Tag: Photography

Black Panther film review ****

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Black Panther, 6th March 2018

The Tourist fancies himself as some kind of high culture dandy so he is normally dubious about fantasy, superhero, action genre films and the like. No plot. no characterisation, lazy, frequently daft, stultifyingly dull effects. There are exceptions if the ideas and treatments warrant it, Blade Runner 2049 most recently, but recent trips to see Star Wars instalments have proved tiresome.

So no interest up to now in the Marvel Studios output. The reviews though made Black Panther sound different, not just because of its Afrocentric setting and largely black creatives, but because of the quality of the result and the originality of the plot. And the Tourist doesn’t want to come across as a hair-shirted, intellectual humble-braggart, intent on only seeing what is good for him.

Black Panther didn’t start off too well. Hoary flash-back set-up, a few listless character tropes, an overwhelming soup of visual influences. But then I unclenched my elitist buttocks, stopped thinking about the smarmy things I could say about it and went with the flow. A flow of utter nonsense of course, but it is childish fantasy, so why bother analysing it, and a fall and rise redemption narrative arc which was telescoped from that first flashback, but it looks marvellous, literally, and the performances are brimming with, cliche alert, brio.

The powerful messages, the evil of Africa’s historic colonisation, the contrast between African and African American inheritances and stereotypes, the harnessing of technological power, are not laid on with a trowel, and the film dials down the visual effects in lieu of something more, frankly, stylish. The Afrofuturism aesthetic is, obviously, pretty cool, but director Ryan Coogler, and the artistic team led by production designer Hannah Bleachler, resist getting too pleased just with the look of the thing. In big screen Wakanda the technological is wedded to the organic, the past to the future, with plenty of sun-saturated daylight. A complete contrast to your standard fantasy setting even if the origin myth is not.

The cast is outstanding. Chadwick Boseman’s King T’Challa does border on the Hamletian instrospection, but this sharpens the focus for Michael B Jordan who plays aggrieved cousin Erik “Killmonger” Stevens, flip sister Shuri (Tottenham’s finest Letitia Wright), cheerfully sadistic Afrikaans baddie Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis) and Forrest Whitaker’s Polonius like Zuri. Daniel Kaluuya as W’Kabi does his trademark, who the f*ck do you think you are, scary stare and Martin Freeman, as Everett K Ross, once again, amiably wanders in from an entirely different movie set in Surrey. I do hope both these chaps don’t give up on the stage with all these Hollywood capers. Danai Gurira’s striking warrior Okoye and Lupita Nyong’o’s graceful spy Nakia should be gifted their own fictional nation on this showing. I am hoping some enterprising London theatre might sport a showing of Danai Gurira’s play Eclipsed which starred Lupita Nyong’o in its Broadway run.

To whom it may concern at Marvel. Let’s have another one of these please. You have a new devotee.

 

Wolfgang Tillmans at Tate Modern review ****

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Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017

Tate Modern, 9th March 2017

Oh my giddy aunt. What to make of this. I am slowly clambering my way up the shaky but intriguing edifice that is contemporary art. I have a rough map in my head but still have a long way to go and need to put a lot more hours in. So that means soaking up anything that the smart people at the Tate can throw at me. After all if it never makes its way into a trophy national gallery show then it’s not art is it. But if everything was like this then the journey would be pure pleasure and no pain.

I knew nothing of Mr Tillmans before this exhibition. Well maybe I had seen one or two of the spectral images where he had arsed about with the photographic production process (don’t ask me how) like Exhibit A above. But my oh my, does he get about. Different angles and perspectives, lots of close ups, street scenes, night scenes, landscapes, seascapes, still lives, portraits, self-portraits, fashion shoots, adverts, studio manipulation, the studio itself, colour fields, colour fields in a box. It seems that everything which has been fair game to the fine, the decorative and the commercial artistic worlds in the past and present can be appropriated by Mr T. And all this work is displayed in all manner of ways to further the assault. The OED should probably create an addendum for its definition of prolific.

However, in the hands of a halfwits like me, and, no offence intended, maybe you, this plethora of photos would just be so much garbage. The world is not short of digital images but it is short of this man’s. It is just endlessly fascinating and thought provoking with a host of strikingly attractive images many of which leap far beyond my aesthetic hurdle. Waves, a deconstructed (literally) digital printer, car headlights, lobster claws, fungi, pears, an arsehole and a pair of bollocks in alarming proximity, a pair of jeans in a box. Just some of the stuff I can remember.

And then there is all the material with a political or moral perspective. No empty one-note sloganising here (well maybe a bit), but some developed ideas and provocations drawn from many sources. I particularly liked the room which juxtaposied newspaper and other media stories about key geopolitical events with extracts and lists from psychological and neuroscience journals outlining frontier research on cognition, behaviour and heuristics.

Oh to have the eye and brain of Mr T. Mind you, whilst I am a keen advocate of the elevated audio experience, (though in practice am addicted to my old style I Pod and newer MP3 kit), I have to draw the line at his taste in music. If you have state of the art kit then playing late 80s electronic, white funk/reggae reclusives Colourbox on it is a big mistake, (they were the worst band on 4AD and that is saying something). And a portrait of Morrissey only adds fuel to this particular lapse-in-musical-taste fire.

Still forgive and forget eh major when there is just so much life on show here. You kids with your constant screen tapping and minimal attention spans will love it. Seriously though, and switching off the curmudgeonly, misanthropic pose for a moment, it really will appeal to anyway with a interest in life. So that’s everybody. You look around. So does he. He is just better at knowing how and when to record and extend the experience than you are. So that you can then breathe it all in. The perfect synthesis of high and low art. And a lot of joy in the mundane and a child-like glee in his making process. Not unlike the Rauschenberg retrospective which was next door and just wound up.

Highly recommended and on until mid June.

 

 

The Radical Eye at Tate Modern review ***

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The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection

Tate Modern, 29th March 2017

Sir Elton John is a thoroughly good bloke in my book. Firstly, for letting the Tate conjure up an exhibition of iconic works by renowned photographers (Man Ray, Dali, Kertesz, Strand), secondly for not coming over like a pretentious kn*b when explaining why he started buying them in the video that accompanies the exhibition – essentially because he liked them and it helped him get over the booze – and thirdly because he intends to gift the collection in time I gather. I can even forgive him for accepting the invitation from Kate Bush to sing on the Fifty Words for Snow album (mind you Stephen Fry should also have put the phone down). Though to be fair it is Kate’s fault for asking and my theory is she deliberately makes these lapses of judgement to confuse us into thinking she is human and not actually a god.

Having said that the house where Sir Elton displays them could do with a bit of colour accessorising in my view – there is a whiff of show home here. As perhaps could this exhibition. There are some absolutely stunning images here make no mistake, but they are all so perfect in pristine black and white, whether portraits, nudes, landscapes, close ups, surrealist mash-ups or still lifes, that in the end I was overwhelmed rather than engaged. The “coffee table book syndrome” that can often hit me in photography exhibitions came fast and came big. It is entirely my fault but I just ended up needing a hit of paint (mmm a bit of Doig would have done the trick if I had time – I know, I know now who is the pretentious kn*b).

If you know what you are looking at then I gather this is the bee’s knees. If you are a casual observer is it worth a whizz round? Yes. But if I only had time for one in Tate Modern right now the Wolfgang Tillmans would get my vote. Nothing pretty about most of his photos but way more to chew on.