One of the most difficult questions to answer is what makes a great performer great? So much that happens on stage takes place in an eye-blink. Dancer A is "better" than Dancer B, but why? Critics talk about "line", about "extension", about how dancers use and shape space. But it is hard to see shapes in words. Now portrait photographer and installation artist David Michalek has, with one deft blow, solved this problem.
It takes a lot of work to make a show look as unconsidered and chaotic as this one: thought and care and time and attention all have to be paid before something so random can be achieved. But as so often with Tillmans, the nagging questions persist: is randomness, are the offhand and the casual, valid as ends in themselves? Because Tillman’s über-hip affectless cool has become very tiresome indeed. Even worse, it’s becoming predictable and dull. Tillman's eye, as ever, remains wonderful, but I remain doubtful about the form in which he chooses to convey his ideas.
Surrealism, it occurred to me while looking round this fine exhibition, is like pornography: it is hard to define, but everyone knows it when they see it. The Surreal House examines what precisely is conjured up in our collective minds by the word “house”: houses are, of course, simply places to live, but their emotional resonance is much deeper, and it is this resonance, and how it acted on, and in turn was acted upon, by a century of artists working in the Surrealist mode, that is on display here.
Aptly, this new documentary about how the Rolling Stones fled from England to the South of France to record Exile on Main Street was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, with a supernaturally healthy-looking Mick Jagger on hand to give it a promotional shove. Jagger (along with Keith Richards and Charlie Watts) produced the film, working closely alongside director Stephen Kijak to knit together an evocative and emotional portrait of "the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world", at what many would argue was their peak.
The Welsh landscape promoted by the tourist board is a known entity. Postcard photographers patrol its contours waiting for the rains to desist and the sun to peer out so that they can snap splendid estuaries, meadowed shores patrolled by a lone diesel train, elegant county towns hibernating in the fold of a loafy hill, aqueducts and crumbling abbeys, beetling peaks and labyrinthine ravines. These photographs by James Morris, from a new exhibition and book, find another, sterner Wales imposed on the old familiar template.
The last time Jack Cardiff went to Cannes, nobody recognised him; wearing his trademark trilby, he'd tell curious autograph hunters he used to be a stand-in for Frank Sinatra. In fact Cardiff's claim to fame was somewhat greater: his was the eye behind some of the most achingly beautiful images in all of cinema. Handsome, charismatic and sharp as a tack, with a bottomless fund of funny and revealing anecdotes, he's also a dream subject for a documentarian. Naturally no television company was prepared to fund a film about him.