Monday 31 May 2010

Exhibitions picks of the week


Newspeak
Riotous ... Real Special Very Painting by Barry Reigate, on show at Newspeak in London. Photograph: Barry Reigate

Newspeak: British Art Now Part 1, London

After art from China and the Middle East, Charles Saatchi's back on home turf for the third survey show at his west London gallery. The title Newspeak refers to the lingo of dictatorship from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: a new language in which words are limited and experience thus restricted. Though intended to be taken ironically, the restriction in this show is a crucial one: Saatchi doesn't collect video, which means some of the most dynamic work to emerge in recent years is absent. Nonetheless, his pick of 29 artists has enough going on to give a sense of the questioning approach and variety of contemporary British art, a marked contrast to the YBA moment that cemented the collector's rep. Highlights include Karla Black's vulnerable, makeup-dusted sculpture, Spartacus Chetwynd's handmade animal costumes and Barry Reigate's riotous pop art collage, Real Special Very Painting.
Saatchi Gallery, SW3, Wed to 17 Oct
Skye Sherwin

David Nash, Wakefield

It's easy to belittle David Nash as the ultimate back-to-nature artist, one for the macho men of the woods, hacking away with his chainsaw, churning out monumental erections. Yet there's something disarming in Nash's singularity of purpose. "I want a simple approach to living and doing," he has said. The more than 300 works in this retrospective could well temporarily find their true cultural home amid Yorkshire Sculpture Park's undulating hillsides. Indoors and out, there are eucalyptus spheres, redwood towers, burnt twig drawings and extensive documentation of such site-specific projects as Wooden Boulder, a sculptural lump of oak set to sail on a stream in the Welsh mountains in 1978. Organic flux and decay are essential elements of Nash's various projects, with warping and cracking contributing a crucial finesse to the works' blunt and bold aesthetic.
Yorkshire Sculpture Park, to 27 Feb, 2011
Robert Clark

Rachel Khedoori, London

For the past seven years, Rachel Khedoori has been searching the internet for news stories about the Iraq war. As her Iraq project demonstrates, that's a weighty amount of text. Collated in giant tomes, they're dictionary-dense, the articles running on and on: a physical testament to the burden of recent history, which the words circle and repeat, in near countless attempts to nail the fugitive business of what happened and what's still happening. Shifting from global politics to personal meditation, a new film work explores this effect on the landscape of the artist's childhood home, Australia. Both works create a sense of shifting space, inside the mind and in the world.
Hauser & Wirth, W1, Fri to 31 Jul
Skye Sherwin

The Glass Delusion, Sunderland

The Glass Delusion takes its title from a term, coined in the Middle Ages, for a form of depression in which sufferers fear they are made of glass and therefore impossibly vulnerable to psychic and physical breakage. It is recorded that victims would refuse to sit down as they believed their body weight would fracture their buttocks. So here, an impressive array of artists, including Susan Hiller and Matt Mullican, reflect on the dual nature of glass's hardness and fragility. A highlight is bound to be Beryl Sokoloff's film celebration of the House of Mirrors, built in 1960s Woodstock by the wonderfully obsessive Clarence Schmidt.
National Glass Centre, to 3 Oct
Robert Clark

001 London, London

The big city is the subject of this zingy show of prints created by a who's who of up-to-the-minute graphic artists. There's the mastermind behind big boys' "character toy" company Arnos, James Jarvis, whose 2D orange ball on legs looks like a distant cousin to Tony Hart's iconic Plasticine chum Morph. Fashion designer and fabric-print whiz David David has created a signature bright op-art design. Meanwhile Anthony Burrill, a kingpin of the scene, provides a tart take on life in the capital with a print featuring a mass of prohibitive road signs. Look out, too, for young designer Kate Moross, Lizzie Finn's needlework-inspired illustration, plus "Victorian punk revivalists" the Rubbishmen.
7 Marshall St, W1, to 3 Jul
Skye Sherwin

Dürer and Italy, Port Sunlight

A lovely show on loan from Glasgow's Hunterian Museum, enchantingly displayed in the quirky Port Sunlight village's equally lovely Lady Lever Art Gallery. While the exhibition ostensibly charts in part the great German Renaissance artist's creative cross-fertilisation with his Italian contemporaries, any excuse is welcome to get another glimpse of his engravings, surely some of the most sensitively skilful pieces of printmaking of all time. Each image could only be by Dürer and no one else before or since. Here you can see his Eve with corkscrew locks and Adam with his naked foot planted, for some reason, on a mouse's tail. Here's his Self-Portrait, all dolled-up hippy-style like someone out of the Incredible String Band. But Dürer's most unforgettable print is Melancholia, an enigmatic reflection on the mysteries of creation and the expectation for artists to be somewhat wired to the moon.
Lady Lever Art Gallery, to 26 Sep
Robert Clark

Lily Van Der Stokker: No Big Deal Thing, St Ives

Lily Van Der Stokker's art will do anything to make friends. The Dutch artist's relentlessly cheery giant wall drawings teem with flowers, greetings-card messages, dopey blobby shapes and candy-coloured polka dots. They indulge in decoration, pretty colours, niceness and mawkish charm. In fact, they're so girly, childish and cute as to become a little belligerent: an alternative kind of feminist challenge to art world machismo and its yen for the grave and drily intellectual. She seems to ask, quite seriously, what's wrong with artists being upbeat or talking about love and family – while also pondering how it is that many people go weak at the knees for this stuff. This is her largest UK exhibition yet and includes wall drawings and works on paper.
Tate St Ives, to 26 Sep
Skye Sherwin

MadeIn, Birmingham

The Chinese artists' collective MadeIn presents installations that make often deceptively playful comment on assumptions of national culture. In addition to amalgamating the words "made in", the term apparently translates phonetically into Chinese as "without a roof". This is art that likes to sidestep easy categorisation as well as the creative restrictions of recent Chinese history, and the work itself tends to tackle big, bad themes of Middle Eastern conflicts with audacious assemblages of throwaway raw materials. The toe-ends of combat desert boots are arranged in an inward facing circle. An inert pile of rubble, like some bomb blast debris, can be seen on closer inspection to be animated by a rhythmical electrical breathing.
Ikon Gallery, to 11 Jul
Robert Clark

Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera Tate Modern, London


Exposed is full of sneaky images and surreptitious views, hidden cameras and nefarious goings-on. This is a rough ride, by turns entertaining, horrifying, morbid and compulsive. Taking us from the American civil war to the burning oil fields of the first Gulf war, from an 1860s execution in China to the death chamber in a modern Mississippi penitentiary, there's plenty that is ghastly and ghoulish, much that is seamy, much that is innocuous but invasive, such as Harry Callahan's images of women lost in thought, and Yale Joel's 1946 shots through a two-way mirror in a Broadway cinema lobby.

Kohei Yoshiyuki photographed people having sex, and watching others having sex in a public park at night. We spy a KGB agent rummaging through files, and approaching a secret meeting place in the woods. The paparazzi snap Liz Taylor and Richard Burton snogging. Merry Alpern's great series of shots through dirty windows of a brothel, seen from the photographer's own building, are all the more tantalising for being such fragmentary views. There's sex and strangeness here, electrocutions and suicides, lynchings and murders and death squad assassinations.

As Kim Novak takes her seat in the railroad dining car, all the guys in the carriage turn to watch, and we watch them watching her. Greta Garbo avoids the camera, and a dead man on an Italian garage ramp, hit in the back, no longer cares. There's a vitrine of walking stick cameras, watch-fob cameras, cameras with hidden second lenses that point in a different direction to the one you think they do.

But key images are missing, the most obvious being the infamous shots taken at Abu Ghraib. I keep thinking there's an even better show to be made – one with a less obvious American bias.

Until 3 October. Details: 020-7887 8888.
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