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Five of the Best...Exhibitions
  1. The Conversation Piece
  2. Points of view: Capturing the 19th Century in Photographs
  3. The Sacred Made Real
  4. Robert Mapplethorpe: A Season In Hell
  5. The Future is with Bloomberg New Contemporaries

Critics' Choice

Film

Andrew O'Hagan

quoteNew Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of itquote

Andrew O'Hagan The Twilight Saga: New Moon Theatre

Henry Hitchings

quoteA smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusionquote

Henry Hitchings Cock Restaurants

David Sexton

quoteKitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave quote

David Sexton Kitchen W8

Reader reviews

Film

Adam, Harrow

quoteToo long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effectsquote

2012 Theatre

Rob, London

quoteThis is a peculiar play and does not work for me. Some of it is very funny but there are real flawsquote

The Habit Of Art Music

Bernard, London

quoteAlex has a strong powerful voice and was faultless, she is far better now than she was on the X-Factorquote

Alexandra Burke

Arts and Exhibition reviews London,

Robert Mapplethorpe: Still Moving & Lady

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Alison Jacques
Berners Street, W1T 3LN

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Description: A rare chance to see the artist's film work and portraits of Patti Smith, also featuring photographs by Judy Linn.


Phone: 0207631 4720
Website: www.alisonjacquesgallery.com
Email: info@alisonjacquesgallery.com

Trains: Tube: Piccadilly Circus Overground network, Tube / Bus: 3, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 29, 38, 55, 73, 88, 98, 113, 176, 189, 390, 453, Transport for London

 
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Shock tactics falter

Fisun Güner, Evening Standard 12.09.06
 
Robert Mapplethorpe picture of Lisa Lyon

Stardom: Robert Mapplethorpe's pictures of Lisa Lyon look more like a pop video than technically brilliant art

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The Robert Mapplethorpe industry has been sustained by three factors: the quality of the artist's work, his vast output and, not least, his notoriety as a maker of shocking images. Mapplethorpe died in 1989, and during a career that lasted little more than a decade he stoked up a lot of controversy.

His thrilling, technically brilliant and coolly beautiful photographs effectively took homoerotica - with a penchant for sadomasochism - out of the sex shop and into the art gallery.

These, his glacial portraits of glamorous New York art world types and his icily erotic flowers have sealed Mapplethorpe's reputation as the real deal. But if you root around long enough in the archives, you're bound to come up with a turkey or two. And boy, what turkeys this show dredges up.

Mapplethorpe only made two films in his life, so even he must have known that was not his natural mÈtier. Nonetheless, these rarely seen shorts form the nucleus of this exhibition - and they show how easily Mapplethorpe was seduced by kitsch and how the 'arty' and the 'classy' easily descends into the kind of clumsy, adolescentspiked nonsense we have here.

Made in 1978, Still Moving features a zoned-out Patti Smith intoning fragments of inaudible poetry while stumbling about in a muslin-draped room for 13 minutes. It's achingly pretentious, of course, but one can almost forgive it as the product of its time.

Much worse is Lady, made six years later. Featuring female bodybuilding champ Lisa Lyon as she walks through a huge Gothic mansion wearing hooded robes, or flexing her body in revealing leather gear, this too is a product of its time - which is why it looks and sounds like a very crass and very camp 1980s pop video which just aches to be Fellini. Think Ultravox without the production values.

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Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

 

Reader reviews (2)

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I left this exhibition with a huge smile on my face, it's so cool! I'm not into Patti Smith so I wasn't in love with the photos of her, but I adored the Lisa Lyon stuff, brilliant brilliant brilliant. It is camp, absolutely, but there's serious stuff underneath.

- Lucy White, Hamstead

Camp, kitch and all for free! It's exhibitions like this that constantly remind me how great this city really is. Peftectly of-its-time, this pop art is genuinely weird in parts and stunningly fabulous in others. I didn't see the videos but from what I hear I didn't miss out. Definitely pop in if you are in the area!

- Cindi, Northfields


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