Is the V&A’s Undressed: A Brief History of Underwear wunderbra or a load of pants? April 14, 2016 V&A | ★★☆☆☆ After the blockbuster success of David Bowie Is and Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, the V&A returns with another exhibition that’s sure to draw in the punters. Because it’s about underwear and includes the word “undressed”. But while the title hints towards something a little salacious, the delivery is an exhaustive, often dry, slightly repetitive [...]
Tate Britain’s Conceptual Art in Britain 1964-1979 is worthwhile if you’re prepared to work for it April 14, 2016 Tate Britain | ★★★☆☆ When you enter this exhibition, you’ll see a pyramid of oranges stacked up in front of you, giving the gallery a pleasant citrusy aroma. Go over and pick one up – this is allowed – and hold it in your hand for the rest of the time you’re there. You’ll want to [...]
Tate Modern unveils its plans for a brave new art world but admits it still has £30m financial black hole April 14, 2016 A group of more than 500 singers will greet the first visitors to the new Tate Modern gallery when it opens in June, underlining its new focus on live and performance art. Following that visitors can look forward to being corralled by horseback police in the Turbine Hall courtesy of Tania Bruguera's Tatlin's Whisper, as well as experiencing experimental sculpture from Tokyo, social [...]
NASA’s stunning series of free space tourism posters offers a glimpse at the imagined future of interstellar travel April 12, 2016 NASA’s Voyager mission left Earth in 1977, taking advantage of a once-every-175-year alignment of the planets to take a grand tour of the solar system. Using a manoeuvre called a gravitational assist, the tiny probe swung itself around Jupiter like a slingshot, zipping past Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, picking up speed each time until it was [...]
Boulevard, Robin Williams’ last movie, is a muted tribute April 7, 2016 Dir. Dito Montiel | ★★★☆☆ While not the last film he shot, Boulevard has the sad distinction of being the late Robin Williams' final on-screen role, arriving just over 18 months after the actor’s death. He plays Nolan, a married bank employee whose existence has become a simple, sad matter of plodding through the days, [...]
Timothy Spall excels in The Old Vic’s The Caretaker April 7, 2016 The Old Vic | ★★★★☆ Harold’s Pinter’s first big hit, The Caretaker, is a frenetic comedy about three social outcasts, all woefully incapable of communicating with each other. This claustrophobic play takes place inside a leaky loft conversion strewn with lofty piles of newspapers and a host of unfinished DIY projects. It’s exhausting just looking [...]
X at the Royal Court review: a terrifying, claustrophobic space horror that comes unravelled April 7, 2016 Royal Court | ★★★☆☆ The best science fiction is virtually always a vehicle for social commentary, a metaphor for talking about the here and now. Alien can be read as an advocation of abortion; Dune reflects the geopolitics of the Cold War-era oil industry; Dawn of the Dead is a critique of consumerism. But, crucially, you [...]
Whistler at the Fine Art Society shows an artist who was rightly considered thoroughly radical April 7, 2016 James McNeill Whistler is best known for his painterly concern for harmony of tones and mood, rather than overtly symbolic or moral content. This is famously evident in his Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1 of 1871, commonly known as Whistler’s Mother. What is less known is that he was also an extraordinary pioneer both [...]
New photography exhibition seeks out the implausible in the everyday April 7, 2016 Photographer Stephen Shore’s most striking work comes from his epic tour across 1970s America in search of what could be called the “extraordinary ordinary”. Many of his pictures depict the everyday life of Americans that, frozen in time, divorced from the mundanity of life, seem unbelievable. Badlands National (pictured) shows a tiny, unremarkable house, a [...]
Exhibitionism review: The Saatchi Gallery recreated Mick Jagger’s grotty old flat April 4, 2016 Saatchi Gallery | ★★★★★ A year before they set about irreversibly altering the course of music history globally and forever, The Rolling Stones ate baked beans straight out of the tin in a squalid Chelsea flat like mucky little dirtbags. Their festering hovel at 102 Edith Grove has been meticulously recreated as part of Exhibitionism, [...]