Essential media about the arts

10 things I love at Tate Britain…

20.05.2013 posted by John Wyver Category: Visual arts

… and one that I just don’t understand – but we’ll get to that. The re-hang of Tate Britain is complete and unquestionably and unreservedly is a cause for celebration. The main circuit of the galleries is now a walk through 500 years of British art, arranged in a rigorous chronology, and then there are break-out spaces with smaller shows. The main perambulation will remain largely in place for a good while, but the ‘In focus’ exhibitions will change regularly. On the basis of a first visit last Saturday, when the galleries were pleasantly busy but a long way off the crammed conditions at Tate Modern, my sense is that the place and its art has never looked better, more enriching and more stimulating. Brava, director Penelope Curtis, and bravo head of displays Chris Stephens, and their many collaborators. There is much I want to post about, but I thought as an opener I would simply celebrate some things I admired and appreciated in just a small number of spaces – the galleries devoted to the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s as well as the two new Henry Moore rooms.
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25 random things about Illuminations (again)

9.05.2013 posted by John Wyver Category: About Illuminations, Film, Performance, Television, Visual arts

Back in 2009 we ran a blog post that was based on an article in the New York Times which claimed that the ‘latest digital fad [is] a chain-letter-cum-literary exercise called “25 Random Things About Me”.’ For a while it was big on Facebook, and this was the only excuse the Times needed for its pop psychology: ‘…why this particular distraction has suddenly become a phenomenon is anyone’s guess. For most, it seems to be a creative way to indulge in social networking without coming off as needy or shamelessly self-absorbed.’ The world has moved on a bit since then, as there have been some changes too at Illuminations. Nonetheless, absolved from neediness or self-obsession, we are delighted to offer today the 2013 version of 25 Random Things About Illuminations.
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Pictures at a cinema exhibition

12.04.2013 posted by John Wyver Category: Digital media, Film, Television, Visual arts

To Clapham Picturehouse for Manet: Portraying Life, the Royal Academy of Arts exhibition (until 14 April) ‘captured for cinema screens worldwide’. That’s the claim of Exhibition: Great Art on Screen, a new initiative from Seventh Art productions and philgrabskyfilms.com in association with distributors BY Experience. It’s a follow-up to Leonardo Live in 2011 (about which I wrote here), except that it’s not live. It is, however, another element of the rapidly developing bundle of events that cinema owners call ‘alternative content’, along with Met Opera: Live in HD, NT Live and a forthcoming Pompeii Live from the British Museum (on 16 June). Except that this isn’t live. Manet: Portraying Life is a documentary of the kind that is familiar (perhaps over-familiar) from the BBC and Sky Arts. It’s 91 minutes long, it’s on a big screen, it’s thoughtful and finely-shot, but it’s not… well, you get the idea.
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A media archaeological mystery

10.04.2013 posted by John Wyver Category: Digital media, Visual arts

Here’s an intriguing mystery. I have been writing in another context about the ITV company Granada and the benevolent despot who ran it in the 1950s and 1960s, Sidney Bernstein. Bernstein owned a chain of cinemas as well as heading an entertainment conglomerate that, by the mid-’60s, encompassed a television rental business and motorway service stations. Often described as a ‘Socialist millionaire’, Bernstein was a major art collector who eventually gave a significant collection of mostly modern masterpieces to Manchester Art Gallery (above). On 14 February 1959, the New Statesman ran a largely admiring profile of Bernstein (without a byline, as was the custom then) which included the information that, thanks to Granada,

visitors to art galleries, in Manchester and elsewhere, will shortly be able to hire for half-a-crown a gadget with earphones, through which they will hear interpretative commentaries on the pictures they are looking at.

Which I find extraordinary. This is early 1959, remember, and Granada is involved in the development of audioguides for museums. I had previously assumed such guides were only introduced, at the earliest, in the 1980s. In fact, it’s tricky trying to research the history of audioguides – I can find next-to-nothing online and one of the most scholarly papers concerned with the topic – ‘Four steps in the history of museum technologies and visitors’ digital participation’ by Jorgen Riber Christensen in MedieKulter, 2011; available as a free download) – contains nothing about their history.

All of which leads me to ask, does anyone know anything about this Granada-backed audioguide? Was it actually prototyped and tested? Does anyone remember using one? And, inevitably, is there a collector of historical media artefacts who actually owns one? All information, including about the early history of audioguides, gratefully received.

Clips from a life

27.03.2013 posted by John Wyver Category: About Illuminations, Film, Visual arts

Just after I had taken the photos above and below of these aged newspaper clippings I tossed them into a recycling sack. They followed hundreds – thousands – of others that had lain in piles in my bedsits and studies across the past forty years. Some of them anchored significant memories – one recalled my visit as a sixteen year old to the Tate Gallery’s William Blake show. But now they’ve gone, and I’m pleased that they have. Indulge me, however, as I explain about how I came to have these clippings and why I felt able finally to throw them away.

Newspaper clippings 2
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Small is beautiful

11.03.2013 posted by John Wyver Category: Visual arts

The best – and best-value – show of modern painting in London right now is not the overblown and distinctly patchy Manet: Portraying Life at the Royal Academy (until 14 April; entrance fee £15). Rather, it is Becoming Picasso: Paris 1901 at The Courtauld Gallery (until 26 May; entrance £6, for which you also get access to Courtauld’s many other masterpieces). You can get a sense of the show from this video with curator Dr Barnaby Wright, and as critics have notes, it’s glorious. Alastair Sooke for the Telegraph called it ‘a tight, compelling and beautifully installed exhibition’; for Brian Sewell writing for the Evening Standard, it is ‘a formidable exhibition, didactic, intense and moving’; Jonathan Jones for the Guardian describes the show as ‘scintillating’. But perhaps not quite enough has been made of just how exemplary this is as a perfectly-formed and small exhibition.
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Federico on film

8.03.2013 posted by John Wyver Category: About Illuminations, Visual arts

We have hugely enjoyed producing four short videos and a trailer for the exhibition Barocci: Brilliance and Grace which is at London’s National Gallery until 19 May. The films about the work of the late Renaissance master Federico Barocci were co-produced with the Saint Louis Art Museum, where the exhibition was presented before Christmas. The show opened here ten days ago and has been received with rapture in the Evening Standard by Brian Sewell (‘this is a beautiful, thrilling and intelligent exhibition’) and by Richard Dorment for the Telegraph (‘a staggeringly ambitious and heartbreakingly beautiful exhibition’). Some of the videos are on YouTube (although in a slightly eccentric way; see below) and we are embedding them here; the director of photography is Ian Serfontein, editor Todd Macdonald and producer Linda Zuck. This is the trailer:

Across the jump you will find three more of the films.
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On view at The Hepworth

4.03.2013 posted by John Wyver Category: About Illuminations, Visual arts

We are delighted to present a short film that we have made for The Hepworth Wakefield about the three exhibitions of work by Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Alice Channer and Linder on view there until 12 May (above is a detail of a work by Alice Channer). It’s a terrific trio of shows, so do try to catch them. Many thanks to The Hepworth for the commission, and to director of photography Marc Rovira and editor Todd MacDonald.

The dreamer Delvaux on DVD

22.02.2013 posted by John Wyver Category: About Illuminations, Television, Visual arts

The Sleepwalker of Saint-Idesbald is the most recent addition to our catalogue of Art Lives films that we distribute on DVD. Completed in 1987, this is a richly interesting documentary about the Belgian Surrealist Paul Delvaux who died in 1994 at the age of 97. Delvaux is best-known for dreamlike tableaux featuring naked women in settings that are both fantastical and grounded in archaic Belgian townscapes. Adrian Maben’s film is a conventional biographical profile and its primary interest comes from the presence of Delvaux himself who relates his own life story. Plus there is a wealth of archive photographs together with images of Belgium at the time was shot, together with shots of many of Delvaux’s most famous images. There are some infelicities, such as incongruous music at times, and the film is very much of its moment, but it remains a valuable record of an intriguing artist. You can purchase the film here.
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Reprise: Art then, now

29.01.2013 posted by John Wyver Category: About Illuminations, Television, Visual arts

Another post from our archives, this time from 8 March 2011, when I was about to teach a very similar class to the one that I will give at the Royal College of Art tomorrow.

I am delighted to be contributing a quartet of classes to David Crowley’s Critical Writing in Art & Design course at the Royal College of Art. Our first two sessions considered television films about Henry Moore and then Kenneth Clark and Simon Schama. Tomorrow, the third session focusses on alternatives to the dominant traditions of arts programming on British television, and one key example is the 1987 series State of the Art that Illuminations produced for Channel 4. The series is published by us along with an interview with the series’ writer Sandy Nairne (available here as a double DVD for £39.99). It’s one of the major projects with which we’ve been involved and it remains close to the core of the company. And this despite the fact that when it was first shown it was roundly abused by almost everyone.
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