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New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Theatre
A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
Restaurants
Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave
Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
This is a peculiar play and does not work for me. Some of it is very funny but there are real flaws
Alex has a strong powerful voice and was faultless, she is far better now than she was on the X-Factor
London,
Evening Standard rating
Reader rating
Phone: 07886631744
Website: www.hideandseekfest.co.uk
Email: caitlin@hideandseek.co.uk
All human life and death: Muybridge's Man Driving Forward
Time travel: Bertelli's Continuous Profile
Identity: Joanna Kane’s portrait of William Blake’s life mask from her series The Somnambulists
Has someone decided that it’s National Mark Wallinger Week without telling me? The 50-year-old British conceptual artist won the Ebbsfleet commission seven days ago with his proposed sculpture of a giant white horse, southern England’s answer to Gormley’s Angel of the North.
And now he has curated a travelling exhibition that is colourful, surprising, witty, intelligent, irreverent and elegiac.
Wallinger’s own artistic production has often been too obtuse to wow the crowds but you can’t level that criticism at his first foray into curating. The visual gags are great, and often about grandiose delusions. Missing, however, is a classical statue of a dying Gaul, propping himself up on one limb — the result of accidental damage. There is a 19th-century photograph by Roger Fenton of a human skeleton next to an entertainingly similar gorilla skeleton. We have a futuristic bust of Mussolini, meant to show the leader’s profile looking out in all directions but which looks like a designer door-knob, or something more erotic. Masterpieces sit next to mistakes in this impressively researched assortment of art across 2,000 years of human history.
The exhibition is titled The Russian Linesman after a contested decision in the 1966 West Germany v England World Cup Final, which decided the match in England’s favour. Like that populist reference, Wallinger’s show is full of works of art about reality and illusion, from Albrecht Dürer’s “how-to” engravings of perspective to Tacita Dean’s film of the invisible people who make the sound effects for films. There are reflections on art’s anachronistic relationship with violence, as in the video from the little-known Dutch artist Aernout Mik, consisting of war outtakes, footage from the Yugoslav civil war left on the cutting-room floor.
The line (linesman = draughtsman = artist, geddit?) provides another layer of connections, from the neat minimalism of Fred Sandback’s sculptures drawn in thread in the air, to the politically drawn line of the Berlin Wall, whose route had to be marked out in white paint before it was built.
The whole ensemble amounts to a well-argued essay about the pre-history of conceptualism. From George Stubbs’s drawing of a human skeleton in the posture of an animal to Cornelius Gijsbrechts’ Reverse Side of a Painting (1670), this exhibition shows that conceptual art’s themes of social hierarchies, cultural assumptions and the politics of images go back centuries.
Until 4 May. Open daily, 10am-6pm; until 10pm on Fri. Admission £7; concs available. Information: 0871 663 2519; www.haywardgallery.org.uk
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
