Bill Viola and Michelangelo, RA
No photos allowed, so can only comment on this. The Michelangelo drawings, Archers Shooting at a Herm, notably, are as wonderful as one might expect and would constitute a great exhibition alone (as I think several have, a few years back at the Courtauld – I’m sure Tityas was there and Phaeton). It seems to me an enormous stroke of hubris to display them with Viola’s works, as if there were something fundamental that they had in common. As it is, it strikes me as two separate exhibitions in one space.
As for Viola’s videos and installations, there’s no doubt that they are striking – who wouldn’t pause and watch transfixed as a baby emerges from the mother, who squats facing the camera? I’ve been there (childbirth) three times, but I was always at the other end so the view was obscured. At the other end of this triptych, Viola’s mother is dying – one might think filming to be an intrusion at such a time, but I suppose it’s easier than getting a stranger or his/her family to consent… Can’t remember what’s in between; life, presumably.
My favourite of the Viola’s is the one with the diving figure that never arrives at the surface of the pool. Reflected in the water can be seen the upside down images of poolside people walking – but they are not there. The most annoying film is that of the two old people examining their naked. scrawny bodies with pencil torches – saw this in Bilbao a while ago and it annoyed me there too.
Here’s a Viola from Bilbao – not in this exhibition, but it will give you an idea…
Ken Kiff, Sainsbury Centre, UEA Norwich, until 23rd April 2019
This is without question the strangest exhibition I’ve seen for a very long time. Kiff, who died in 2001, started a sequence of paintings in 1971 that eventually ran to around two hundred. He called it – The Sequence. The catalogue refers to Bosch, Klee, Chagall and Samuel Palmer as possible influences, or “fellow travellers” at least, and the Jungian influences are hard to miss; or so the book tells me. Ovid, Yeats and Rilke also get a mention. He was in psychoanalysis from 1959 onwards and this also informs the work, to say the least.
No title given in book
Love and shadow – sorry about the reflection; she’s holding his leg, by the way, not a stick
Crouching Man (1)
Dignified man in a respectable London suburb, passed by a girl
Talking with a psychoanalyst; night sky – the analyst is the black seated figure; the pointing finger is mine
The poet; Mayakovsky – For what its worth, Kiff is wrong – Mayakovsky shot himself in the chest, not the head (photograph in David King’s brilliant book, “Red Star over Russia”).
(Woman with) protruding tongue – reflection again
The works are all small (the largest is 113×76 cm) and are in acrylic on paper, gummed to board. The book claims him as, for a time, a very influential figure in British art. I can’t see any obvious evidence of his influence, however; he seems a complete one-off to me.
City of Women (Fellini, 1980)
Watched the DVD of this fevered and feverish film, starring Anna Prucnal and “Fellini’s favourite alter ego”, Marcello Mastroianni as Snaporaz, and was deeply moved. In the age of #MeToo, it seems to me that Fellini’s film still has much of relevance to tell us.
Next time, Don McCullin, Franz West and Dorothea Tanning.
Free Radicals
Blackpaint
05 March 19
Blackpaint's Blog 