subject: Visual Arts Reviews By The Arts Desk [print this page] The visual arts exhibitions kicking off this week include a homage to a dying medium, a show by a cross-dressing potter and a retrospective of arguably the most influential living painter - The Arts Desk reviewers give their verdict.
Tacita Deans artwork FILM is what currently greets visitors to Tate Moderns Turbine Hall. Its a cinematic collage starring the halls very own east window along with a seemingly random selection of images from the outside world and it constitutes a homage to that now old-fashioned medium of celluloid film. Dean is passionate about film, and has created what she calls a visual poem both with it and about it, using time-honoured manual techniques of cutting, painting and tinting - techniques that will soon be extinct as the medium is fast disappearing. Sarah Kent found it a powerful experience, encompassing a variety of moods and suggesting hints of Mondrian, but perhaps more importantly because film needs a champion now more than ever.
Meanwhile over at another of the London galleries, the Serpentine, Kent was struck by the installations in Anri Salas exhibition: a self-playing snare drum, a pair of revolving gloves, a film of a young man intensely playing the drum, the cacophony all but drowning out any other noise in the film. These pieces are all linked through sound - perhaps unsurprising as Sala used to be a musician - and signal the important relationship it has with its environment. This seamless marriage of sound and vision was a delight to behold, according to Kent.
Grayson Perry, Mark Hudson notes, is so well known as a straight-talking transvestite potter with a teddy bear fixation that his actual work is often overlooked. And yet his show, The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, designed specially by Perry in response to the British Museums collection, is a superbly rich and rewarding one. His own pieces - often cheeky parodies which canonise his teddy bear, Alan Measles, and his female alter ego Claire as modern-day saints - are interspersed with various treasures and works of visual art from the museum, so an ancient Ghanaian headdress can be found next to a traditional-seeming cast-iron statue by Perry. And the show works best when the line between them becomes fuzzy, when Perrys pieces are so integrated into the museums that it is difficult to tell them apart. His works are affectionate as well as skilful, and though not as profound as he might wish, in this context, when the artist is forced out of introspection, they work at their best.
Despite the recent proliferation of Gerhard Richter exhibitions, Fisun Gner welcomed the major new Panorama retrospective at Tate Modern. The previous shows had all had a narrow focus, and Richters style encompasses so many genres - from photorealism to monochrome abstracts to 19th century-style landscapes to blurred black-and-white images - that it required a fuller survey. This one, however, only partly fulfilled that need. The chronological rather than thematic hang made it feel rather disrupted and repetitive, and more like a study of his processes rather than the meanings behind the works. Gner was left feeling that something was still missing and indeed several key works were not included. As a result, it was a good solid survey that amply demonstrated the painters virtuosity, but it fell short of being a brilliant one.
And finally, Judith Flanders was greatly impressed by the unassuming Miracles and Charms show of devotional works at the Wellcome Collection. Traditional Mexican ex-votos dating from the 16th century onwards depict the breadth of ordinary human tragedy - death, disease, accidents - as a way of offering thanks for answered prayers. This most democratic form of folk art, Flanders found, could be both powerful and charming, and with a parallel exhibition of amulets and charms - some with detailed provenance and some very mysterious - running alongside it, she deemed this show something of a quiet hit.
