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

Citizen sculptors?

Modern British Sculpture, Royal Academy, London

By raising the question of what constitutes sculpture, the curators may, unwittingly, have struck a hammer-blow against the idea of abstract sculpture which has of itself - and before it has garnered any associations - any use as a common reference.

Provisional relationships

MISCHIEF, sculptures and drawings by Lucia Nogueira, Kettle's Yard, Cambridge / Gabriel Orozco, Tate Modern, London

Nogueira and Orozco exhibit a wry curiosity towards the everyday matter explored in their expansive respective solo shows. Within each series of installations lies a powerful interplay of physical energies that pervades, invades and collides, disconcerting and subverting our relationship to everyday matter.

Change, decay, rebirth

Treasures from Budapest: European Masters from Leonardo to Schiele, Royal Academy, London

This celebration of a long-standing Hungarian hunger for art is not simply a straightforward demonstration of artists’ skills, refreshing though that is: it is an artistic running commentary, as it were, on the intellectual and political ferment that Europe underwent from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century.

Traces of the future

Walid Raad: Miraculous Beginnings, Whitechapel Gallery, London

To say that Raad’s work occurs in the space between truth and fiction is a cliché that doesn’t give the work the merit it deserves. A far better way of describing it is that it explores the space between the latent and manifest aspects of Lebanese culture and history.

Art takes over the world (untitled)

Frieze Art Fair 2010, London

At the north end of the art fair there were several posters promoting the Save The Arts campaign in response to the proposed cuts in government arts funding. This was the political wing of the fair. Nearby were the works displayed by The Regina gallery in Moscow and London. These included a painting about gangsters showing a guy lying down with an erect penis with a head saying ‘Russia’ and wearing a cap saying ‘capitalism.’ I found it boring and obvious.

Beyond normality

Serbian art ten years after Milošević

The process of transition towards liberal democracy has been portrayed as a process of normalisation. The West, according to this reading of history, is the embodiment of the historical standard, and what is wrong with the institutions in the East is that they are not yet Western. Artists and curators in Serbia have been persistent in offering alternative readings of the recent political changes in their country.

A Phoenix from the Ashes

Beauty on the big screen

With a shift towards aesthetic quality in the art world, is the world of cinema now rekindling its love affair with aesthetics too?

A return to beauty and civility?

Contemporary art may be embracing the long-unfashionable idea of beauty once more

In 2010, it is safe to say that a shift is occurring once again, this time, away from the vacuous and the obscene; an ever increasing sense of ‘de nouveau’ is now surging through the citadel of contemporary art.

Perceptions of The Doors

The Doors: When You’re Strange, Idea Generation Gallery, London

‘There really hasn’t been a major male sex symbol since James Dean died and Marlon Brando got a paunch. Dylan is more of a cerebral heart throb and The Beatles have always been too cute to be deeply sexy. Now comes along Jim Morrison of The Doors.’

Canned laughter?

Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the World, by Gary Indiana (Basic Books, 2010)

Any work that doesn’t have a Romantic artist forcing it out of his tortured consciousness is seen as somehow invalid. But whilst Pop Art may have been loaded with varying degrees of well-meant pretentious theory by academics, at heart it is straightforward representational art which gives people something which they understand: and that is what they want to see.

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.