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Jo Higgins
Published outcomes - National Gallery of ...
Published outcomes - National Gallery of Australia: Digital Young Writers Mentorship
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Jo Higgins
ABC Arts: 'Air' at QAGOMA
ABC Arts: 'Air' at QAGOMA
Writings
Jo Higgins
ABC Arts: Megan Cope is building a living, ...
ABC Arts: Megan Cope is building a living, breathing artwork on Minjerribah
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Jo Higgins
Exhibition essay: Topographies of painting - ...
Exhibition essay: Topographies of painting - Gregory Hodge, Sullivan + Strumpf
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Jo Higgins
ABC Arts: Richard Bell at documenta fifteen
ABC Arts: Richard Bell at documenta fifteen

London

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Frida Kahlo at the Victoria & Albert Museum

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Plaster corset, painted and decorated by Frida Kahlo, Museo Frida Kahlo. © Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Archives, Banco de México, Fiduciary of the Trust of the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museums.

I so, so loved seeing Frida Kahlo: Making Herself Up at the V&A when I was in London earlier this month.

Despite finding the haunting soundtrack they bled into every room a bit emotionally manipulative, I felt that the exhibition - full of personal belongings and artefacts exhumed after 50 years from a locked room in her house, La Casa Azul, in Mexico City - powerfully cut through so much of the myth about her, absolutely anchoring her life and work and extraordinarily wonderful, powerful sartorial choices in her body.

The plaster casts and steel braces; her prosthetic leg; her many medicines and the details of her pain – so much pain – brought a real clarity and urgency to her work. To create such visceral, clear-sighted, provocative works despite and because of her pain, I’m just in awe really of her intense female energy. To have her passion and anger and vision, when so many others would have foregone their politics and aesthetic agendas for painful solitude and defeat, I was profoundly moved actually. And I also really, really loved – thinking about her jewellery – how she used it to do and say so many things – about herself and about Mexico. Jewellery really can be this extraordinarily powerful, subtle tool for communication if you wear it right…

There’s so much more to say about Kahlo, her work, the exhibition, the god awful, tasteless shit they were selling in the giftshop (I can’t imagine how the socialist Kahlo would have felt about £45 floral headbands being sold in her name…) but really, for me - it was about that visceral, tangible connection to her pain and her clarity of purpose.

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A round-up: Miles Aldridge, Somerset House; Katharina Fritsch, Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square; Michael Landy, ‘Saints Alive’, National Gallery

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Yesterday I took in a couple of exhibitions in and around central London. What follows is more a collection of immediate responses than any sort of at-length review. Take from them what you will…

First up, Miles Aldridge, ‘I Only Want You to Love Me’, Somerset House, 10 July – 9 September 2013

Miles Aldridge for Vogue Italia

A career retrospective of sorts of the fashion photographer Miles Aldridge, this tight show was bright and shiny and visually stunning with lush, saturated colour and a highly strung sense of pop.

Aldridge’s creative collaborations with Italian Vogue in particular are pretty impressive – he conjures these dark, female domestic narratives and tableaux, working initially from sketches and stories,  which Vogue then dress in high couture. Think super-saturated plasticised Stepford Wives and a compelling, creepy beauty.

 

From here, it was a short walk to Trafalgar Square to see Katharina Fritsch, Hahn/Cock, Fourth Plinth, 25 July 2013 – 2014.

Katharina Fritsch, Hahn/Cock, Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square, 2013-2014

The latest Fourth Plinth commission was unveiled in Trafalgar Square this week, Hahn/Cock by German sculpture Katharina Fritsch. There’s a lot of mileage to be had in this work in the form of cheap gags but as an obvious metaphor for all the other male posturing going on in Trafalgar Square – from statues to street performers – it’s a straightforward enough work to appreciate with enough visual bang to be an effective addition to the Square.

And what with giving Boris Johnson the chance to make a complete, well, cock of himself by not being able to say the word ‘cock’ on its unveiling, well that was just a free gift with commission really.

Lastly, a visit to see Michael Landy, ‘Saints Alive’, National Gallery, 23 May – 24 November 2013

Michael Landy has been at the National Gallery since 2009 as the eighth Rootstein Hopkins Associate Artist. Bringing his interests in assemblage, destruction and the story of things to bear here, Landy’s seven mechanical sculptures bring to life the deaths of several saints including Jerome, Thomas, Francis of Assissi and Catherine of Alexandria who are portrayed elsewhere in the gallery in paintings by artists including Botticelli and Carlo Crivelli.

These larger than life sculptures are animated by the pushing of pedals and pulling of levers and there’s something quite shocking about seeing Saint Jerome thump his fibreglass chest with a heavy rock in the hope of quietening his impure sexual thoughts, never mind Apollonia reliving her torture by yanking her teeth out with a pair of pliers.

There’s a great beauty to the sculptural, mechanical elements of these works and Landy’s preparatory collages, which decorate the walls of the first hall, are just exquisite. It’s well worth a visit.

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Jeremy Deller, Sacrilege, Burgess Park, London

A series of gratuitous photos of the irreverent joy that is jumping on Jeremy Deller’s Sacrilege. This inflatable Stonehenge, a co-commission between Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art and the Mayor of London, is touring the UK and it’s currently in Burgess Park, Peckham.

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I acknowledge the Gadigal and Bidjigal peoples of the Eora nation, the traditional owners of the unceded land on which I live and work and I pay my respects to their Elders, past, present and emerging.