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

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.

More than buildings

Floor Plan, Phoenix Gallery, Brighton

The construction project of the Phoenix Gallery itself had to negotiate around the home of a Harriet Sylvester, aged 89, who refused to be bought out. White has worked into the edge of one room here, creating a human sized mouse hole. On entering we are faced with a narrow passage leading to a space which we can imagine Harriet Sylvester still occupies.

Poodles in the Wilderness

Play for a Stage of the Natural Theatre of Cruelty, Serpentine Pavilion, London, 4 September 2009

I was struck more by the handful of people who resisted the impulse to look behind the screen, obstinately remaining seated, their refusal to participate in crossing the threshold from passive observer to active participant paradoxically becoming an assertion of subjectivity.

The daily doings of the domestic front

'Outbreak 1939', Imperial War Museum, London

The exhibition gives us a sense of the calm before the storm which would be unleashed in the summer of 1940. But that’s not quite enough. It’s easy now - with hindsight - to look critically at the politics of appeasement which preceded the events commemorated by this exhibition, and the failure of politicians to stop Hitler. But we must remember that their actions were overshadowed by memories of the Somme.

Deposing the Art Establishment?

Public art and the public

What united the three panellists who argued against public consultation was their impassioned support for the autonomy of the artist. They defended the freedom of the artist to create their art without the meddling of politicians or, more to the point, the need to answer to the public. In doing so, they framed the debate not in terms of a tired establishment versus the public stance but in terms of being pro-artist.

Strident solemnity

Gay Icons, National Portrait Gallery, London

A backward-glancing Joe Orton shows the playwright exhibiting a defiance that looks camp but – as we know from his plays and diary – he was anything but wimpish. Painter Francis Bacon looks drunk and weepily belligerent, but you sense that he’s ready for another struggle at the easel depicting the red meat of human existence before heading-off to the Colony Room.

In love with love

L’Amour de Loin, ENO, Coliseum, London

This is less the story of a relationship than an exploration of why two people choose it instead of a real relationship. When Rudel’s actual poems are sung in the medieval French, the music takes a turn that evokes the music of that period, full of harsh, primitive harmonies, archaic scales and a note of loss and sadness. These songs are what bind Jaufré and his Countess together.