Issue 13
Visiting and Revisiting Art, etcetera
At this time of year we can’t help but get excited by colour, splashing it all over our latest issue with Claire Daigle on Cy Twombly, who, as John Berger has written, “visualises with living colours the silent space that exists between and around worlds.” We have much to celebrate, with Twombly’s 80th birthday, and TATE ETC.’s own 4th anniversary, so we’ve added a sprinkling of gold, in the form of conversations on Gustav Klimt, and sensuous tales of heady trips East by Boetti, Polke and Edward Lear, chasing, “the strong second glow which comes in the East when the sun has sunk a few minutes.”
Highlights include…
Alfred Weidinger & Herbert Lachmayer on Gustav Klimt
Brooks Adams on Boetti, Polke, Clemente & Taaffe
Briony Llewellyn on British Orientalist Paintings
Max Koxloff, Juergen Teller, David Goldblatt and others on Street and Studio Photography
Hari Kunzru on King Mob
Wilfried Dickhoff on Marcel Broodthaers
John Baldessari in the studio
Claire Daigle on Cy Twombly
David Lewis on Ben Nicholson
Eric Fernie & John Onians on Neuroarthistory
Brooks Adams stokes the camp-fire for a tale of four contemporary art shamans, of stoned-soul picnics in 1970s Kabul and Afganistan before the Soviet invasion of 1979; of vibrant, easy-to-plunder craft traditions in Pakistan and India; of long walks through the labyrinthine Kasbah in Cairo, of taking tea with Paul Bowles in Tangiers. The artists in question: Alighiero e Boetti, Sigmar Polke, Francesco Clemente and
Philip Taaffe.
Herbert Lachmayer: “A sort of Klimtomania emerged in the circles of progressive, mostly Jewish grande bourgeoisie in Vienna – it was fancy and excitingly fashionable that the lady of the house had been painted during a modeling session with the maestro in his atelier. Even the husband of the lady may have profited from the glamour of this event.”
Lachmayer and Alfred Weidinger look at Gustav Klimt as professional voyeur, as the Viennese avant-garde of the 1880s used eroticism as a weapon against the ridiculous conservatism of Catholic bourgeois society.
To coincide with Tate Modern’s survey exhibition that explores the parallel worlds of photographs taken in the urban environment and those taken as studio portraits – including the work of Helmar Lerski, Rineke Dijkstra, Malick Sidibé and Paul Strand, Max Kozloff argues that such distinctions have become blurred over the years. David Goldblatt reacts to Helen Levitt and Chris Killip explores the collapse of Communism through the work of Boris Mikhailov.
John Onians: “Art historians have always known that both the making and the experiencing of art rely on the brain, but they rarely ask themselves how the brain works. A neuroarthistorian does. Today there is so much new knowledge in this field that our understanding of art can be transformed.”
A good example of Marcel Broodthaers’s poetically political view of art was Décor, installed at the ICA six months before his death. A large crab and a lobster sit at a table playing cards; amongst other borrowed furnishings, creating Broodthaers’s conquest of an institutional space. Wilfried Dickhoff explores this invitation to interpretation.
Hari Kunzru was named as one of twenty ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ by Granta magazine. We set him loose in the Tate archive to explore the disruptive elements of Dada and hard-edged politics of the 1960s ‘gangster’ group King Mob.
“The wall between Ben’s and Terry Frost’s studio was so thin we could hear sounds through it. We could hear Ben begin to scrape at the surfaces of his paintings with a razor blade – scrrch-scrrch-scrrch.” David Lewis scratches at the surface of Ben Nicholson and the St Ives artists.
“Painter-Laureate and Grand-Peripatetic Ass and Boshproducing-Luminary.” Edward Lear on himself,
page 40.
TATE ETC. is published three times a year.
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