Late October Catch-up - Part One

Well what a couple of weeks it’s been – seen and done so much. No time for the usual in depth psycho-cultural analysis!

It all began with CONTROL, Anton Corbijn’s film of the life and death of Ian Curtis. I wasn’t at all a Joy Division fan, nor did I have high hopes for the movie, but it was really good, crucially avoiding making Curtis out to be a tortured genius/martyr/saint. At times hypnotic, and moving, and a film which has stayed with me.

I spent a lot of time at the BRITISH MUSEUM. THE FIRST EMPEROR exhibition is an amazing thing to see, although not quite living up to the politically motivated hype (and how the fuck can they sell Chairman Mao pin badges in the shop?). It told the Emperor’s story well – how he created unified systems of money, language, weights and measures etc to keep his empire together - and despite the lack of numbers of terracotta figures, you got a sense of the scale of the folly of his tomb complex. But the queues and excruciatingly slow snake of people working their way around the exhibition were painful. But much better was my return to the CRAFTING BEAUTY IN MODERN JAPAN exhibition – the pieces seemed even more extraordinary second time around, and they had some lovely new kimonos on display. I also went to a free lecture given by one of the potters on his life and aesthetics. Still at the BM they had a great little room with a display of KOREAN MOON JARS – huge pots of white china made in two separate halves then joined together before firing – only about 1 in 10 pots survive, but those that do have the most extraordinary undulations and bulges around the join.

TUNNG are on the road again promoting their excellent new album, Good Arrows, and played at the 229 Club. They just keep getting better, having developed a richer and more interesting sound since I last saw them You feel they just need to shake their booty a tad more to really fire up the crowd. They finished with a superb cover of Dancing Naked In the Rain.

At the BARBICAN, I went to SEDUCED, ART AND SEX FROM ANTIQUITY TO NOW. The most damning thing I can say is that, by half way round this overtly serious exhibition of explicit sexual material, I was well and truly bored. The highlight was the last room and had nothing really to do with the exhibition, it was the soundtrack to a Nan Goldin slide show, and was the piece that John Tavener wrote for Bjork and the Brodsky Quartet, a simply stunning piece of modern re-imagined choral music.

Still at the Barbican I saw the SHEN WEI DANCE ARTS COMPANY and a work called Connect Transfer. Some of the dancing was a bit twee for me, a bit birdy hopping like, but most was mesmerising and meditative. Their thing is that the stage was made of canvass, and the dancers dipped their hands or feet in paint, painting the stage as the work progressed. Afterwards the canvas is cut up and sold to the audience. I bought a bit on the basis of the woman on the desk saying that Shen Wei has been commissioned to choreograph the opening of the Beijing Olympics, so the “painting” will hopefully increase in value. Standing around at the end whilst members of the company signed the work, I felt more like a groupie that an art collector.