Page 46 - Rt Critic News Today

Lit in silhouette, a bubble is suspended from a short rod, filling most of a vignetted black-and-white frame. Immediately a solid form enters from the left, headed directly for the delicate sphere. The contour of this smaller round is irregular. Excreted from an unseen ejector, its stuttered trail reveals it traveled faster, thus farther, between film frames than was captured, but not by much.

It’s the late 1950s at an art school in the north of England and a teacher in the metalwork department has just dragged one of his first-year students out of the classroom to berate him for his shameless lack of effort. One of the student’s friends who happens to witness this encounter notices how his pal, who is only 17, has plunged his hands into his pants pockets, very likely in order to prevent himself from punching the fulminating teacher in the nose.

Could there be any more dispiriting topic than that of the gun? A topic veering between devastating personal histories, “shoot first” laws and arrogant entitlements, and weak pronouncements about sensible gun control?

In this introduction to Christopher Williams’s 2023 reimagining of Jeux, echoes of the past immediately mix within a contemporary setting. The work was first choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and premiered a century ago. Debussy was commissioned for the original production, though he initially balked at what he thought was a ridiculous scenario: tennis.

Already a trailblazer when it comes to making short prose an art form, Lydia Davis is also part of a vanguard shifting the publishing industry in another impactful way: Our Strangers will only be available through Bookshop, independent booksellers, and through libraries, but not on that well-known online marketplace. Yet, as momentous as this is, the true pleasure of this collection is having more of Davis’s stories in our strange world, in these strange times.

A visitor to Valerie Jaudon’s stunning show at DC Moore, made up of sixteen oils produced between 2006 and 2023, might justifiably wonder just what it is she is trying to express. This imaginary visitor might know nothing of her participation in the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s or of the fact that she coined the term “conceptual abstraction” to describe her own work and that of others.

Meyerowitz (in dialogue with his friend Lorenzo Braca, a historian and photographer) speaks eloquently and passionately about a variety of photo-related topics. Their series of discussions, divided into nine chapters, traces Meyerowitz’s artistic development over the course of his career.

Over the course of two days of performances, single audience members were blindfolded and led into the titular room where the twenty-five minute work unfolded. Sounds swirled around the listener, who gave themself over to the experience while the duo created a virtuosic sonic performance, an environment where all the senses were heightened.

Born during the Great Depression in a small North Carolina town in the Blue Ridge Mountains where she shares a three-room clapboard house with her parents and seven siblings, a six-year-old girl impresses everyone when she accompanies a church choir (her mother is a Methodist preacher) on the piano. Friends convince her mother to have her daughter take piano lessons.

Tony Cokes consumes media with a singular zeal. The video works which he has become known for incorporate text from a dizzyingly wide range of sources—speeches, books, newspapers, archives, Twitter feeds. Unfolding on the screen against bright, changing monochromatic backgrounds, flashes of text are overlaid with songs from an equally impressive range of musical genres and tones, drawn from Cokes’s wide and deep knowledge of music history.