Vision On

Art rocks -- and a summer break

I'm taking a break for 10 days on a family holiday, then back with (I hope) exciting news about the RSC Hamlet.

In the meantime, take a look at these astonishing pictures (courtesy of the Guardian and English Heritage) of prehistoric rock art at various locations in Britain. Jonathan Jones writes about them here -- and EH with other partners have launched a fascinating website about them.

Also Wallflower Press, publishers of my book Vision On: Film, Television and the Arts In Britain, have put their new website on line today. They're offering a discount of 15% on all purchases.

Tate (Britain) is great

I'm a big fan of Tate Britain. I can be a little ambivalent about other parts of Tate's empire, but what I still (and probably always will) think of as the Tate Gallery is, more or less, a wonder. A time there was when it didn't open until 2pm and, still at school, I would come up from my family's home in Maidstone on the bus and wait in the early afternoon crowd outside. A little later I'd go to the Sunday morning openings restricted just for the Friends, when the galleries were largely, gloriously empty.

Now it's unthinkable that the place wouldn't be fully open on Sunday mornings from 10am -- and that's where I've spent the past couple of hours. And among the paintings I saw was The Green Earth 1979-80 by Victor Pasmore, of whom and which more below.

Why is the place so special? Here's what I particularly enjoyed this morning...

Could it be, could it be?

Sky Arts, for which we've just completed Art of Faith, is very savvy about securing press attention. And one of its smartest strategies is the Friday night "Hijack" slot. A personality chooses a run of programmes for the evening from the channel's catalogue. Marry this idea with a figure in whom the press is interested and it's a smart way of securing free column inches.

Announced today is the programmer for Friday August 22: Culture Secretary Andy Burnham, still somewhat of a mystery to those in the arts and broadcasting. So today the Guardian Culture blog and the Times ran pieces about what might be divined from his selection. And nestled in his quartet of announced choices is a half-hour documentary about Antony Gormley, an artist who according to Burnham achieves "the remarkable trick of being both utterly accessible and deeply mysterious at the same time".

Now could this be, could this possibly be, our film from theEYE series with Gormley? The Times describes the programme as an "interview" with the artist, which is a pretty fair description of our documentary, although it also features a really good and rather beautifully filmed selection of his works. And this EYE is under licence to Sky Arts. If it is, I have to say I'm rather childishly pleased with the idea -- and tomorrow I'll try to confirm whether this is the case. The picture incidentally is of one of Gormley's accessible-but-mysterious figures snapped at Roche Court earlier in the summer.

Update: Sky Arts have confirmed that Andy Burnham's choice is indeed our EYE film. Neat that, isn't it?

All you need is love

Congratulations to my friend Ian Macmillan (on the right) who entered into his Civil Partnership with Andy Hitchman today. It was a lovely, touching ceremony.

 

 

 

Ian made the film The Scholte Affair with me for the Tx. series, but this is the opening from his truly exceptional Channel 4 series with Matt Collings, This is Modern Art.

One small idea (1.)

Walking around the Twombly exhibition I was struck by an idea for a series of television documentaries. There's a terrific group of canvases, Untitled (Bolsena), that was apparently painted in the summer of 1969 at a time when the artist was fascinated by television coverage of the first moon landing. And once you know that, you can see in the details suggestions of the craft and its path through to the moon and back.

I suddenly thought of making a film that brought together a range of artwork -- and not just painting but poetry, music and more -- that was directly prompted or influenced by Apollo 11. The catalogue references Robert Rauschenberg's Stoned Moon series of lithographs, and now I'm on the hunt for more. It seemed to me at that moment an excellent idea -- and one with a natural tie-in time next summer, when we have the 40th anniversary of the landing.

A hour or so later, I decided on a preliminary title, Inspired, and on the sense that it probably needed two companions to make into a short series (which is always more commissionable than a one-off). So why not apply the approach to two other key post-war post-war events, the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the 9/11 attacks?

I'm going to post occasionally as I develop the notion and see if I can find some funding and bring it to reality.

Cy and Marc

Tate Modern's exhibition of the work of Cy Twombly is, simply, glorious. After a clutch of early works, it concentrates on presenting groups of works made by Twombly at a specific moment -- and the galleries have rarely looked better. Indeed, perhaps the last time there was a show as simply visually as this was the Donald Judd exhibition back in 2004, also curated personally by Tate Director Nicholas Serota. These are cycles of great beauty and richness and poetry and wonder.

(My one caveat is, for the moment, about the sculpture. For me, the objects do far less than the paintings and drawings. I think I'd have preferred a show that featured fewer of these. The image Quattro Stagioni: Inverno, 1993-4 is © Cy Twombly, courtesy Tate Modern.)

I'll unquestionably return, and I hope on several occasions, before the show closes in mid-September. One of my interests is that more than a decade ago I produced a film about Twombly's work with the radical (and wonderful) director Marc Karlin.

Michael Gill 1923-2005

Last week Georgina Denison, the widow of filmmaker Michael Gill, put together a private screening of a compilation of her late husband's work. She brought together some two hundred colleagues and admirers, many of whom had worked together at the BBC in the 1960s and 1970s. Gill's son, the critic AA Gill, spoke briefly beforehand, there were drinks, and an appropriate atmosphere of admiration and sadness. I felt privileged to be there.

I knew Michael slightly; in the later 1980s Georgina and he had an office next to the room in which Illuminations was based in Newman Passage, close to Channel 4's first building.

Out on the street

Geoff Dyer contributes a good essay to the Guardian Review about street photography, addressed to the current Tate Modern show, Street & Studio: An Urban History of Photography. After running through an engaging history of street photography, he comes to the ubiquity of fine art photography in the galleries today (at Tate and elsewhere). This is his central point:

"...the corollary of photographers being assimilated as artists was that artists started to nibble away at - no, to chomp huge chunks out of - "photography's central purpose and aesthetic" [the phrase is from curator John Szarkowski]."

And among the photographers committed to the "documentary style" who Dyer feels are side-lined by the contemporary sense of  photography-as-art is the wonderful Alec Soth (above, Jill & Shayne from his Fashion Magazine series), who we filmed with for the first series of Artland in 2006. He's now with Magnum Photos, and making great work. Other admirable names mentioned by Dyer are Alex Webb and Trent Parke, Matt Stuart and Michael Ackerman.

All that sparkles

There was a very upscale party last night to open the William and Judith Bollinger Gallery at the V&A last night above is a French spray of laurel, from about 1805, courtesy of V&A Images). I  drank a glass or two of champagne and queued up to get into the gallery itself, where three Illuminations films are running on continuous loops as part of the display.

We shot these "How was it made?" shorts last summer with three craftspeople: Jane Short (who makes an exquisite enamel brooch), Shaun Leane (a diamond ring) and Martin Matthews (crafting a watchcase just as his father, grandfather and great-grandfather did back across a century). All three films look just fine in the display.

I have to say that before producing the three films I couldn't quite see the interest of jewellery, at least as a focus for a museum display. But working on the shorts (which were scrupulously edited by Matthew Hart) made me really engaged -- jewels are a facet of all the big stories, including sex and politics and money and death. The gallery, designed by Eva Jiricna Architects, is like a cabinet of curiosities crossed with the shiny black floor and sharp lighting of Strictly Come Dancing. And the jewels, well, they're to die for.

Weirdly, at least this morning, there's nothing new on the V&A website about the gallery.

Kew's Moores

Late in its run (it's been on since September and closes next weekend) I visited the terrific exhibition of twenty-eight major Moore works from the 1950s to the 1980s in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Despite it being Easter Sunday, for much of the time I was walking around in the blizzard. These are a handful of photos, with a comedy self-portrait right at the end.

Reclining Figure, 1982 (detail)