Features

New sounds are on the breeze, too. Lianne La Havas releases her third album on 17 July after an absence of five years in which the soulful UK singer-songwriter explored her identity, and influences as diverse as Jaco Pastorius and Milton Nascimento; she livestreams a ticketed performance from London’s Roundhouse on 15 July. Fontaines DC return with their much-anticipated second outing, A Hero’s Death, on 31 July, while a month later, intense fellow travellers Idles preview their forthcoming album with a series of livestreamed gigs from a secret location (29 and 30 August). … [Read more...] about Summer 2020 culture highlights: the biggest releases this season

Art Bold Tendencies, Peckham (opening late July)Chosen by Zoé Whitley, curator, Chisenhale galleryI’m looking forward to Bold Tendencies reopening in Peckham. I live in south-east London and am eager to support the new local adaptations of our cultural lives. Bold – housed in a former multistorey car park – has permanent works on its site by Richard Wentworth (Agora), Adel Abdessemed (Bristow), Simon Whybray (hi boo i love you), and the Derek Jarman Garden. They’ve also got new live and film interventions planned throughout the summer, as well as the continuation of Harold Offeh’s Hail the New Prophets. At Chisenhale we are gearing up for a safe public reopening in September, with a beautiful exhibition by Thao Nguyen Phan. I definitely associate summertime with listening to music outdoors. I was so looking forward to Green Man’s lineup this year between Sudan Archives, Thundercat and Michael Kiwanuka and am hopeful it will return next year. Our … [Read more...] about The heat’s back on: our insiders’ guide to 2020’s best summer culture

When I first heard about the Canongate Myths Project, I thought it would never take off. The idea of 'rewriting a myth' - what kind of writer would be interested in that? I thought. Rewriting poetry, translating or retelling old stories, as many of our great poets do, is one thing. Poetry, after all, is in itself the basis for poetry. But a writer of prose 'novelising', familiarising, making conscious and known one of the great ancient tales of old? I wasn't sure. Myths are, by their very nature, somehow unknowable and need to be that way - rearing out of our unconsciousness like boulders on the landscape or rocks in the sea. How do you turn that very unknownness into a chatty little novel by Margaret Atwood? … [Read more...] about Here’s to second chances

An Aside is full of surprises, echoes, connections, themes emerging as though by chance. Dean's personal radar, her private preoccupations, lead her on. This is a great way to go about things. She wanted a particular Gerhard Richter painting, but couldn't locate it, and turned up instead a little sketch for a sculptured head. This led to other heads, and heads are very like stones, which led to Kurt Schwitters's stones painted with bands and swipes of colour, and to Paul Nash's paintings of stones, and his prewar photographs of gnarled tree stumps, hung here beside Eileen Agar's photos of weathered rocks. Agar and Nash saw surreal monsters and personages in these forms, surrealism as old as the hills. In a nearby corner sit Marisa Merz's little lumpen clay heads, heads on the way to being stones, and in another room stands what appears to be a carved tree trunk by Thomas Scheibitz, which is in fact a found, eroded, unfinished gravestone, a leftover from the Scheibitz family monumental … [Read more...] about Fancy seeing you here …

Boty’s is far and away the wildest, most experimental, surreal and eye-catching part, still strange to the eye today. She is interested, she says – displaying a collage where a massive ocean liner is sinking, but as if into a pastoral scene, a field full of grazing sheep – in the moments when “something very extraordinary is happening, yet everyone around isn’t taking any notice of it at all”. The other three artists play with toy guns, drive around, paint doors and flags and Americana. Boty, conversely, drops us head-first into a dream, and when the dream turns into a nightmare she slaps it in the face, wakes up into what’s now a multilayered narrative of dreamworld and mundanity, then, dressed in a top hat and tux, she mimes bizarrely in full adult voluptuousness to Shirley Temple’s child-voice singing “On the Good Ship Lollipop”, until the screen itself ruptures in a cartoon explosion. … [Read more...] about Ali Smith on the prime of pop artist Pauline Boty