Some youtube wizard, the imperceptibly named dabble778, is responsible for the above. Bringing Bob Dylan's 2006 album Modern Times into glorious dialogue with Charlie Chaplin's 1936 movie of the same name, finally initiated me into the joys of Charlie Chaplin, after just about everyone else on this planet.
I've always venerated Dylan in a totally unhealthy way, but with Charlie Chaplin I suppose I assumed his raggedy limbs and musical hall clothes had nothing to do with me. All it took was a simple gesture combining the not-quite-arbitrarily-connected two, to unlock a world of pleasures. Well, four minutes of it.
In a link so tenuous it should have a new title, the Modern Times: Responding to Chaos exhibition just opened at Kettle's Yard Gallery, in Cambridge, bringing into an extraordinary conversation drawings and films by an astonishing variety of different modernist artists.
To name some names: Pollock, Malevich, Mondrian, Grosz, Klee, Pollock, de Kooning, Giacometti, Bourgeois, Beuys, Serra, Judd, Twombly, Boccioni, El Lissitsky.
Especial treats included a fourteen-minute-long video by Ferdinand Léger called Ballet Mécanique (which you can watch here), and a small drawing by Kurt Schwitters, entitled 'Koi'. This I had to bend forward to inspect properly, and I found it rewarding in a way no drawing ever has been. The lightness of the marks made, the careful deployment of colour and shade, and the way it lingered on the brink of signification (and its opposite), meant it revealed itself incredibly slowly. Several days later, its presence in the exhibition remains far more problematic than the bolder works of abstract expressionism which surrounded it, busily proclaiming their new language for art.
A friend remarked it looked like a drawing-board offcut, and intriguingly it did seem to bear the imprint of industry once more important but no longer otherwise accounted for, quietly commanding all your attention.
I've always venerated Dylan in a totally unhealthy way, but with Charlie Chaplin I suppose I assumed his raggedy limbs and musical hall clothes had nothing to do with me. All it took was a simple gesture combining the not-quite-arbitrarily-connected two, to unlock a world of pleasures. Well, four minutes of it.
In a link so tenuous it should have a new title, the Modern Times: Responding to Chaos exhibition just opened at Kettle's Yard Gallery, in Cambridge, bringing into an extraordinary conversation drawings and films by an astonishing variety of different modernist artists.
To name some names: Pollock, Malevich, Mondrian, Grosz, Klee, Pollock, de Kooning, Giacometti, Bourgeois, Beuys, Serra, Judd, Twombly, Boccioni, El Lissitsky.
Especial treats included a fourteen-minute-long video by Ferdinand Léger called Ballet Mécanique (which you can watch here), and a small drawing by Kurt Schwitters, entitled 'Koi'. This I had to bend forward to inspect properly, and I found it rewarding in a way no drawing ever has been. The lightness of the marks made, the careful deployment of colour and shade, and the way it lingered on the brink of signification (and its opposite), meant it revealed itself incredibly slowly. Several days later, its presence in the exhibition remains far more problematic than the bolder works of abstract expressionism which surrounded it, busily proclaiming their new language for art.
A friend remarked it looked like a drawing-board offcut, and intriguingly it did seem to bear the imprint of industry once more important but no longer otherwise accounted for, quietly commanding all your attention.
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