avant-garde
Nancy Spero & Marcus Coates, Serpentine GallerySunday, 13 March 2011
A maypole greets you on entry to the Serpentine Gallery; don’t expect a cheery celebration of spring, though. Nancy Spero’s installation Maypole: Take No Prisoners II (2008) is a scream of rage against violence and its hapless victims. Dangling from... Read more... |
CD: Zwischenwelt - Paranormale AktivitatSunday, 13 February 2011
The Detroit electro-techno duo of James Stinson and Gerald Donald aka Drexciya never gave away their secrets easily. Almost completely anonymous and never photographed during their 10-year existence – which ended with Stinson's 2002 death after a... Read more... |
Mordant Mass, The VortexSunday, 13 February 2011
Avant-garde art, by its very nature, always treads a fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous, and between entertainment and alienation. Thankfully this is something understood very well by the joint curators of Friday night's show at the... Read more... |
CD: Joan As Police Woman - The Deep FieldFriday, 28 January 2011
There’s a story doing the rounds that, while good, Joan Wasser’s latest fails to hit the highs of her other albums as Police Woman. Don’t believe it; it’s pure snobbery. In a world of MP3s this is a gorgeous warm album that will sound forever vinyl... Read more... |
RIP Trish Keenan of BroadcastFriday, 14 January 2011
I'm absolutely horrified to hear of the death this morning from pneumonia, following a swine-flu infection, of Trish Keenan of the band Broadcast. I had only ever spoken to her on the telephone, but many friends knew her well and she was one of... Read more... |
The Urethra Postcard Art of Gilbert & GeorgeFriday, 14 January 2011
Radio interviewer: “Are you Royalists?” George: “Of course! We’re not weird.” Gilbert & George may have been accused in the past of being coprophiliac pederast fascists (owing to their love of turds, anuses, young men with cropped hair and... Read more... |
The Magic Band on The Real Captain BeefheartTuesday, 28 December 2010
Captain Beefheart, who with his Magic Band made John Peel’s favourite album, 1969’s extraordinary Trout Mask Replica, died of complications from multiple sclerosis last week, aged 69. In tribute, below is a feature from 2003, much of it unpublished... Read more... |
Captain Beefheart, 1941-2010Monday, 20 December 2010
"The way I keep in touch with the world… is very gingerly… because the world touches too hard." That honest and hugely poignant statement by the musician, composer, songwriter, painter and full-on eccentric Captain Beefheart comes from a documentary... Read more... |
The Thrill of It All, Forced Entertainment, Riverside StudiosTuesday, 26 October 2010
It’s pretty hard to describe a Forced Entertainment show. But let’s try anyway: imagine a stage full of crazy dancers, the men in black wigs, the women in white ones, prancing around, flinging their arms in the air, mistiming their high kicks, and... Read more... |
Alan Moore's Unearthing, Old Vic TunnelsFriday, 30 July 2010
It's very hard to ever know what to expect from Alan Moore, the Mage of Northampton. The author of era-defining comics like Watchmen, V For Vendetta and From Hell has long maintained that art and magic are one and the same, and since the mid-1990s... Read more... |
Serge Gainsbourg vs The Anglo-SaxonsWednesday, 28 July 2010
The arrival of Gainsbourg: Vie Héroique in British cinemas this week – under its Anglo-Saxon title Gainsbourg – assumes that distributors think there’s an audience. Even so, Gainsbourg hardly has the appeal of a Johnny Cash biopic. Or even an Ike... Read more... |
Laura Moody, The Forge, CamdenWednesday, 14 July 2010
Laura Moody says she was given a cello as a child to curb hyperactivity, but listening to her last night you might well have wondered if she’d had Tourettes too. The singer-cellist’s sound included clicks, shrieks, howls, and a lot of things that... Read more... |
