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Sunday, 11 October 2020

Artlyst: 'Everyday Heroes' & Spirituality and Art

My latest articles for Artlyst are a review of Everyday Heroes at the Southbank Centre and a feature about the spiritualities explored in exhibitions at the Arusha Gallery, The Drawing Room and White Cube Gallery:

'These vividly rendered, emotionally articulate and imaginatively intimate portraits rendered in paint, charcoal, photography, collage, or with language (poetry), draw significantly on religious and political imagery and ideas ...

Taken together, these portraits highlight the sheer scale of the collective response to this crisis which is helping keep this country going during the crisis. Those involved are often working in extremely challenging circumstances and putting their own personal safety at risk.

‘Everyday Heroes’ is vividly imaginative and emotionally compelling; were its inspiration to foster ongoing community kindness through the valuing of immigrants and appropriate pay for care workers that might well be the best celebration of key workers imaginable.'

'Once upon a time in modernism, the interlacing of art and religion was rendered invisible. Art was not just for art’s sake but was exclusively about art. For Clement Greenberg and his followers, art that was pure and autonomous was art that was self-critical and self-defining ...

That time is long past as art critics and curators have now caught up with the religious questions and spiritual issues that inform much contemporary art. The question is no longer the puzzle of the paradox that Taylor identified, but what these spiritual preoccupations signify.'

My other Artlyst pieces are:

Interviews:

Articles:

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The Voices Of East Harlem - Can You Feel It?

Monday, 15 June 2015

Festival of Love

Festival of Love is at the Southbank Centre until Monday 31 August 2015. It provides a summer of love-themed activities, performances, music, exhibitions and free events as hundreds of artists, communities and partners come together to create an unforgettable summer. Enjoy the Thames-side site transformed by several large-scale indoor and outdoor installations, interactive artworks and unique pop-ups to spend time in with your friends and loved-ones.

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Violent Femmes - Love, Love, Love, Love, Love.

Saturday, 26 October 2013

The Rest Is Noise: Politics and Spirituality

After Stalin’s death in 1953, life behind the Iron Curtain slowly began to change – and by the 1970s the Soviet Union under Brezhnev was beginning to modernise. Symbols of the West such as jeans and rock music became popular in Soviet Russia, signalling anew era of cautious thawing of Cold War relations. In the West, the 1970s and ’80s were fast-paced decades – first a recession then economic boom years, where advertising and communications technology rapidly accelerated the pace of modern life.

To counter this materialism, some composers offered a return to spiritual values, and others resorted to overtly political music.

Much of this religious music came from the Soviet Union and its satellite states, where religious belief had been marginalised under the official state atheism. More surprising were the commercial possibilities in this sacred music. The simple, consonant songs of lamentation in Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony unexpectedly sold over a million copies when it was released to commemorate victims of the Holocaust.

No composer exemplified this turn to the sacred more than Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, whose work conveys an intense and profound spirituality. Hans Werner Henze gave voice to oppressed peoples and political radicals such as Cornelius Cardew who tried to sweep aside the bourgeois norms of the musical establishment.

Politics and Spirituality events at the Southbank Centre include:

Author Karen Armstrong looks back at the global religious landscape of the 1970s and '80s. This period saw increasing secularism in the West and a return to the spiritual in the Communist bloc.
Author Alain de Botton investigates how spirituality fitted into an increasingly consumerist world.
Layla Alexander-Garrett, who worked as Andrei Tarkovsky’s translator on set, discusses the work and vision of the great Russian filmmaker with chair Gareth Evans, writer and film curator’
Composer and presenter John Browne leads a fun and informal workshop on Sofia Gubaidulina's Offertorium on Sunday.
Gubaidulina's String Quartets Nos.3 & 4 performed by the Ligeti String Quartet.
Extracts from Cornelius Cardew's Paragraph 5 of The Great Learning by the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and James Weeks.
Excerpts from Hans Werner Henze's Voices by musicians from the Royal College of Music.
Film screenings including Solaris, Tarkovsky's psychological space-race drama and Dekalog.

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Sofia Gubaidulina - Offertorium.