A Bigger Splash

This weekend is the last chance to see 'A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance' at Tate Modern in London. The exhibition 'looks at the dynamic relationship between painting and performance since the 1950s'. I must admit in places the connections seem rather tenuous, but who cares when there is this much iconic radical/feminist/queer film, photography and painting in one space.

Viennese Actionism, Derek Jarman (his film 'Miss Gaby, I'm ready for my close up'), Cindi Sherman, Ana Mendiata, Jack Smith, Hélio Oiticica - all present and correct, along with the following:



Sanja Ivekovic, Make-Up Make-Down (1978) - the film features the make up ritual to a soundtrack that includes 'Fly Robin Fly' by Silver Convention.

 

Yayoi Kusama, from 'Flower Orgy', 1968

 

Zsuzsanna Ujj, With a Throne, 1986



Gunter Brus walking through Vienna in 1965 painted white
with a black stripe down his face and front - for which he was arrested



Luigi Ontani as San Sebastiano, 1976

 

Valie Export, Identity Transfer 3, 1968



Modelling dresses with fabric printed 
by Pinot Gallizio's Situationist 'industrial painting' process, 1958

 The second part of the show features contemporary installations - inevitably they lack the subversive charge of the earlier work, products of an age in which art's shock value has seemingly been exhausted, and in which the creative gestures that erupted outside of the academy have now been safely domesticated in the 21st century gallery. But I enjoyed the dream space room of  Karen Kilmnik's Swan Lake (1992).

 A Bigger Splash closes on 1st April 2013.