Early One Morning (1962) by Sir Anthony Caro is a great work of art, about which I have written in the past. Made of steel yet appearing as light as paper, it formed part of a radical body of abstract work by the innovative artist that was presented at the Whitechapel Gallery, London in 1963. The world was shown that sculpture neither had to be bulky nor presented vaingloriously upon a plinth. These were just two of the ideas that over many years he passed on to his students at St Martin's School, which included the likes of Gilbert and George, Richard Long, Richard Deacon and Barry Flanagan.
When I saw the nattily dressed, still actively sculpting, octogenarian at the Royal Academy yesterday for the press view of their show Modern British Sculpture, I asked him if would mind spending a couple of minutes with me to talk about his modern masterpiece. He agreed immediately and proceeded to chat about the work with the sort of unpretentious candour that seems beyond many younger artists.
In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.
Here's a few words from the artists who have just won the next two commissions for Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth: Elmgreen & Dragset and Katharina Fritsch:
In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.
Elmgreen & Dragset's, Powerless Structures, Fig.101, will be unveiled in 2012 with Katharina Fritsch's Hahn / Cock coming a year later.
Darren Aronofsky's soon-to-be-released movie Black Swan has been ruffling some feathers in the dance world. There has been criticism about its lack of authenticity and for being riddled with ballerina-as-a-paranoid-neurotic clichés as Deborah Bull (an ex-principal dancer at the Royal Ballet) and I discussed on Today this morning.
Deborah ends by suggesting you don't take your young daughter to see the film if she wants to learn about ballet (it's cert 15). Well, perhaps she could look at my short film instead, in which the Royal Ballet's wonderful Zenaida Yanowsky shows me how a dancer becomes a good (white) swan and a bad (black) swan with little more than a head gesture and arm movement. She is terrific.
In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.
You can see more of Zenaida Yanowsky at the Royal Opera House later this month where she is dancing the lead in Swan Lake (the role that Portman takes on in the movie).
PS. Frankly I think the ballet world is being too literal; Black Swan is as much about ballet as the King's Speech is about royalty. Yes, the film's story is framed around a ballerina and the ballet Swan Lake, but only as a device for a melodramatic physiological thriller, with a bit of werewolf-like action thrown in for good measure.
An arts journal by 
© MMXI