Category Archives: Art and design

The curse of Mies van der Rohe: Berlin’s six-year, £120m fight to fix his dysfunctional, puddle-strewn gallery

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The modernist maestro had carte blanche to build a great museum. The result? A breathtaking icon hopeless for displaying art. British architect David Chipperfield relives his gargantuan repair job

Never has so much praise been lavished on so dysfunctional a building. The last major project of modernist master Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie is a perfectly square temple of steel and glass, raised above the street on its own granite acropolis. Built in 1968, not far from the recently erected Berlin Wall, it was intended to symbolise the freedoms of the west, its big black roof enclosing an epic column-free hall for the display of modern art. It has long been venerated as a 20th-century Parthenon, the ultimate example of Mies’s pursuit of “universal space”.

But as a museum, it has always been a disaster. Ever since it opened, the New National Gallery has been dogged by cracking windows, heavy condensation and awkward display spaces, presenting a curatorial nightmare for its staff. Beneath the impractical grand hall are subterranean galleries for the permanent collection that have the dreary feeling of a windowless office complex. It is one of the most extreme examples of the quest for purity of form trumping the demands of function.

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‘Forgotten masters’: auction shines light on India’s overlooked artists

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Paintings commissioned by East India Company in 18th and 19th century up for sale at Sotheby’s

Remarkable paintings of the flora and fauna of India, including a work once owned by Jackie Kennedy Onassis depicting a stork eating a snail, are to go on sale in the first auction dedicated to Company School art.

Sotheby’s has announced details of a sale that shines light on overlooked Indian artists today regarded as forgotten masters.

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Scrawny trees, patchy grass, terrible view … why £6m Marble Arch Mound still falls flat

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After a summer of free entry, visitors will now have to pay up to £8 to climb the London project. But will they bother?

It has been called a “BTec Eiffel Tower” and a “slag heap”. It’s been compared to “a car-park Santa’s grotto, with dogs pretending to be reindeer”. The Marble Arch Mound, the temporary artificial hill commissioned by Westminster city council as an “ambitious” visitor attraction, has become, as a representative of the local community put it, “an international laughing stock”.

The council responded to criticism by allowing free entry during August, and a certain number of the curious and the ghoulishly fascinated have turned up. This week it will start charging again. Given fundamental flaws in the project’s conception, the question is whether people will want to pay £8 for a weekend fast-track ticket now, any more than they did when it first opened at the end of July.

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Tsitsi Dangarembga’s next work won’t be read by anyone until 2114

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The Zimbabwean writer joins authors including Margaret Atwood and Ocean Vuong who have agreed to lock away new writing in the Future Library

Tsitsi Dangarembga made the Booker shortlist for her most recent novel, This Mournable Body, the story of a girl trying to make a life in post-colonial Zimbabwe which was praised as “magnificent” and “sublime”. Her next work, however, is likely to receive fewer accolades: it will not be revealed to the world until 2114.

The Zimbabwean writer is the eighth author selected for the Future Library project, an organic artwork dreamed up by the Scottish artist Katie Paterson. It began in 2014 with the planting of 1,000 Norwegian spruces in a patch of forest outside Oslo. Paterson is asking one writer a year to contribute a manuscript to the project – “the length of the piece is entirely for the author to decide” – with Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong and Karl Ove Knausgård already signed up. The works, unseen by anyone but the writers themselves, will be kept in a room lined with wood from the forest in the Deichman library in Oslo. One hundred years after Future Library was launched, in 2114, the trees will be felled, and the manuscripts printed for the first time.

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Baby on Nevermind cover sues Nirvana over child sexual exploitation

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Spencer Elden, who appeared at four months old on iconic album design, claims the image is child pornography

Spencer Elden, who appeared as a naked baby on one of rock music’s most iconic album covers – Nevermind by Nirvana – is suing the band, claiming he was sexually exploited as a child.

In a lawsuit filed in a Californian district court against numerous parties, including the surviving members of the band, Kurt Cobain’s widow Courtney Love, and the record labels that released or distributed the album in the last three decades, Elden alleges the defendants produced child pornography with the image, which features him swimming naked towards a dollar bill with his genitalia visible.

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In your face: how Chuck Close built images and tore them apart

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Face blindness meant the photorealist artist, who has died aged 81, had to dismantle and reconstitute, making every cell of his pixellated portraits ever more dramatic

Hugely enlarged, Chuck Close stares back at you from behind his glasses, a cigarette lodged in the corner of his mouth. It is a face with a what-you-looking-at stare, and you look back, dwarfed by his image, thinking get-out-of-my-face in return.

Taking us from the top of his head to his sprouting chest hair, via every pore and bristle, the artist’s unkempt anti-grooming and non-coiffure, the trickle of smoke exhaled from his nostril, Close’s 1967-8 Big Self-Portrait charts every centimetre of his black and white photograph, which was gridded, enlarged and copied on to the canvas, then painted using a spray gun. All the aberrations of the original photograph, with its blank background and out-of-focus ear, are retained in the painting. The tip of the smouldering cigarette looms out at you. It makes you want to duck. Painted when Close was in his late 20s, the self-portrait was Close’s big move, both calling card and confrontation.

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Our art deals with real injustices, some in Palestine: no wonder we faced opposition « Forensic Architecture

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Our battle to restore a statement to a Manchester exhibition was really about what can and can’t be said in cultural spaces

On Wednesday, protesters in Manchester reclaimed one of the city’s main cultural institutions. Despite the rain, pro-Palestine activists gathered in front of the closed doors of the Whitworth gallery, part of the University of Manchester. It was because of their persistent action, and 13,000 letters sent to the gallery, that part of our exhibition, a printed statement titled “Forensic Architecture stands with Palestine”, has been reinstated. The exhibition, which we insisted be shut as a result of the statement’s unilateral removal, has now reopened.

On Sunday 15 August, a blog post on the website of UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) announced that, following the group’s intervention, the statement had been removed from our exhibition, Cloud Studies. When we first heard of the news, we were not altogether surprised. The same group had already criticised a statement of solidarity with Palestinians published on the Whitworth’s website in June, and succeeded in convincing the university to have it removed. And this was hardly UKLFI’s first attack on us as an organisation. In 2018, when we were nominated for the Turner prize, UKLFI urged the Tate not to award the prize to us on the outrageous grounds that documents that we had published in relation to Palestine amounted to “modern blood libels likely to promote antisemitism and attacks on Jews”.

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‘They call us bewitched’: the DRC performers turning trash into art – photo essay

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Dolls found in rubbish dumps, radio parts and discarded flip-flops are among items used to create surreal costumes by a Kinshasa collective highlighting political and environmental issues

As a child, Shaka Fumu Kabaka witnessed the atrocities that took place during the six-day war between Ugandan and Rwandan forces in his home town of Kisangani in June 2000.

“It was not even our war, but a war between two foreign armies,” he said.

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Anne Bean: ‘People said Yoko Ono ruined the Beatles. I think the Beatles ruined her’

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The performance artist on her new 10-hour work, rethinking her distance from feminism, and why she told Malcolm McLaren her avant garde covers band was ‘unmanageable’

Anne Bean has been revisiting her past. On 21 August the pioneering performance artist is taking part in a 10-hour “durational live event” as part of PSX: A Decade of Performance Art in the UK. Not only did this require her to look back on five decades of practice – her past work, she tells me, is “intimately linked” to her present – but it’s taking place at Bermondsey’s Ugly Duck, a stone’s throw from the Butler’s Wharf studio in London in which she worked from the mid-70s to the mid-80s.

Many artists at the time, including Derek Jarman and Andrew Logan, squatted in warehouses there, and in her time Bean has worked with everyone from slapstick clowns the Kipper Kids to artists such as Paul McCarthy and Rose English, as well as sharing bills with Psychic TV, Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti. She even opened for Roxy Music as part of the pseudo-pop band Moody and the Menstruators, an avant garde performance covers group she founded in 1971. Bean has often used sound in her work and loves music – her father was a classical and jazz musician – but Moody was never supposed to be a real band, more “a subversive exploration of the boundaries between art and music”.

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Evacuations continue in Afghanistan – in pictures

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Following the Taliban’s military takeover of the country, westerners continue to leave. Afghans hoping to escape Taliban rule have gathered in Kabul, with many making desperate attempts to flee. There was chaos at the airport, where troops used guns and helicopters to clear the runways, and several people died in frantic last-minute attempts to escape by clinging to departing planes

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‘We always see sex from the man’s view’: Cammie Toloui, the peep show performer who peeped back

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Turning her camera on her customers, the sex worker and photojournalist exposed the male gaze to itself – and opened up a world of shame and desire

“As a rebellious preteen, I sat down and made a list of my life goals,” writes Cammie Toloui in her photobook 5 Dollars for 3 Minutes. “It was pretty simple: 1. Sex. 2. Drugs. 3. Rock’n’roll.”

Born in the San Francisco Bay Area in the Summer of Love, Toloui was in the right place to hit these targets, and by 1990 was a member of a feminist punk band, Yeastie Girlz, and working at the Lusty Lady strip club. Stripping was part-rebellion and part-necessity because Toloui was studying photojournalism at San Francisco State University and the Lusty Lady paid well, but when she was given an assignment to shoot her own life, it also became a project. Deciding not to photograph herself or her colleagues, because female nudes have been seen so many times before, she trained her camera on the customers.

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Banksy confirms he is behind British seaside ‘spraycation’ artworks

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Anonymous artist posts Instagram video charting his coastal tour in an ageing camper van

Banksy has confirmed that he is indeed the author of a number of works that have appeared recently in seaside towns on the UK east coast.

An Instagram video clip, just over three minutes long called “A Great British Spraycation”, shows the elusive artist taking a summer road trip in a beaten-up camper van with cans of spray paint stashed inside a cooler.

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Bat on a non-slip roof: National Trust adapts manor for nocturnal residents

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Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk gives tiles a special coating to stop bats slipping off as part of £6m roofing project

Bats have probably been in the attics of Oxburgh Hall for centuries. But how can they return for a good day’s sleep when the National Trust puts new and unfamiliar tiles on the roof?

The trust on Thursday revealed the lengths to which it has gone to keep the bat residents of a historic manor house in Norfolk happy during a £6m reroofing project – including specially adapted tiles which they can happily scoot up.

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Picasso pieces worth about $100m to be auctioned in Las Vegas

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Sotheby’s to sell 11 works in Bellagio hotel and casino, in one of most valuable Picasso auctions yet

Las Vegas: the city of sin, where you can gamble away your savings, get married on a whim, dine on an octuple bypass burger at the Heart Attack Grill – and soon, it has been announced, take part in one of the most valuable Picasso auctions ever staged.

Sotheby’s has announced it is to sell 11 Picasso works owned by MGM Resorts, which have a combined value of about $100m (£72m).

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Drawing a blank: can artistic talent ever be taught?

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While Romantics insist artists are born not made, some of the best painters, sculptors and modern artists followed conventional teaching

Genius cannot be taught but skills can. And even the wildest, most visionary of artists relies on the techniques they were taught. If you want to make digital art, you need to learn to code. A training in film will help with moving-image art. So much is obvious. But today we’re in thrall to a vacuous Romanticism that insists artists are born not made.

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Golden history of Kazakhstan’s Saka warrior people revealed

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Exhibition at Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge to tell story of little known civilization that flourished from eighth to third century BC

Wisdom, as Bob Marley put it, is better than gold. From next month however, the precious metal is central to a major new historical exhibition in Cambridge using loaned artefacts telling the story of an ancient civilization little known beyond Kazakhstan.

Golden objects unearthed from ancient burial mounds built by the Saka warrior people of central Asia – a culture which flourished from around the eighth century BC to the third century BC – will go on display at the Fitzwilliam Museum.

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How the ‘art of the insane’ inspired the surrealists – and was twisted by the Nazis

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The author of an acclaimed new book tells how Hitler used works by psychiatric patients in his culture war

On a winter’s day in 1898, a stocky young man with a handlebar moustache was hurrying along the banks of a canal in Hamburg, north Germany. Franz Karl Bühler was in a panic, fleeing a gang of mysterious agents who had been tormenting him for months. There was only one way to escape, he thought. He must swim for it. So he plunged into the dark water, close to freezing at this time of year, and struck out for the far side. When he was hauled on to the bank, soaked and shivering, it became clear to passersby that there was something odd about the man. There was no sign of his pursuers. He was confused, perhaps insane. So he was taken to the nearby Friedrichsberg “madhouse”, as it was known then, and taken inside. He would remain in the dubious care of the German psychiatric system for the next 42 years, one of hundreds of thousands of patients who lived near-invisible lives behind the asylum walls.

Bühler’s incarceration disturbed him, but it also marked the beginning of a remarkable story, one in which he played a leading role. It reveals the debt art owes to mental illness, and the way that connection was used to wage history’s most destructive culture war.

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Tate donor warns: ‘I’ll take back my £20m Francis Bacon collection’

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Barry Joule, a close friend of the artist, says the gallery has not kept to a pledge to stage exhibitions of the works

When more than 1,200 sketches, photographs and documents from the studio of Francis Bacon were donated to the Tate in 2004, it was described as one of the most generous gifts the gallery had ever received, estimated to be worth £20m. Now the donor is threatening to cancel the gift, accusing the gallery of reneging on pledges to stage exhibitions of the material.

Barry Joule, a longstanding friend of Bacon, had wanted the items to go to the Tate, as it had been the artist’s favourite gallery. Over the years, he kept expecting the Tate to do justice to it with an exhibition, as he says they had planned on accepting the gift. He wrote repeatedly to curatorial staff, asking when the show would happen.

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Bryan Adams photographs Cher, Grimes and Iggy Pop for Pirelli calendar

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Jennifer Hudson, St Vincent and other music stars also feature in touring-themed photoshoots conceived by rocker-photographer

Images of recording artists including Cher, Iggy Pop, Jennifer Hudson and Grimes will feature in one of the world’s best known photographic commissions.

For the 2022 Pirelli calendar, the rock star and photographer Bryan Adams has captured superstar singers as if they were touring – precisely what they have been unable to do for more than a year.

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