The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) was an informal collective of modern expressionist artists who came together in Munich, Germany in the early twentieth century. Members of the group included Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Franz Marc, August Macke, Elisabeth Epstein, Marianne Werefkin, and Alexej Jawlensky. In this short film, curator Natalia Sidlina and art historian Dorothy Price explain how the group wanted to explore the emotional and spiritual dimensions of art, emphasising abstraction, symbolism and expressive mark-making. Jazz musician and saxophonist Emma Rawicz, who experiences synesthesia, also gives us her personal, improvised musical response to the art of the Blue Rider. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl
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12.8.24
Goodbye Twitter
We have decided that Twitter has become too toxic and that we don't feel comfortable there anymore. Therefore we have decided to close our Twitter account by the end of the week. No decisions have yet been taken with regards to a replacement.
10.8.24
Arts can help foster social cohesion – but only if its class problem is dealt with first
On the morning of July 5, Keir Starmer and his supporters celebrated Labour’s election victory in the Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern, bathed in the glow of a huge red wall behind. Hard on the heels of the culture wars of the Conservative election campaign and its “rip-off degrees” rhetoric, this iconic start felt like stepping into a parallel universe.
Industry media such as the Art Newspaper and Artnet.com wasted no time in expressing their enthusiasm about what “Change begins now” could mean for the arts in Britain.
For me, watching Starmer making this speech in Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s power station turned iconic international art gallery, prompted a somewhat different question. Using this backdrop of the Turbine Hall’s industrial heritage seemed to ask: what will the arts do for everyday working people?
This article is part of our State of the Arts series. These articles tackle the challenges of the arts and heritage industry – and celebrate the wins, too.
Tate Modern generates £100 million annually for London’s economy. The transformation of the Bankside power station signals there’s life in the old dog Britain yet – that the arts can play a role in the creative renewal of the country by offering everyone more opportunities to appreciate great art.
In his book Culture Is Not An Industry, academic Justin O'Connor argues that art needs to be reclaimed for the common good, explaining how it is often presented in economic terms, focusing on its monetary value – rather than as an experience that enriches people’s lives. This narrow, economic definition of culture as consumption runs counter to Starmer’s “politics of service”.
My work draws on insights born of teaching young people from poor and working-class communities on creative degree courses, helping them to grasp the complex relationship between art and politics.
To put it briefly, the history of Europe is littered with revolutionary moments when politics had to reckon with art as a symbol of power and indifference to the needs of everyday people. The Louvre Museum in Paris and the National Gallery in London were both created to divorce the status of art from the aristocracy and the monarchy and transfer its power to the people. This history paints the Turbine Hall’s red wall in a more troubling light.
A party supporting arts for everyone?
The Labour party election campaign consistently stressed the working-class roots of its leader and many of its candidates. Arts Council England includes socio-economic background in its equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) metrics, but they are the exception rather than the rule among arts organisations.
In 2023, a team of academics from the Universities of Edinburgh, Manchester and Sheffield published an analysis of 50 years of data on jobs within the arts from the Office of National Statistics. This revealed that the opportunity for creative work is, and always has been, “profoundly unequal in class terms” and that “gender and ethnicity compound inequalities of access” to the arts.
Most startling of all was their finding that, compared to people who were working-class, from ethnic minorities or women, a person is still three times more likely to have a job in the creative industries if they are male, from an affluent background, live in London, yet don’t have a degree. It seems that the choice of a young, working-class Keir Starmer to become a lawyer was a more direct route to speaking at Tate Modern than art school.
Social-policy academic Teresa Crew has argued that to be working-class is to be seen as just not good enough. To fit in, working-class people must become what others deem to be “cultivated”, and that means abandoning heritage, behaviours and interests that do not fit with accepted, “higher” forms of culture.
Art appreciation is deeply biased because it always demands that people absorb culture that is situated elsewhere – meaning, on a global, not local level. In 2010, the Conservative party cemented the role of art appreciation in its knowledge-based national curriculum by placing particular emphasis on learning about the history of great artists and designers. Five years later, their election manifesto weaponised it, claiming the “irrelevance” of this focus on high art to the lives of normal people.
In effect, the Tories vociferously rejected their own curriculum to appeal to red wall voters. The strengthened eBaccalaureate pledged to “take back” education for “ordinary” working people by removing the arts from “your child’s statutory KS4 curriculum”, just as curbs on immigration would take back “your” country.
Populism has capitalised on years of deprivation and lack of opportunities in Britain’s coastal, post-industrial and rural communities, persuading people that their hardships are separate from issues of gender, sexuality and race.
But populism is wrong: low socio-economic status increases the impact of all forms of discrimination. The poverty that blights local communities across continents aren’t provincial problems but perpetuated by the drive for global profit.
In Barnsley, my home town, 30% of voters chose Reform in the election. In his novel Pity (2024), Andrew McMillan writes of this former mining area being home to numerous multinational call centres, attracted by the chance to offer low wages in an area ranked as the country’s lowest-paid district.
Art has the capacity to mine common ground between peoples and experiences and to reveal populism’s lies. But the arts can only foster greater social cohesion if the new government can help fix the discrimination built into creative education and the creative sector.
Without that change, any government support for the arts will undermine the government’s bid for political stability, and populism will mobilise the sector’s prejudice to chip away at the red wall that Labour has fought so hard to reclaim.
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Vanessa Corby, Professor of the History, Theory, and Practice of Art, York St John University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
4.8.24
Dada: how 1916 art movement reacting to world war is inspiring improvisation artists today
Artists, poets, musicians and physical performers all know the power of improvisation – spontaneous expression, responsive play with others, experimentation, vulnerability, even chaos. All this can generate potent new art forms and dramatically energise the creative process, as anyone who has enjoyed a good improv show at the Edinburgh Fringe – beginning next week – will know.
But none of these elements is the natural habitat of academic research. I am an art historian specialising in the 20th century’s most radical avant-garde movement: Dada, which began in Zurich in 1916. The city drew exiles, dissenters, displaced artists, writers and performers from across Europe to the relative peace and freedom of neutral Switzerland during the first world war.
In a shabby alley in Zurich’s old town, German poet Hugo Ball founded the Cabaret Voltaire. This legendary nightclub’s artists and performers included Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara and Hans Arp, with Sophie Taeuber Arp joining them a little later. Over its few months of existence, it quickly became a site of bold multilingual experimentation, protest, play and subversion.
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Performances were unpredictable and impromptu. The latest art hung on the walls. There were songs, poems, dances and sketches – some were popular cabaret numbers, but others were completely new.
Melody gave way to noise. Dance gave way to strange new physical movements. Sense gave way to nonsense. Decorum gave way to chaos, and anger at the war erupted. What emerged in Zurich as “Dada” profoundly challenged what it meant to make art, poetry and music in the face of a society tearing itself apart.
The Dadaists were consummate improvisers. They embraced chance, montage and incongruity. In their collages, sound poems, manifestos and public demonstrations, they favoured surprise, rupture and shock. They did not create for the museum, the archive or the concert hall, and frequently derided the professors who sought to study them.
A 21st-century dialogue with Dada
As one such academic, I wanted to explore the role of improvisation at the Cabaret Voltaire. Doing so has shaken up my way of thinking about Dada – all thanks to a loose, open and diverse Glasgow-based group of sonic improvisers called GIOdynamics.
The group is led by musician and dramatist Jer Reid, my invaluable collaborator. GIOdynamics’ regular improvisation evenings in Glasgow reminded me of aspects of Dada performance – and so the idea for our collaborative experiment, DADAdynamics, emerged.
Through improvisation in sound and movement, we wanted to discover more about the Cabaret Voltaire and its resonances today. Guided both by Reid’s bold creative vision and what emerged from the performers’ improvisation, we explored some of the fragmentary remains of Dada – a phenomenon that “hit the spectator like a bullet”, as German cultural critic Walter Benjamin memorably described it.
Our plan was not to attempt a reconstruction. Rather, holding loosely to Dada’s historical shards, we engaged in something more like a creative dialogue with Dada for today. It all came together in a sold-out public performance earlier this year called DADAdynamics: An Evening at the Cabaret Voltaire 1916/2024.
We had no idea how our audience, packed into a hot Glasgow bar venue, would react. But from the start, there was what the Dadaists experienced too: laughter, astonishment, sombre reflection on war – and a touch of mayhem. The experience felt as unpredictable, as risky and as spirited as I imagine nights at the Cabaret Voltaire were.
Reid and choreographer Aby Watson led the group in physically exploring the improvised “masked dances” that were a regular feature of the early performances in Zurich. Following the Dadaist Marcel Janco, we made our own masks out of found materials, with bizarre and striking results. Gloves became beards, keys became eyelids, and pegs became noses. There were resonances with the wounds and prosthetics of that first world war era, and with the waste and excess of our own age.
I recited Dada texts on stage, feeling the force of old words of anti-war protest, none of it lost in translation. Armin Sturm, from Germany, performed sound poems by Hugo Ball, dressed to extraordinary effect in a cylindrical cardboard version of the Cubist costume which Ball wore and described as a “magical bishop” with a “shaman’s hat”.
As performers, we all discovered more about what the Dadaists were doing. I learned, especially, about the creative importance of empathy, trust in the process, and resisting the idea of making everything seamless.
Our most ambitious undertaking was the rarely performed seven-act, purely sonic Nativity Play: Bruitistic, also by Ball. Bruitism, from the French for noise, was a crucial concept in wartime avant-garde circles. It expanded music-making to include all the noises of modern life, violent or mundane: bells, whistles, chains, pots and pans, whips, bangs, propellers, hammers, animal sounds, human cries and more.
Reid asked what the Dadaists might have done had they had access to basic synthesisers. And so our nativity play took the sounds that Ball’s score listed, looping and warping some of them to remarkable effect.
We were all struck by the intense emotional range of the piece. There was childlike joy and absurdity, violence in the form of a propellor-powered angel, and a final anguished lament.
The play ends with Mary’s prophetic foresight of the crucifixion of her baby son. His bloodshed, and the wails of the human and non-human alike, was and is a reminder of the brutal deaths of legions of young people in 1916, across the battlefields of Europe and beyond – and across our increasingly fractured world now.
Deborah Lewer, Senior Lecturer in History of Art, University of Glasgow
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
3.8.24
1.8.24
'Beautiful things can be vessels for painful stories' – Pio Abad | Tate
Within his work, Pio Abad considers cultural loss and colonial histories, often reflecting on his upbringing in the Philippines and his parents' role in the anti-dictatorship struggle. Featuring drawing, etchings and sculptures, the work highlights overlooked histories. In this film, Abad explores power, storytelling and how jewellery can be seductive. As he says, 'we're all magpies, drawn to these shiny objects.' Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl
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Water Walks: Taey Iohe in Walthamstow Wetlands | Tate
Artist and writer Taey Iohe guides us through a meditative act of self-disovery in the tranquil setting of London's Walthamstow Wetlands...
