At White Cube

Nick Richardson: Christian Marclay, 19 March 2015

... their meaning. ‘My reason for pulling out of DJing,’ Marclay said in an interview with David Toop at around the time The Clock went crazy, ‘is that I feel that records have lost their meaning in a strange way. They’re not the objects that we all used to interact with and that brought us all the music we enjoyed.’ The Clock was a way of DJing ...

At Tate Britain

James Cahill: Frank Bowling, 15 August 2019

... made a Royal Academician in 2005 but he has remained a quiet man of British art in comparison with David Hockney or R.B. Kitaj, his contemporaries at the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s. ‘Swan i’ (1964) The exhibition shows how decisively he transcends the well-worn term ‘postwar British artist’: Bowling is diasporic, resisting easy ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Bullet Train’, 8 September 2022

... The song​  we hear at the beginning of David Leitch’s film Bullet Train is the Bee Gees’ ‘Stayin’ Alive’. It’s a good song and all too relevant, but by the time the movie’s plot gets rolling it sounds more like a fragile wish than any sort of programme. ‘Fate is a name for my bad luck,’ a leading character says ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Nightmare Alley’, 24 February 2022

... can read them later. There is also a flashback to a time when Zeena and her partner (Ian Keith; David Strathairn) were in vaudeville. Their act involved working a complicated code, where one of them would apparently be repeating questions from the audience but was actually signalling facts about the questioners. In the city, a different kind of trick is ...

At Tate Modern

Peter Campbell: The fairground at Bankside, 22 June 2006

... associations. Murals and altarpieces take on something from the churches they were painted for; David Smith’s, Rodin’s and Brancusi’s sculpture looked best in their studios. Donald Judd has gone so far as to develop the Chinati Foundation in Texas just to show his work; you can see why the pieces by him in one of the most successful rooms in the new ...

Iran and the UN

Norman Dombey: Iran and the UN, 23 February 2006

... is correct when it states that non-weapon states party to the NPT have a right to enrich uranium. David Edwards, a former legal counsellor at the Foreign Office, has written that ‘safeguards are designed to detect diversion of materials for military or unknown purposes. Nothing in the NPT or safeguards agreements legally prevents a state party to them from ...

Short Cuts

Jan-Werner Müller: Playing Democracy, 19 June 2014

... make the real decisions. So now she is backing Juncker again – only to find herself up against David Cameron’s threat that the appointment of a supposed arch-federalist makes the UK’s exit from the EU more likely. The stand-off makes for high drama, but it will probably be resolved in the time-honoured way of the EU: a backroom deal that allows ...

Dad & Jr

Christian Lorentzen: Bushes Jr & Sr, 4 December 2014

... a game of wallyball, the version of volleyball Jr liked to play with the Marines in the Camp David racquetball court. His days painting are now troubled by the rise of Islamic State, which you could call his one success at nation-building. I always cringe when someone panning a book says its flaws are a shame because at its heart is a story worth ...

Short Cuts

Daniel Soar: Running Out of Time, 8 January 2015

... illegally being paid less than the minimum wage, which sits uncomfortably with the fact that under David Cameron’s government only two employers have been fined for underpaying, for a total of £4696.) If you’re a psychotherapist on Harley Street you can convert an hour into £200. And if you’re a specialist partner at a large law firm you can translate ...

At the Royal Academy

Daniel Soar: Hockney, 9 February 2012

... The vast David Hockney show at the Royal Academy (until 9 April) is deliberately overwhelming. What it most looks like is an overblown, hyped-up, hyperreal parody of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, that super-English annual gathering of the amateur art establishment, to which the buying public with large pocketbooks flock from the Home Counties and beyond ...

At Tate Britain

Brian Dillon: Patrick Keiller, 7 June 2012

... its pile of wrecked German aircraft, compositionally modelled on a frozen sea by Caspar David Friedrich, was in fact discovered by the painter at the Morris car works at Cowley. Keiller pairs it with a French advertisement for the Morris 1100, an image of an economic future for British manufacturing that never came. In Keiller’s cartography, there ...

At Victoria Miro

Peter Campbell: William Eggleston, 25 February 2010

... unhappy. The unexplained strangeness of the ordinary or tacky that has drawn film-makers like David Lynch to Eggleston is evident, but the colour also registers at a different level. As in Van Gogh’s late paintings it has a life of its own. Purely as coloured objects, the photographs are rich, subtle, pretty even. The process used to print them in the ...

At the Imperial War Museum

Gaby Wood: Lee Miller, 17 December 2015

... never wore the same outfit for more than a few hours. She was also a hypochondriac. Her colleague David Scherman (who took the famous picture of Miller in Hitler’s bathtub) later remembered that ‘you named a disease and Lee would imagine she had it in no time at all.’ Regina Lisso, Town Hall, Leipzig (1945) by Lee Miller. Lee Miller ...

At Tate Modern

Brian Dillon: Klein/Moriyama, 22 November 2012

... work, where he was the graphic equal of Irving Penn and a far stranger photographer than, say, David Bailey or Richard Avedon. But then he has long been ambivalent about his fashion photography; already in 1966 he had skewered that milieu with Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, the first in a series of satirical films that would take up much of his next ...

At the White Cube

Peter Campbell: Anselm Kiefer, 22 February 2007

... impulse is chilled have tended to be a Northern, and particularly a German speciality. Caspar David Friedrich’s mountains and deserted seashores are melancholy accounts of man’s place in nature. Emil Nolde’s seas and sunsets have no place for man at all. It is the way Kiefer’s work seems to refer to how things are, without spelling out precisely ...