Design

TV I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, Sky Crime/Now TV (late August)Lucy Prebble, writer/producer (Succession, A Very Expensive Poison)I Hate Suzie, the show I’ve created with my best friend, Billie Piper. But I’m also hugely excited for I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, the HBO/Sky docuseries about the Golden State Killer based on Michelle McNamara’s dark and dazzling book. It’s a horrifying story, with an ending that Michelle never lived to see. I am fascinated by things that frighten me. I love it when true crime is done well and respectfully, rather than thrashed out trashily, and HBO are the masters of doing it properly. The Before Sunrise trilogy by Richard Linklater always makes me think of summers gone by and lovers, missed and taken, but this summer I’ll be doing post-production on I Hate Suzie and mostly trying not to perish in a pandemic, or to cause others to perish in a pandemic. … [Read more...] about The heat’s back on: our insiders’ guide to 2020’s best summer culture

Dean has used the technique again for Providence, a film portrait of Warner alone, with hummingbirds hovering and flitting about the grasses in a California field. There’s a hummingbird, there’s Warner’s eyebrows again. He looks like a tufted owl. This is shown down in the temporary exhibition spaces at the NPG, now filled with Dean’s filmed portraits. David Hockney smokes and maunders about in his LA studio. Seated in the shade in his garden, Arte Povera artist Mario Merz fondles a pine cone and is disturbed by the sound of church bells, as though they were an omen. The cicadas sizzle, loudly. Eventually, Merz wanders off across the lawn. What a face that man had. Claes Oldenburg arranges and rearranges objects on shelves. Julie Mehretu and her assistants work diligently on a vast painting, Mehretu’s hand skittering across a surface, leaving a little trail of marks. We watch over her shoulder. I find myself holding my breath. … [Read more...] about Tacita Dean: Portrait and Still Life review – ‘I find myself holding my breath’

"Nothing is more frightening than not knowing where you're going, but then again nothing can be more satisfying than finding you've arrived somewhere without any clear idea of the route," writes Dean in the catalogue. This also seems to be how Schütte's dog came about. Did Lother Baumgarten know where he was going, as he wandered about in the feral swamps bordering the Rhine between Cologne and Düsseldorf in the late-1960s, photographing the washed-up rubbish, the tangles of undergrowth, the reed-choked hinterland, the backwaters like dusty mirrors, doubtless cursing and sweating as he foundered around, imagining he had found Amazonia in the Rhur? He turned the photos into a slideshow, and added a soundtrack of squawking birds, frog-burps, insect hum, recorded on his later travels in the Brazilian jungle. Did he think of the Rhine when he was in Brazil? … [Read more...] about Fancy seeing you here …

Film mixes black and white, flaring tinted colour slabs, interior and exterior shots. A cricket forages, foliage swims in its own reflection, an industrial chimney billows bright smoke in black and white sunlight. A rock appears, both the mountain in the old Paramount Pictures logo and an imaginary Alp derived from the strange, almost forgotten 1944 novel Mount Analogue by René Daumal. Dean used the antediluvian technique of painting her invented mountain on glass, placed in front of the camera, to create scenes of a mountain inside the Turbine Hall, rising from a misty sea of dry ice. … [Read more...] about Tacita Dean: Film – review

Tate was still infuriated by a visit two years earlier to the huge Pop Art retrospective at the Royal Academy, particularly at “the mismatch between the many picturings of women, usually highly sexualised, often reduced to reified body parts, and the absence of women as artists making images (I counted later – out of 202 works – only one by a woman).” She met Mellor, they shared contacts and she unearthed yet more work “behind a cupboard at her brother’s place, in a different farmhouse kitchen”. She found “paintings, sketchbooks, collages”, including that 1966 painting BUM, which she discovered “in a lock-up” beneath some flats in west London. She and Mellor collaborated on the catalogue of Pauline Boty: The Only Blonde in the World (1998), which Tate then followed with Pauline Boty: Pop Artist and Woman (2013), a full-length biographical and critical monograph. … [Read more...] about Ali Smith on the prime of pop artist Pauline Boty