Arts Archives

Unreliable evidence

Exhibitions

I hadn’t really thought much about pixels before, despite spending a large portion of my day looking at them. After all, a pixel is just a tiny unit in a digital image, and we all tend to look at the bigger picture. But how about this: this humble unit has now become a key feature of drone warfare. Drone-fired missiles have reportedly been developed that can burrow through targeted buildings, and leave a hole that appears smaller than a pixel on publicly available satellite images. This means that drone strikes are often invisible to groups who try to monitor attacks, such as NGOs or the UN.

Fred Johnston

Bone Scanning

Poems

Perhaps like Superman I will see through walls now that I’ve tanked up on isotopes lighting bruise-blue veins and sparking neon from suspect bones the camera, smoochy as a lover will map out the secret places where little bumpy evils lurk jigsawing until I am like a find in a dig and there it is, the whole of me in middle-age nothing for a lover to caress a Hallowe’en thing with the ugly quiet of the dead. Give this clatter of razor-white calcium a name even as its anonymity claims its non-identity a figure polished up from a mass grave a chip in the skull where the bullet went in not a movement or the image will blur as if a spirit wrestled its way out of the frame call it a soul, if you will, it won’t matter I am my own atrocity, I know that now.

Mark Palmer

Maximum Bob

Music

We were like four hapless contestants on University Challenge. None of us knew the answer. But just like they do on the telly, I leaned learnedly across towards my 28-year-old son, who in turn looked despairingly towards one of my stepsons, before my other stepson made his contribution with a shrug of the shoulders. So, it was up to me as captain of the team to take a guess as the first few bars wafted through the Royal Albert Hall. ‘“Tangled Up in Blue”?’ I proffered with as much enthusiasm as Jeremy Corbyn at a white-tie dinner. But, fingers on the buzzer, there were far bigger questions to be answered.

Ismene Brown

Wherefore art thou Romeo?

Irish ayes

Opera

It’s Halloween, and right on lightning-flash cue enters an operatic ghost story exhumed from the grave of long-since-buried works. You couldn’t hope for more discerning grave-robbers than Wexford Festival Opera, however, who have long made it their mission to bring forgotten operas back to life. Mascagni’s Guglielmo Ratcliff is a proper blood-on-the-tartan gothic thriller, all duels, doomed lovers, fainting heroines and family curses, with a score as fleshy with tunes as the composer’s more famous Cavalleria rusticana — think Lucia di Lammermoor without the fey bel canto warblings. So why so long neglected? There are no musical mad wives lurking in Guglielmo Ratcliff’s attic, but there are more than a few technical demons.

Deborah Ross

Shaken, not stirred

Cinema

Spectre is the 24th film in the Bond franchise, the fourth starring Daniel Craig, the second directed by Sam Mendes, and the first at not much of anything. Nothing new to report, in other words. It probably delivers what the die-hard fans want, but it is not like Casino Royale or Skyfall (no one talks about Quantum of Solace, by the way, because it’s assumed everyone involved was drunk) as it doesn’t deliver to those of us who never liked Bond, but then discovered that we did. Where has Bond’s interior landscape gone? Where is his woundedness? Where is the emotional heft? Who might we actually care about here? At least we open quietly, with Bond lying back in a meadow, simply watching the clouds float by... I’m kidding, of course.

James Delingpole

DVF worship

Television

Girl is back for half-term so I’ve been able to watch nothing but crap on TV this week. Some of you will say, ‘Oh come on! You pay the bills, so you get to control the remote.’ But that’s not how things work when you’ve got a teenage girl at home. Especially not one whose ankle you have been responsible for breaking. So crap, I’m afraid, is what I’m going to have to review. Not, it must be said, that the crap has all been crap. House of DVF (E! Online), for example. I’ve mentioned it before and the reason I’m mentioning it again is the matchless insights it offers into the strange and terrifying world of womankind.

Kate Chisholm

Battle fatigue

Radio and podcasts

Can anyone explain this sudden enthusiasm for Agincourt, that unexpected victory over the French, now being celebrated, or rather commemorated, on radio, on digital, online? It was so weird to switch on Radio 4 on Sunday morning (which just happened to be St Crispin’s Day, the day on which the battle was fought) to discover that even Sunday Worship was being devoted to commemorating one of the bloodiest battles in that most bloodthirsty period.

Ian Harrow

In Other Eyes

25 October 2015

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition: the novel that John Lennon might have written (plus: martian poetry)

The latest challenge was to submit an extract from a novel written by a rock star of your choosing. I was pleased that Adrian Fry went for that genius storyteller Tom Waits although, as Morrissey’s recent stinker demonstrates, being able to write decent song lyrics is no guarantee of literary success (the Guardian’s Michael Hann spoke for many when he described the pope of mope’s novel as ‘an unpolished turd of a book, the stale excrement of Morrissey’s imagination’.

22 October 2015

Martin Gayford

Repetitive but compelling: Giacometti at the National Portrait Gallery reviewed

Exhibitions

One day in 1938 Alberto Giacometti saw a marvellous sight on his bedroom ceiling. It was ‘a thread like a spider’s web, but made of dust’, an object that was both ‘very, very fine’ and in constant motion, like a snake except that ‘no animal’, he thought, had ever made such movements: ‘light and sweeping and always different’. This was, you might say, a revelation of the beauty that lay in extreme thinness and fragility. In Giacometti: Pure Presence at the National Portrait Gallery you see that process of attenuation occurring, in different ways, again and again in his art.

Melanie McDonagh

Spectre: less coherent, less fun, and with a swiz of a Bond girl

Quite the oddest sensation last night at the first public screening at the Odeon, Leicester Square, of the new James Bond movie, Spectre, was being at the heart of a really big gathering where no one had a mobile phone. All the smartphones were confiscated at the door for fear of piracy and the spectacle of London’s finest not knowing what to do with their hands was quite something; some people positively talked to each other. The downside was the scrum at the end to retrieve them. The other odd thing was the feeling of being a bit out of sync with the rest of the gathering. At the same press event for Skyfall, the atmosphere at the end was exhilarated because the audience had had a good time together.

Michael Tanner

What’s the point of the Met’s new Otello?

The new production of Verdi's Otello at the Met, with set designs by Ed Devlin, did make me wonder, as I watched it in the Cambridge Picture House, why they had bothered, since in no respect does it improve on many traditional productions. The sets are kind of sumptuous, but then what looked like a solid wooden or stone building turns out to be perspex, with neon lighting, and liable to slide around for no obvious reason. The costumes are suitably period, lavish, spotless. From the cinema-goer's point of view, the most irritating thing is that the camera remains almost always on the person singing.

Niru Ratnam

Cut funding to sport (which we’re no good at) and give it to the arts (which we are)

This morning Art Review announced its ‘Power 100’, a list of movers and shakers of the international art world. Last year the list was topped by Sir Nicholas Serota who beat off the likes of Larry Gagosian, Ai Weiwei and Jeff Koons. The reason behind Serota’s position was Tate’s considerable international influence across Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Art Review’s editor Mark Rappolt says, 'it operates an institution as a network of patrons and interests that spread far beyond the limits of its physical building.

Katrina Naomi

Mentor

Poems

for Marisa Foz del Barrio You divorced on the first day it was legal, were imprisoned three times as a Communist under Franco, still dyed your hair blonde and – at the age I am now – still lived with your parents’ bourgeois furniture (those impossible beds), the drapes and porcelain from another era, one you’d rebelled against but kept close by, as if to understand yourself better. I think of you sitting under your father’s army awards, a carpet-style brocade over the table and over your knees, a lamp at your feet, like an old woman, your rollie constantly giving up in the green ash tray. And me, curled on the stiff sofa, trying to follow every word – you never spoke in English, never explained.

James Walton

The Last Kingdom is BBC2’s solemnly cheesy answer to Game of Thrones

Television

The opening caption for The Last Kingdom (BBC2, Thursday) read ‘Kingdom of Northumbria, North of England, 866 AD’. In fact, though, an equally accurate piece of scene-setting might have been ‘Britain, Saturday teatime, the 1970s’. The series, based on the novels by Bernard Cornwell, has been described in advance as the BBC’s answer to Game of Thrones — and, as various thesps in furs and long beards began to attack each other with swords, it wasn’t hard to see why. Yet, apart perhaps from the level of the violence, the programme’s real roots seem to belong to less sophisticated (and less expensive) shows than that: the kind set firmly in the period known as ‘yore’ and that many of us will dimly remember from our childhoods.

Kate Chisholm

What’s it like to talk at length to a serial killer?

Radio and podcasts

‘I’ve never met a human being who doesn’t appreciate being listened to, being taken seriously,’ said Asbjorn Rachlew, the Norwegian homicide detective who one afternoon in the summer of 2011 found himself listening to Anders Breivik, who had just killed 77 people in a shoot-out on an island near Oslo. His job, Rachlew explained, was to get Breivik to talk, but not ‘by faking it, through manipulation etc.’. You have to show real concern, he said, to get the information you need, because you have to remember that suspects, too, like Breivik, are also traumatised. ‘Banging the table and screaming etc. doesn’t help communication...

Deborah Ross

Self-pitying, despairing, often delusional: the real Marlon Brando

Cinema

Listen to Me Marlon is a documentary portrait of Marlon Brando that has him burbling into your ear for 102 minutes, but if you have to have someone burbling in your ear for 102 minutes — and there is no law saying it’s obligatory — you could do a lot worse. This isn’t one of your regular documentaries. There are no talking heads, and it’s not blah-blah-blah and then he did this and then he did that and then his BMI got ridiculous, and so on. Instead, it is based on the hundreds of hours of personal audio tapes Brando made in his lifetime, which haven’t been heard until now, and which were uncovered by film-maker Stevan Riley, who wrote, directed and edited.

Lloyd Evans

Shakespeare at his freest and most exuberant: The Wars of the Roses reviewed

Theatre

The RSC’s The Wars of the Roses solves a peculiar literary problem. Shakespeare’s earliest history plays are entitled Henry VI parts (I), (II) and (III), which is thought to put people off. If you see one why not see all? If you miss the opener will the sequels confuse you? The solution is to condense the material and to reconfigure it as a single theatrical event. The result is a revelation. Here we have Shakespeare at his freest and most exuberant cramming the stage with every blockbusting trick he can contrive. Sex, battles, conspiracies, sword fights, gorings, cuckoldings, lynchings, beheadings. And there’s a constant stream of jibes aimed at the faithless French. The action opens with the death of Henry V.

Alexandra Coghlan

I doubt Goethe intended Werther’s sorrows to be as unremitting as this

Opera

There are some things the French do better than everyone else. Cheese, military defeats and extra-marital affairs are a given, but what about opera? English Touring Opera’s autumn tour sets out a tasting plate of the nation’s Romantic finest, hoping to persuade audiences that there’s more to France than just Carmen. Debussy’s delicate tragedy Pelléas et Mélisande sits between the fragrant melodies of Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann and the Armagnac-soaked passions of Massenet’s Werther. It’s a typically wide-ranging programme from this small company, but one whose compromises inevitably equal its ambitions.

15 October 2015

Martin Gayford

With this Tate Britain exhibition, Frank Auerbach joins the masters

Exhibitions

No sooner had I stepped into the private view of Frank Auerbach’s exhibition at Tate Britain than I bumped into the painter himself. Auerbach was standing, surrounded by his pictures of 60 years ago, but he immediately started talking instead about Michelangelo. Of course, it is generally safe to assume that when artists talk about other artists they are also reflecting, at second hand, on their own work. And so it was in this case. Michelangelo, Auerbach pointed out, had stingingly described someone else’s architectural design as looking like ‘a cage for crickets’. So, he argued, Michelangelo was clearly striving to make his own work the opposite of that: to give it grandeur.

William Cook

What is it about Bill Viola’s films that reduce grown-ups to tears?

Arts feature

Even the most down-to-earth people get emotional about Bill Viola’s videos. Clare Lilley of Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) seems close to tears as she takes me round his new show. Lilley is the show’s curator. She’s usually so matter-of-fact, but when she talks about Viola her eyes light up. When she took her two teenage daughters to his studio in Los Angeles, she tells me, they both cried when they saw his films. I like to think I’m made of sterner stuff, but when she leaves me in the Sculpture Park’s Underground Gallery, where Viola is on show, after a few minutes in there on my own I’m blubbing like a baby. What is it about Bill Viola that makes grown men (and women) weep?

Tony Kennerley

Dementia Love

Poems

You lie so quiet on your bed, You hear the sound and turn your head. I wait and hope, perhaps a chance, The faintest smile – I hold your glance But no – no hint of recognition. I press your lips and take your hand And move aside a greying strand – You seem surprised – there’s no embrace. The smallest incline of your head I close, my tears upon your face. ‘Who are you?’ ‘A friend’ I said. You lie so quiet on your bed, I enter soft, you turn your head. Your arms reach up and clasp and hold And in a trice the years unfold A tenderness of memory. A union of heart and mind The rapture when our bodies bind – You slump and break – the thoughts are gone Back with the demons in your head.

Michael Tanner

Ariadne shows what a wonderful operetta composer Richard Strauss could have been

Opera

‘Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance... Those Greeks were superficial — out of profundity [Nietzsche’s own italics].’ Thus said Nietzsche in the preface to The Gay Science. I expect Richard Strauss knew the passage. At any rate, many of his works give the impression of being composed by someone who wasn’t sure how profound he could be, or wanted to be, or indeed what profundity was. This is most evident in Ariadne auf Naxos, which deals explicitly with these issues. To add to his perplexities at this time, Strauss had Hugo von Hofmannsthal lecturing him in letters.

Damian Thompson

Why I’m glad my piano teacher spent more time chatting than teaching

Music

At the entrance to Marylebone railway station is an old piano that anyone can play. Unfortunately, whoever had this sweet idea can’t be bothered to fix the broken notes. Even so, about once a fortnight, on my way back from visiting my mother in Gerrards Cross, I put down my shopping bag and bash out Chopin’s Waltz in C-sharp minor. As I do, I invariably think about Mrs Irene Oates, the first proper eccentric I met. She was my only piano teacher and I’m grateful to her. On the other hand I’m not very good, even by amateur standards, and she’s partly to blame. When I was 11, my mother told me that she’d spoken on the telephone to a lady who was going to teach my sister and me the piano.

Lloyd Evans

The characters are barely stereotypes: The Father at the Wyndham’s reviewed

Theatre

The Father, set in a swish Paris apartment, has a beautifully spare and elegant set. The stage is framed by a slender rectangle of dazzling white dots which impart an air of incalculable and almost intimidating opulence to the show. I felt I was lucky to be there. Here’s the plot. Kenneth Cranham plays a doddery old sausage whose daughter and her husband want to dump him in a nursing home. Will they succeed? That’s the plot. Writer Florian Zeller uses pranks and false starts to create suspense and to illustrate Dad’s scrambled mentality. Different actors play the daughter, the son-in-law and the day-nurse. At first this is gratifyingly weird but repetition makes it seem meagre and banal. Other effects stress the same point.

Deborah Ross

The Program could do with a good dose of performance-enhancing drugs

Cinema

The Program, as directed by Stephen Frears, is a biopic of Lance Armstrong, the American cyclist and ‘sporting hero’ who came back from cancer to win the Tour de France seven times before he was exposed as a drugs cheat. It is a thrilling fall-from-grace story, the sort that brings you out in goosebumps just thinking about it — to know you have cheated, to know you are about to be found out, to live with having been found out; how might any of this feel? This should have served Armstrong up on a plate, but it somehow doesn’t. It covers the ground, but it’s underpowered dramatically. It’s like watching a perfunctory documentary, acted out. It doesn’t give us the man. I wanted to see him unravel.

Ismene Brown

Giselle has floored many a ballerina — it did so again last week

Hunted blows a fresh breeze through the stale world of reality TV

Television

Television used to employ entertainers to entertain the public. Back then you could count the channels on the fingers of one hand and still have a thumb left over to stick aloft in praise of the nightly parade of talent. That was decades ago, before every housing estate in the land pointed supplicatory dishes at the cosmos, which beamed back numberless multi-channels devoted to cooking and/or shopping, golfing and/or shagging. It’s all changed. Now television employs the public to entertain the public. It’s cheaper. So we have talent shows, reality shows, aspirational have-a-go shows from which contestants are expelled one at a time. It is always gripping to find out which members of the public can sing/sell/bake exceedingly good cakes.