Skip to main content

'Western society has little space for ecstasy': back to Berlin's 90s club scene

Feted for her macabre and freaky stage shows, Gisèle Vienne has created a time-bending piece of ‘physical philosophy’ inspired by her clubbing days

When Gisèle Vienne was growing up in Grenoble, France, her artist mother used to say, “paintings are cheaper than wallpaper”. So that’s exactly what they had, all over their walls. Vienne’s mum is Dorli Vienne-Pollak (a former student of Oskar Kokoschka), who made “pretty crazy, transgressive works” inspired by everything from 80s punks and strip clubs to fantasy battle scenes. It must have been quite an eyeful for a child.

Today, Vienne’s Paris home is completely white. It’s a small rebellion against her upbringing, which, balanced with the influence of her “overeducated French intellectual” father, makes complete sense of the artist Vienne has become. Her works in puppetry, theatre and dance (including Jerk, Kindertotenlieder, The Ventriloquists Convention) make headlines for their macabre obsessions: sex, violence, fantasy, serial killers and freaky dolls. Bubbling under all that is a vibrant intellect. Vienne’s conversation down the phone from France bounces fizzily from early 20th-century sociology to transcendental meditation.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2os4CEZ
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

Elena Ferrante: ‘Solaris is not Tarkovsky’s best film, but it made the greatest impression on me’

Solaris is astonishing because the book that inspired it doesn’t seem to contain Tarkovsky’s film A film that I watch at least once a year is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris . I’ve loved all of Tarkovsky’s works, even the most difficult. Some I’ve seen in the cinema, others on television. I saw Andrei Rublev at the cinema, and on the big screen it was astonishing, its black-and-white extraordinary: I’ll probably never see it again in a cinema, but I hope that young people will have the opportunity. I also saw Solaris on the big screen – not Tarkovsky’s best film, but the one that made the greatest impression on me. I remember that it was advertised as the Soviet answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey – a completely misleading slogan. To see in it a cinematic contest between the US and the USSR was as silly as it was misleading. Kubrick’s marvellous film, with its imaginative force, would certainly win. But it doesn’t have even a hint of the desperation, of the sense of loss, that dominates Sol...
Post a Comment
Read more