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

Unconventional classification

Smoke, Pump House Gallery, Battersea Park, London

This is a diverting exhibition, and I was certainly engaged while meandering through the four floors of the gallery, the setting of which was very appropriate for this catholic set of ephemera. I particularly enjoyed Pae White’s striking tapestry suspended between the top two floors, and the stunning patterns produced by Marey’s 1901 smoke machine (I want one!).

Life through a lens

Annie Leibowitz; A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005, National Portrait Gallery, London

So the exhibition gives us the celebrity stuff we expect. Or does it? For the unexpected lurks here.

Gee, thanks Andy

Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms, Hayward Gallery, London

Glam rockers, punks, new romantics and today’s more extreme street fashion club kids can all be said to be Warhol’s children.

Raw meat

Francis Bacon, Tate Britain, London

It’s easy to dismiss Bacon as a gay schlock merchant and his work as a sort of story-board from a Hammer Horror film scripted by Oscar Wilde. An exhibition to mark the forthcoming centenary of his birth gives us the chance to re-evaluate this view

The community mural and the changing cultural paradigm in America

A photoessay by Californian muralist Rip Cronk, with examples of his murals

Ironically, the autonomous self is dependent on immersion into culture. As a function of culture, the community mural inspires symbolic experiences of an actualisation process that reveal our potential as well as define our limitations. A subtle ‘leap of faith’ occurs as the viewer identifies with values and ideals expressed in the mural.

In•dex•a•ble difference

Documenting Live, by the Live Art Development Agency and David A Bailey

Combined, the work of the featured artists highlights the sheer malleability and breadth of live art in all its guises and highlights the diversity of styles, content and concerns within culturally specific or diverse practice.

Celebrating and berating

Unfinished Realities, Hannah Barry Gallery, London

Awst and Walther enact their demolition with ponderous deliberation and protracted curiosity, forgetting about the audience along the way; the diminishing numbers testifying to the long stretches of boredom.

Snow in Istanbul

Photoessay impression: Istanbul, and Snow by Orhan Pamuk (Faber)

Once people internalise the ideology of passivity and infectiveness, they cease to be able to understand themselves as properly political subjects.

An Islamic Disneyland

The The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, Tate Britain, London

Dennis Hayes reflects on a recent exhibition at Tate Britain, which said more about the West than the East.

Communist kitsch without conviction

Photoessay: a visit to Memento Park, Budapest, Hungary

Is a work of art that forges its content out of the everyday, and shows its epic potential, not infinitely preferable to fantasy tales from Middle Earth?

Flexibility and firmness

'Hadrian: Empire and Conflict', British Museum, London

A statue of Hadrian – showing a tough-faced Emperor with his left foot crushing a semi-prostrate barbarian - is graphic demonstration of his determination to maintain as much of the Empire as he could intact by whatever means necessary.

Make some NOISE

The case for NOISE, the 'virtual' talent festival

In an industry where nepotism is truly rife, it seems that unless your parents are celebrities, or rich, it’s getting tougher to get a foot in the door. But for most people, art is something to be done during down-time, with the ‘McJob’ acting as an inconvenient yet altogether necessary cover for an alter-ego as a zeitgeist-defining fashionista or future Rock God.

‘Step off the stage’

The Live Art Almanac, edited by Daniel Brine

Together, the texts collated in the Almanac cover myriad ideas and areas, some are firmly grounded in their sense of the performative and what ‘Live Art’ as a strategy includes, others cross and expand the borders of what it means to be ‘Live’ or even what it means to be ‘Art’. But happily the Almanac has much more to offer than a definition of Live Art.

Playing the building

Battery Maritime Building, New York

Participants queue up to operate the instrument on busy days, but to my untrained ear every tune sounded similar. This is amusing. In all probability players hope to add something new, imagine they are being empowered by the artist.

Whirligig of war

Wyndham Lewis Portraits, National Gallery, London

For Lewis, as for many others, the war had rendered the 1914 socio-political work order irrelevant; it was the left like the ‘old battalion’ of the wartime soldiers’ song ‘hanging on the old barbed wire’. For Lewis, as for many others, the political future was to be found on the right with some form of authortarianism.