What a curious curate’s egg Tate Liverpool has pulled out of its hat with Alice in Wonderland. And what a complete rag-bag of minor, uninteresting artists.
What we're used to seeing whenever the BBC launches on one of its epic explorations of the natural world is moving pictures. But as well as training film cameras at their subects, from the largest mountains and glaciers to the smallest organisms, the hardy modern-day adventurers armed with their phenomenal hi-tech kit also train still cameras at everything they encounter.
Many of the images will be all too familiar. Captain Scott writing a diary in his quarters. Three of Shackleton’s men scrubbing below decks. The Endurance lit up in the long polar night. The ice cave shaped like an italic teardrop and shot from within its chilly maw (pictured below). Penguins, dogs, seals, ponies, mostly destined for death. Chaps – above all chaps – four who famously died with Scott, many more who famously survived with Shackleton.
I’m not sure I’ve ever felt so ambivalent about a show, and so strongly both pro and con. The pros first, then. This is an astonishing, revelatory exhibition of avant-garde art and architecture in the Soviet Union in the brief but hectic period from the Revolution to the Stalinist crackdown in the 1930s.
Who needs to hear or see anything more of the creepily manipulative world of Andy Warhol’s Factory? We’ve seen the films (well, bits of them); we bought the album (the one with the banana on the front); we’ve bought and dispensed with the images (in cheap repro form) several times over. We’ve seen those grainily evocative images of the Velvet Underground, Edie Sedgwick, Gerard Malanga and co looking glassily back at us so many times we almost feel we were there ourselves.
Armed American soldiers stand in the stone window frames of a ruined building in Berlin, curious and disturbing echoes of those classical statues that so often were used to add portentous significance to a facade; but here in a 1961 photograph by Don McCullin, they are overlooking, with some intensity, the East German military on the other side. The Wall has just been built.
A beguiling shadow play greets and enchants on arrival: the silhouettes of three ballerinas, each performing an arabesque, are cast upon the wall as you enter. The effect, as their softly delineated forms dip and slowly rotate, is mesmerising. It’s also an apt opener to an exhibition devoted to exploring how Degas strove to achieve a sense of fluidity and movement in his paintings of dancers, a subject for which he is chiefly known.
From Edinburgh to London and back, via Tatooine and Port Talbot, Rich Hardcastle has photographed playwrights and magicians, burlesque dancers and rugby captains, and regularly adorned the covers of The Big Issue, FHM and The Sunday Times Culture section. Along the way, though, the 40-year-old Londoner has missed no opportunity to shoot the great and the good-humoured, has documented Karl Pilkington’s idiocy abroad, and has produced the pictures for the illustrated book of Extras.
The Eighties, the decade that fed us the creed of “greed is good”, spawned the fashion “glamazon”. She had supergloss looks and a full décolletage, and, naturally, she wouldn’t get out of bed for less than 10K. In the Nineties, the decade that ushered in grunge and Cool Britannia, an entirely different creature emerged. She was very young, very skinny, and had a look that somehow combined the exquisitely ethereal and the very ordinary. She came in the gamine shape of Kate Moss.
The sturdy, healthy, almost glowing attractiveness of Ruby Loftus, her reddish curls partly tamed by a green hair net, her face punctuated by bright-red lipstick characteristic of the 1940s, her blue overall neatly complementing her red shirt, and her expression intense and concentrated as she screws a breech ring as part of the manufacture of the Bofors gun at a factory in Newport, is a famously captivating image of the Home Front in the last world war.