From Olympics-coordinated Chinese exhibitions to the opening of a Francis Bacon retrospective at Tate Britain, 2008 looks set to be a spectacular year for the visual arts. Our critics select the best of a good lot
China Design Now, at the V & A, includes this cover for Vision magazine by Chen Man
ART Rachel Campbell-Johnston
Liverpool
The capital will be in upheaval this coming year. It will be decamping to Liverpool which, after much fuss and fanfare, becomes the European Capital of Culture. A city that languished for decades in the doldrums has been given a facelift. No wonder the Beatles are scuttling back for a look.
Certainly the art world is pulling out a few stops. From the Walker Gallery’s celebration of Art in the Age of Steam through a vast new spider’s web sculpture to be spun over the docks to the public art project that will scatter dozens of idiosyncratic replicas of Liverpool’s iconic (if ridiculous) Superlam-banana around the streets, the city will be catering for all tastes from classical to modern. The biggest cultural coup is at the Tate. This will be offering us for the first time in Britain a show of the works of the glittering Austrian Gustav Klimt.
The East
A new Chinese year is beginning in Britain. As Beijing becomes the back-drop for the summer Olympics, contemporary Chinese art will continue to surge – like its recent auction-house prices – across our cultural consciousness. It’s more than just a fad. It’s a flood. China Now, the largest-ever festival of Chinese culture in the UK, launches in February, the GLA has its China in London festival all planned, the V&A’s huge spring exhibition looks at China Design Now and Charles Saatchi will be opening his swanky new Chelsea premises with an exhibition of works by Chinese contemporaries.
Will it be the sub-continent next? The Serpentine is about to stage India Calling and Saatchi, it has been noted, has started making a number of acquisitions of works by artists from the Near East.
Olympics
All eyes will be on the Olympics this summer. But even as the grand beano closes in Beijing, Britain will be picking up the baton. Our bash at the world’s biggest sporting event may feel a long way off. But actually, the cultural Olympiad officially begins this autumn. There are lots of big decisions to be made.
Competition will be cutthroat keen as artists jostle for a place in the global spotlight. A host of big public commissions will be coming up for grabs. So prepare for plenty of argument and lots of ideas. One plan currently being whispered about, for instance, is for a vast contemporary art show to take place in venues strung out right across the capital.
Francis Bacon
Who can resist a bit of Bacon? There is no great secret to this postwar artist’s success. He was the most extraordinary, powerful and compelling of painters. His images seem to short-circuit our normal appreciative processes. They cut straight to the nervous system and hijack the soul. Perhaps best of all, as far as we are concerned, he is British. (His family were actually of Anglo-Irish descent).
For once we have a great home-grown talent to celebrate. Expect Baconmania to take hold and rampage in his old Soho stomping grounds as, to herald his forthcoming centenary, Tate Britain stages a spectacular retrospective show.
Art market
Speculators will certainly be looking about warily this year. Last autumn the market had a light brush with breakdown when a much-touted sale of Impressionist paintings flopped. It turned out to be a classic case of overreaction to economic wobbles. Before the art sales were over, the boom was most definitely back.
But how long can it last? Can it survive a credit crisis? A reverse in trends has been predicted for quite a long while now. Many think this readjustment is long overdue. But it could prove a rough ride. People at the salerooms could be hanging on to their seats.
ARCHITECTURE Tom Dyckhoff
Beijing
We’re not supposed to like icon projects any more: too glitzy, too, well, Dubai. Oh, but we do, we do, we do! And there’s nothing like that glorious combination of a command economy, a newly wakening super-power eager to blow raspberries at the US and the television sets of the entire world being focused on it for creating them.
Herzog & de Meuron’s “bird’s nest” stadium, Norman Foster’s humungous airport, Rem Koolhaas’s state TV megalith, a watersports venue made from giant bubbles . . . rest assured, there’ll be plenty to gawp at on telly next summer between the 100m dash and the synchronised swimming. Watch it and weep, Baron Coe.
Colchester, Leicester, John Lewis: the year of unlikely design champions
In snoozesome old Blighty these days you have to sniff out glam contemporary architecture in unlikely spots. Rafael Viñoly may well be building his “walkie-talkie” skyscraper in London, but it’s in Colchester that he will make his UK debut in the new year with the Firstsite art gallery, shaped like a giant banana.
Second bite of the Uraguayan-American superstarchitect goes to Leicester, where Viñoly’s Performing Arts Centre opens in the spring. Just around the corner, Foreign Office Architects open a crystalline glass department store for that tireless defender of the avant garde, John Lewis. Next you’ll be telling me that Zaha’s rebranding Clinton Cards. She is? (Only kidding.)
The parasols of Seville
Slowly but surely we’re witnessing the emergence of a new architecture, one in which often surreal, fluid, digital dreams conjured up on computer screens become reality. The midwives are a new generation of rising architects such as Jurgen Mayer H, from Germany, whose peculiar creations so far defy conventional pigeon-holing.
This is the project that will put him on the map. On the surface it’s the same old same old – an icon project, a farmers’ market, bars, restaurants, shops, blah, blah. It’s the incredible form – six giant morphing mushrooms in wood, predicted to be the world’s largest wooden building – that astonishes, confirming Spain as Europe’s most daring architectural nation.
Walking into a halfway decent British airport
Of course it will all go wrong. But just for those few seconds before pride turns to hubris and good old British bodge and cynicism sours the lot, to be able to walk into an airport like those you get abroad – soaring ceilings, genuine daylight, tiled floors shined to infinity – will be manna from heaven. Heathrow’s Terminal 5, by Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners, isn’t the world’s biggest, the world’s most beautiful, or a revolution in airport architecture – it’s just a big shed. But at least it’s not a cattleshed. Opens March 27.
Regeneration: The movie!
I chuckled when I first heard that the Channel 4 commissioner who came up with the idea of regenerating an entire declined industrial town in front of the TV cameras through the magical powers of architecture thought it would air within 18 months. Had she never been to a planning meeting? Had she never met a Nimby?
Five years later, word is that the series, set in Castleford, West Yorkshire, may well finally go out in the spring. Though they did say that in 2004. And 2005. And, indeed, 2006. Watch, if only to witness world-class design stars such as Martha Schwartz come face to face with the last word in intransigence: a Yorkshire planner.
PHOTOGRAPHY Joanna Pitman
Famous faces
The big glitzy headline photography show next year will be Vanity Fair: Photographs 1913-2008 at the National Portrait Gallery, running February 14 to May 26. In line with the magazine’s focus, this will be a glossy history of photographic celebrity portraiture, some 150 images ranging from works by Edward Steichen, Man Ray, Baron de Meyer and Cecil Beaton to classic contemporary work by Annie Leibovitz, Helmut Newton and Mario Testino.
Given our celebrity obsessions, this is guaranteed to be a crowd-puller.
Avant garde
Alexander Rodchenko: Revolution in Photography will be launched with less fanfare but it will be no less interesting an exhibition, at the Hayward Gallery, February 7 to April 27. Rodchenko (1891-1956) was a distinguished avant-garde photographer, painter and graphic designer during the heady period of the 1920s, when artists’ faith in the revolution had not yet seriously eroded.
This is to be the first major exhibition in the UK of his photographs, featuring 120 prints and photomontages as well as poster and magazine designs, focusing on two decades of his work from the 1920s when he applied the principles of Constructivism to photography, employing vertiginous angles and unusual points of view to make his subjects look like abstract compositions.
New spaces
As well as major photographic exhibitions, several significant new photography exhibition spaces will be developed next year: The new £15.5 million building for the Photographers’ Gallery, designed by O’Donnell + Tuomey, in Ramillies Street in Soho, will be due for opening in 2010.
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh has just received a £10 million investment from the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Scottish government towards their £17 million project to refurbish and transform the gallery, doubling the amount of gallery space and developing a new focus on photography.
The former Scottish National Photography Centre has received funding for redevelopment in the Royal High School Building on Carlton Hill. The new Herzog and de Meuron building for Tate Modern, due for 2012, has received £50 million from the Government. It will give the museum more space for displaying photography. Tate Modern is also planning for the first time to hire a specialist photography curator.
Projects and prizes
Another sign of things to come is the flourishing of photography MAs in the UK. There were something like 2,700 applicants for 25 places on the London College of Communication MA course for next year, and there are now 11 well-established photography MAs and BAs around the country, covering photojournalism, photographic studies, social documentary and fashion photography.
The number of prizes is also growing: in addition to the National Portrait Gallery’s Photographic Portrait Prize, which has picked up sponsorship, starting next year, from the law firm Taylor Wessing, there is the Deutsche Börse Photographic Prize at the Photographers’ Gallery, the Jerwood Photography Awards, a new photographic award for six emerging British photographers funded by the National Media Museum in Bradford and administered by the Wilson Centre for Photography, and a new prize being planned by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, aimed at young British and Japanese photographers.
Television
After the success of The Genius of Photography, on BBC Four, Channel 4 will broadcast a three-part series, Picture This, starting on Sunday. It will be styled along the lines of The Apprentice, and will follow six amateur photographers competing on a series of photography assignments, judged by Brett Rogers, director of the Photographers’ Gallery, the photographer Martin Parr and gallery owner Alex Proud.
The candidates are filmed learning new skills, but two are dropped at the end of each of the first two programmes, leaving two to battle it out for the prize of a solo show at Baltic in Gateshead and a publication of the winner’s work, to be promoted at the Photographers’ Gallery.
Around the same time, Channel 4 will broadcast a series of three-minute films on photographers.
This year looks as if it will be all about the growth and democratisation of photography.
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