritual sense. The issues of race, disease, ageing, and even plastic surgery were touched upon in an honest way, not to insult anyone in anyway, but to openly address the different opinions of how skin can be regarded.

The Penn treatment

lrving Penn Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, London

Penn’s pictures manage to deliver both less and more than they show. Most important of all, however, they remind us of an era when celebrity was conferred on solid achievement rather than on the ability to rise without trace.

The Mayor who sets his sights low

Why Londoners should challenge the low horizons of Boris Johnson, and champion the building of skyscrapers

Boris Johnson has used his powers to galvanise the anti-high-rise sentiment into an object of policy. So far, he has gotten away with this unchallenged. But it is incumbent on us, those who welcome the prospect of transforming London’s skyline into an exciting scene that represents the city’s dynamism, to publicly challenge this short-sighted and un-ambitious policy.

We need mirrors?

Star City – The Future Under Communism, Nottingham Contemporary

It would appear that pathos and disappointment define a strong contemporary current, with fewer options projecting and inspiring us forwards. It seems that that the scope of our future orientation is constrained. We’re not just nervous about setting ambitious goals. The attempt to do so is understood as seen as arrogant. Such audaciousness will see us repeating past mistakes

The blind leading the blind?

'For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there', ICA, London

This exhibition left me with the depressing feeling that the vacuity of postmodern intellectual poses in academia has been uncritically reproduced by some in the cultural world and, as a consequence of being divorced from their philosophically underpinnings, actually rendered more vacuous.

Their fault

Scapegoat Society, Sunbury House, London

The exhibition aims to explore the process through which scapegoats are produced and the inevitability of such figures in any society. Although the message is at times trite, it is also sensitising to the pervasiveness of the scapegoat and the processes through which such figures are produced.

Who are you?

Identity: Eight Rooms, Nine Lives, Wellcome Collection, London

The eight rooms are laudable attempts to concretely illuminate different aspects of a characteristically nebulous issue. However the overall effect is one of an unwelcome eclecticism and fragmentation, as a sustained sense of the profound questions being asked by the exhibition gets lost in the particularity of the different rooms.

Difference in sameness

Agon – Sphinx – Limen, Royal Opera House, London

When Eric Underwood lifts Sarah Lamb during a delicate duet, she gently accommodates her basket-shaped body in his curved arms, just like wine poured in a goblet would end up taking the shape of a tulip. An image bound to be memorable as the seal that only dance can put on beauty.

The glutinous mud of the city

Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites, 1952-62 Courtauld Gallery, London

The construction of the Shell Building on the South Bank of the Thames, near Waterloo, caught Auerbach’s imagination. ‘Shell Building Site from the Thames’ (1959) shows a cable being lowered by a crane into the deep excavation that was carried out for this building. As the cable drops against a background of bright, light clay it’s difficult to stave off an attack of vertigo.

Death in Berlin

Live Long and Prosper, Chelsea Theatre, London

Gob Squad’s twenty-minute film remakes seven cinematic death sequences in and around Berlin’s public spaces. Playing on two screens, allowing comparison between the original and its everyday echo, it captures the sentiment and simultaneously sends it up: emotion marinated in ridicule.

A tragic aspiration to cool

Damien Hirst: No Love Lost, Blue Paintings, The Wallace Collection, London

It matters not at all that some people like Hirst. His fans and detractors can happily co-exist, and pour scorn on one another without the slightest harm to either side. But this show is more corrosive, because he has been permitted to upstage really great art. The worthy object of our vituperation is not Hirst, but the people at the Wallace who allowed this to happen.