TATE ETC. Issue 26
Visiting and Revisiting Art, etcetera
Highlights include:
- Fiona MacCarthy and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page on the Pre-Raphaelites
- Merel van Tilburg on William Morris and artists’ wallpapers
- Socially engaged art at the Liverpool Biennial, by Pablo Helguera
- Martin Parr, Simon Baker and Amanda Renshaw on photobooks
- Doug Aitken at Tate Liverpool
- Jonathan Griffin on the grotesque
- Elisabeth Lebovici on Jeanloup Sieff and the meanings in fashion photography
- Isobel Harbison on painting after performance in ‘A Bigger Splash’ at Tate Modern
- Two artist projects from photographers William Klein and Daido Moriyama
- Barbara Steveni on Tony Benn and the Artist Placement Group
- A selection of writings from Ian Hamilton Finlay
- Sally Jarman and Matthew Gale on Paule Vézelay’s unrealised film script
The work of the Pre-Raphaelites has often been overshadowed by their colourful lifestyles and romantic imagery. However, the group was far more politically radical and socially engaged, and its women members more numerous and productive than previously thought. Fiona MacCarthy looks at their collective campaign against the age.
Jimmy Page has lent works to the Tate Britain exhibition. Here he explains his lifelong fascination with the Pre-Raphaelites.
On the eve of their exhibition at Tate Modern, TATE ETC. invited photographers William Klein and Daido Moriyama to publish a selection of their work in the magazine. Tate’s curator of photography introduces their images.
Since Jackson Pollock‘s “action painting” Summertime, artists have blurred the boundaries between painting and performance. Kazuo Shiraga’s mud-writhing, Hermann Nitsch’s poured blood canvases and Niki de Saint Phalle’s shooting paintings all showed how the body could become a stage, further explored by the likes of Bruce Nauman and Helena Almeida. Isobel Harbison looks at their influence on more recent artists.
“The grotesque belongs underground. It is subversive, rudely transgressing the boundaries between inside and out, above and below, elevated and profane.” Jonathan Griffin explores the notion of the grotesque through the centuries and its current re-imagination with humour and a sense of the absurd.
Artists’ wallpapers: Merel van Tilburg looks at an amazing selection of artist designs from the past 150 years—including William Morris, Maurice Denis, Andy Warhol, Sonia Delaunay, René Magritte, Charles Burchfield, Alexander Calder, Thomas Demand and Mai-Thu Perret. As well as beauty and ornament, they are often loaded with symbols and unconscious meanings, or political and social messages.
“Whenever I meet a photographer, one of the things I always ask is: which books have influenced you? You get fascinating responses.” Martin Parr talks to Tate’s Simon Baker and Phaidon’s Amanda Renshaw about photobooks.
A mobile cheese-production unit, a local bakery previously earmarked for closure, a large community garden…what exactly is “socially engaged art”? Pablo Helguera takes a look at the Liverpool Biennial.
“Joseph’s dirty fingernails; blood seeping scarlet from the boy Jesus’s palm; sheep painted from two heads purchased from a local butcher: this build-up of all too realistic detail in Millais‘ first religious painting, Christ in the House of his Parents (‘The Carpenter’s Shop’) brought predictable cries of outrage, not least from Charles Dickens, who complained in Household Words of a Christ child depicted as “a hideous wry-necked, red-haired boy in a nightgown.” –Fiona MacCarthy p33
Doug Aitken on his work The Source for Tate Liverpool “I think we live in a world that’s very much compiled of fragments—fragments of information and experiences. We process these, and each of us synthesises together to create our own view of things….There’s a kind of commonality in the creative process, and also in the sharing of ideas.” –p53
TATE ETC. – Europe’s Largest Art Magazine
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