Pet Shop Boys: Inner Sanctum

Royal Opera House, London

It’s not often that the Royal Opera House throws open its doors to a pop band. In the past Björk, Antony and the Johnsons andRufus Wainwright have appeared in the hallowed space usually reserved for Parsifaland Carmen — though those artists have made no secret of their classical pretensions.

The hi-NRG hits of the Pet Shop Boys require no operatic embellishment, although Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, disco’s Gilbert and George, are notable for bringing high-mindedness to a hedonistic medium. They were doing art-pop long before Lady Gaga was hatched, and are probably the only mainstream pop act that could get away with a song called “Love Is a Bourgeois Construct”.

Their latest show, titled Inner Sanctum, arrives four months after the release of their 13th album Super , which harks back to their late-1980s heyday and is as close to a perfect Pet Shop Boys album as you could wish for.

If the idea of a 61-year-old man in a sharp suit singing “Pop Kids” against a 1990s house groove seems faintly ridiculous, the reality is nothing less than thrilling. The Pet Shop Boys are no spring chickens, but 35 years in the business allows them to bring a level of style and craftsmanship to their performances that younger artists would kill for.

Understatement simply doesn’t feature in this Es Devlin-designed show that deals in primary colours and gives us criss-crossing lasers that bounce off the balconies, musicians in brushed chrome helmets and dancers gambolling in inflatable fat suits.

Elsewhere, high-definition images of billowing clouds, unfurling flowers and moving geometric shapes flank Tennant and Lowe as they move through a punchy setlist that weaves old classics such as “It’s a Sin”, “West End Girls” and “Left to My Own Devices” with newer numbers such as “The Dictator Decides”.

Just as startling is the joy emanating from Tennant himself (Lowe, as ever, barely twitches). While there’s a hint of Kraftwerk in the Pet Shop Boys’ robo-aesthetic — at the start they step out of spherical pods, each wearing sculptural headpieces — Tennant remains the twinkling face of electropop, removing the mask to reveal a delighted grin that doesn’t leave his face for the rest of the show.

Fiona Sturges in Financial Times

London’s Royal Opera House is a temple of high culture. The Pet Shop Boysare a class act: arty intellectuals celebrating more than 30 years’ experience of applying recherché ideas to the pop sphere. Set designer Es Devlin, meanwhile, straddles the worlds of theatre and pop with near-ubiquity. She stages actual operas; her other job this summer is the Rio Olympics opening ceremony.

The maths suggest that PSB x ROH x EsD would equal a run of shows vertiginously high in concept, tending towards the more pretentious end of the Pet Shop Boys’ oeuvre – the subsidiary that soundtracks ballets, for instance, or silent films with the Dresdner Sinfoniker, or publishes weighty tomes of their visual output, and not the core business that pumps out catchy disco. This particular tour production goes by the name Inner Sanctum, after the first track on their most recent album, one of those PSB titles, such as Elysium or Pandemonium, that chucks Latinate polysyllables around with nonchalance.

Anyway, that maths – a gross miscalculation, it turns out. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe’s first night at the opera is awesomely unpretentious, while providing plenty of spectacle to chew over. They roll out the hits while strafing the place with rave lasers, bringing on a bodypopper in an opalescent suit (for New York City Boy) and dancers in inflatable fat suits for the grand finale.

“Tonight I am afraid there is no ballet or opera,” announces Tennant, “just pop music.”

Taking nothing away from Tennant and Lowe, who perform with typical arch understatement, the visuals lift the show

Inevitably, some emphasis is placed on the Pet Shop Boys’ latest album, Super, out in the spring; four songs from a total of 22. This is no hardship, as Super is a poppy, clubby rush of a record, reconnecting the Boys with their youthful directness. The standout recent number is The Pop Kids, which restates the Pet Shop Boys’ allegiance to pop you can dance to, couching it in a nostalgic love story set in the 90s.

“We were young but we imagined we were so sophisticated,” sings Tennant, “Telling everyone we knew that rock was overrated.” Big cheers greet this line; Tennant beams and slaps his hip.

The Pet Shop Boys are generous with the classics, too. If anything, their bittersweet first hit, West End Girls, is dispatched a little too early. The evergreen anthem that receives all the lighting, effects and clap-alongs is It’s a Sin, a rumination on how everything worth doing is wrong in the eyes of organised religion, not least loving someone with similar genitals to your own.

Rarities turn up too, like In the Night, originally the B-side to the single Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money), then the soundtrack to The Clothes Show, now a thumping track in which stagehands with headlamps roll on some additional band members.

Taking nothing away from Tennant and Lowe, who perform with typical arch understatement, the visuals really do lift the show. At the start, two big white orbs rotate to reveal the duo, one wearing a metal headdress, the other an iron mask crossed with a lampshade.

Headgear turns out to be a big feature. The Pet Shop Boys’ three auxiliary band members (two percussionists, a keyboard player) appear initially in helmets. For Inside a Dream, some silver-clad dancers come on stage, also helmeted, looking a little like a Venusian luge team. Even better is the fact that the luge team don’t actually dance, they merely shadow Neil Tennant in a slightly sinister fashion all the way through Winner. At the climax, around two dozen dancers in inflatable round suits (and kerchief masks) arrive for the superb Left to My Own Devices and a euphoric Go West; they fleetingly recall Missy Elliott in The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly), returning in the encore to act out the words of Always on My Mind, by which point we are putty in the Pet Shop Boys’ hands.

If we’re looking for a wider geometrical theme, Devlin offers up an array of circles, interspersed with the odd triangle, cut up by straight laser lines. In the act dubbed “Sun”, one giant ring of light suggests an eclipse; it turns into a disco ball for Love Is a Bourgeois Construct.

Whether this is intentional or not, it is hard to say, but Devlin seems to be playing with depth of field here, in a way that an arena show (a tour has just been announced for 2017) cannot.

Seemingly flat circles, you soon realise, are rings; a backdrop of bauble-y wallpaper gains heft when you realise how far back the stage goes and that the balloons are real. You might extrapolate that Inner Sanctum’s clever staging suggests that the Pet Shop Boys continue to bring colourful three-dimensionality to the often 2D world of pop. But that would be quite pretentious.

Kitty Empire in The Observer

Ragnar Kjartansson

Barbican Gallery, London

Born into a family of acting professionals and having grown up backstage at the Reykjavik City Theatre, Kjartansson’s work combines his experience of stage traditions with experiments in repetition and endurance. Clichés and motifs of Western culture, romantic melancholy and even his own conception, provide the personal and often playful subject matter of the artist’s emotionally charged work. Having successfully represented Iceland at the 2009 Venice Biennale and participated in 2013 with standout works, Kjartansson is now at the cutting edge of contemporary performance art. The exhibition centres around the immersive and moving multi-channel video installation The Visitors (2012) and Take Me Here by the Dishwasher: Memorial for a Marriage (2011) a live performance full of romance and humour featuring ten troubadours singing for up to eight hours a day, every day for the duration.

Barbican website

For a country with a population of only 330,000 people, Iceland has drawn a lot of attention recently. It has always had a strong contemporary musical tradition: Björk and, more recently, Sigur Rós, who played at this year’s Glastonbury Festival, are both Icelandic. This summer it played magnificent football, forcing the exit of Austria in a goal in the last minute of overtime: perhaps the most thrilling match in Euro 2016, followed by its win over England.

It is not short of artists, either. Olafur Eliasson is perhaps the most loved of all the Tate Turbine Hall artists as well as having the most photographed work at Versailles, France, this summer. The Barbican in London has now given its main gallery space to performance and video artist Ragnar Kjartansson for his first and long- overdue mid-career retrospective exhibition in England.

Like many others I had first seen Kjartansson’s work in Venice, in the Biennale of 2009 when he was the youngest artist to represent Iceland. Since then I have hung out with Kjartansson and his band of troubadours in a park in Vienna, visited him in his studio in Reykjavik and saw him perform with his musicians in Turin. I also watched a presentation of his video work The Visitors in 2015 in Cardiff, where he was shortlisted for the Artes Mundi Prize (won by Theaster Gates). Although it was not the winner, the selection committee still chose to purchase a work by Kjartansson rather then Gates, so perhaps that was really the winning event.

Kjartansson was born in Reykjavik in 1976 to a family of theatrical parents. His mother is a well-known actress and his father is a theatre producer; his parents split up when he was young. His grandfather, after whom he is named, was a painter and ceramicist and best friends with Fluxus artist Dieter Roth when he moved to Iceland. Kjartansson enjoys both painting and fishing with his father. When I interviewed Kjartansson in Iceland in 2015 he told me that he was brought up partly by the “lodger in the basement” who I later found out was a famous opera singer who taught Bjork to sing. I am sure now that some of what he told me was peppered with artistic liberty, as much of Ragnar’s mythology is a mixture of fact and fiction.

Death and the Children (2002), an early black and white video work, shows Kjartansson as a kind of benign pied piper. Asked to mind some small children by his then girlfriend, he leads them on a tour of a cemetery while fielding questions of mortality wielding a paper scythe, rebutting the children’s jibes about his “fake scythe”, and informing them that it is the “scythe of DEATH.” The children may be older now but they doubtless will not forget their few moments of starring in an early Kjartansson performance.

Ragnar’s first durational performance work, The Great Unrest (2005), was done upon his completion of the Iceland Academy of the Arts and was part of the Reykjavik Arts Festival. Kjartansson found a disused and decaying building in southern Iceland and transformed it both internally and externally, inhabiting it and performing for six hours every day; painting, making music and occupying the space. Although the festival ran for more than a month, it was in such a remote location that only 150 people actually saw the work, but like all great stories the reputation of the performance outstripped the event.

Although Kjartansson comes from a theatrical family his most overt artistic influence is Marina Abramovic with her focus on durational performance art. The difference with Kjartansson, though, may be that, unlike Abramovic, he continually collaborates with a group of musicians and writers, producing works that whilst often melancholic are often humorous – although in quite a dark way.

In 2009, Kjartansson set up an artist’s studio in an elegant palazzo on the Grand Canal and for the entire run of the Biennale continually painted fellow Icelandic artist Pall Haukur Bjornsson in his speedos. While the beer bottles mounted the fug of smoke and the loucheness of a summer’s day in Venice infected the atmosphere and the paintings.

Kjartansson’s work often contains music. He has been in various bands since his student days. In his studio on the harbour, a former net mending factory, there is a complete drum kit alongside a piano, and guitars hung on the wall. In the past he has said “I can not breathe without music” and so it is not surprising that Iceland’s rich musical scene has permeated his works.

He has already collaborated with well-known Icelandic musicians Kjartan Sveinsson and David Thor jonsson, both of whom have produced scores for his works and also appear as performers in his large video work The Visitors. Filmed in 2012 in Rokeby House, a beautiful if somewhat decaying estate in upstate New York, the band practiced for a week and then the performance was shot in a single take one afternoon lasting just over an hour. There is a pathos in the group of musicians isolated in various rooms, engaged with each other only through their head phones. Kjartansson lies in a bath with his guitar precariously near the water, his modesty preserved by bubbles. The film – 64 minutes long – played in a small gallery near Cardiff throughout the Artes Mundi exhibition, attracted a surprising number of returning visitors drawn by the extraordinary beauty of both the video and the simple score with lyrics by his first wife, performance artist Asdís Sif Gunnarsdottir. Kjartansson is lost in his own melancholic thoughts, singing the simple almost mantra like words “once again I fall into my feminine ways” before he finally emerges from the soapy water.

In 2014 Kjartansson and his troupe were installed in Vienna in the park of the Belvedere Museum. For a month his team, including his father, inhabited a space performing scenes from a great Icelandic tome. They constructed sets with the help of some local design students, rehearsed and sang, storyboarding and creating an extraordinary collection of objects. They filmed the entire process on video. One day I saw the set for the next day looking strangely pedestrian; when I returned it had been transformed with small painterly nuances of light. I was impressed and asked Kjartansson “When and who did this?” and he showed me his paint-stained hands: “I came in early.”

One of the strangest works in this show is Me and My Mother, a video that Kjartansson made with his actress mother Guorun Asmundsdottir. He has reshot it every five years over a period of 15 years, the most recent in 2015. Standing in the same place, the living room of their home, his mother spits at him. She does not hold back; and the shock of this piece, set alongside the interview I had with him, shows both his unflinching embrace of any subject matter for his art, and his acceptance of his parentage.His parents were also the subject of Take Me By the Dishwasher, a piece created for the New Museum in New York and here reprised with new musicians recruited for their ability to make music whilst drinking large quantities of beer.

When I visited him in Reykjavik in 2015 he told me he was having a difficult time with his ex-wife. There was a tremulousness about him, although the robustness was also visible as he posed in his painting apron for me. He showed me a portrait he had done recently for Vogue of disgraced fashionista John Galliano, who had visited him shortly before. It captures the spirit of the designer, who is likely more used to sitting in elegant salons then the shabby chicness of an artist’s studio in this strange land.

When I flew into Reykyavik a few weeks ago on the longest day of the year, I was coincidentally flying in on the day of Kjartansson’s wedding to Ingibjorg Sigurjonsdottir. The plane was 10 hours late and we landed at midnight, just as the sun was setting. Visiting artists in the city the next day who had been at the wedding all related how happy the event had been – starting at 5pm and ending at 5am in multiple locations. I asked for pictures, to be told nobody took any as “we were in the minute”. Aged just 40, Kjartansson has come of age and with his wit and talent and appetite for investigation there is time for more greatness and experimentation. In the Barbican a large pink neon Scandanavian Pain, an earlier work of 2006-2012, hangs above the entrance, indicating you have come to the right place. Perhaps now though there is a chance to replace the sadness with greatness. Iceland is the place to be at the moment and there is a large piece of it in the Barbican. Kjartansson’s desire to replace “sorrow over happiness” as expressed in God, his semi-cheesy video, may soon change, you never know.

Karen Wright in The Independent

Lukas Duwenhögger: You Might Become a Park

Raven Row Gallery, London

Duwenhögger’s figurative paintings conjure his subjects into situations and worlds that are inventively adorned, allusive, anachronistic and compelling. As much as a painter, Duwenhögger is a designer and a fabulist. Most of his subjects are treated with love; when depicted in imaginary portraits they are poised and self-sufficient, while together, often homosocially, they seem engaged in private conversation and shared understandings. Events, allegories and narratives are dispersed over an even, democratic, picture plane. Duwenhögger’s figuration is a deliberate confrontation with high cultural mores, with an awareness of the loaded history of that form but an avoidance of heavy-handed references.

From Gallery website

The works of this German artist, who has lived in Istanbul since 2000, have a distinctive Ottoman sensibility, both sunlit and sinister: a superficial queer theatre of languorous fabulousness, shot through anxiety. The settings are fluid, moving from an operatic nineteenth century into a gilded 1930s and on. It always seems to be the afternoon, waiting to see what the evening will bring. Individually, the works suggest dreams; collectively, they hint at an unspoken history of persecution and betrayal.

There is a special delight in seeing Duwenhögger in the Georgian, domestic elegance of Raven Row. As you climb its four floors, as the scale of the galleries contracts, the paintings take on a more vivid intimacy. An installation on the top floor, ‘Probleema’, hangs five small works in a wooden shed: four men around a table in the midst of some kind of argument look across at four individual paintings of men in the street seen from behind. As in a lot of Duwenhögger’s works, the tensions – sexual, political, cultural, temporal – are strung across the room like wires. One of the most overt works is the model ‘The Celestial Teapot’, a ludicrous ‘proposal for a memorial site for the persecuted homosexuals of National Socialism in Berlin’. At the top of a tower, and surmounted by a conch shell, the titular vessel has human arms: one hand on hip, one limply waving. However you are memorialised, Duwenhögger reminds us (you might become a park, you might become a teapot), elegance and frivolity are absurd and can come at a terrible price.

Timeout London

Francis Alÿs: Ciudad Juárez

David Zwirner London

IN REACTION to the destruction of a city, Picasso painted “Guernica”, depicting the bombing of the Spanish town in 1937. Though the painting was widely celebrated, Jean-Paul Sartre later expressed scepticism that it had ever “won over a single heart to the Spanish cause”. For Sartre the painting sidestepped political reality by turning “cruelty into abstract figures”. This same question, of art’s usefulness in the face of massive human suffering, provides the animating force behind an exhibition by the Belgian-born artist Francis Alÿs, at the David Zwirner Gallery in London, about life in the once prosperous U.S.-Mexico border town of Ciudad Juárez.

It is a well-known, though still shocking, statistic that over 60,000 people were killed in Mexico’s drug wars between 2006-2012. The residents of Ciudad Juárez have suffered a terrible share of this violence over the years—for a time the city had the highest homicide rate in the world. Along with the gang violence, a worrying proportion of murders in the city have become known as feminicidio, the gruesome murders of women. As many as 1,500 women are thought to have been killed in this way in Ciudad Juárez since 1993.

It might seem unlikely that an artist like Francis Alÿs would be able to engage in any meaningful way with life in Ciudad Juárez. He is known for a poetic and absurdist mentality, sending a peacock as his representative to the Venice Biennial of 2001, for example, or arranging for a troop of Household Cavalry to march through the centre of London in 2004. Yet the sensitive and understated works on display here pack a powerful punch. Mr Alÿs has lived in Mexico City since 1986, and frequently collaborates with artists from his adopted home, so he is no uninformed outsider when if comes to life in Mexico.

His films are perhaps best described as surreal documentaries. One short film, entitled “Children’s Game #15: Espejos, Ciudad Juárez, México” (2013) shows a group of children from Ciudad Juárez playing a game where they run through dilapidated buildings and “shoot” each other with the twinkling reflections from fragments of mirror, falling down as though dead in the dust. These kinds of combat games could be played by children anywhere, but in Ciudad Juárez the light-hearted act has troubling echoes, and the ruined surroundings hint at the severe economic depression that has beset the city, with thousands now dead or displaced.

Further showing this decline are the series of old tourist postcards collected by Mr Alÿs and displayed here with all details blacked out, save certain minute elements: a light source or an enigmatic figure. The postcards attest to the fact that Ciudad Juárez, conveniently located on the American border, could once count on a steady tourist industry, as people visited from nearby El Paso or further afield to sample the nightlife that once made it famous (some claim Juárez to be the birthplace of the margarita). However, during the violence of the previous decade Ciudad Juárez became a byword for Mexican drug violence, predictably doing little to encourage tourism. Now, even though the violence has abated, it is proving hard to shake.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is a striking film of Mr Alÿs slowly kicking a flaming football through the dark night of downtown Ciudad Juárez, attracting stares from locals and scaring away stray dogs as police sirens wail in the distance. The vision is haunting, and the details picked up by the camera as it tracks his progress make reference to the city’s many problems: the sex trade, the drug trade, the ambiguous role played by the police. Perhaps the beautiful but oblique film is guilty, as Sartre put it, of reducing cruelty to the abstract. But then so do statistics. This film certainly leaves a more lasting and complex impression than the sad numbers that are usually used to measure the decline of Ciudad Juárez.

From The Economist

Dreigroschenoper

Berliner Ensemble, Berlin

[…] Wilson hat das alles in petto. Er bedient schamlos, was Brecht angeblich verabscheute: das Kulinarische. Alles Milieuhafte ist ihm grundsätzlich banal. Das Publikum genießt die perfekt gestylte Show, in der alle Figuren ins Absurde überzeichnet sind. Der Szenenmagier hat sie sämtlich auf grotesken Stil gedrillt, und sie funktionieren wie bizarr aufgezogene Automaten. Die Make-up- und Frisurabteilung gibt ihr Äußerstes. Und Jacques Reynaud montiert Sohos Bettler und Huren in höchst absonderliche Kostüme. […]
Aber das BE hat hier mit Wilson und seinem dressierten Ensemble ein Meisterwerk szenischen Designs. Riesenerfolg. Das Publikum hing jubelnd hing in den Sitzen, als wäre es mit Uhu festgeklebt.
Peter Hans Göpfert, Berliner Morgenpost, 29.09.2007

Benjamin Clementine

Somerset House

Singer, composer, poet and artist, Benjamin Clementine is an all-too-rare brilliance. Dressed in his trademark black trench coat sans shirt on his back or shoes on his feet, the Mercury Prize-winner’s brooding dramatic force is instantly spellbinding within the imposing beauty of London’s Somerset House.

The 27-year-old Brit, discovered as a homeless busker in Paris, is supported at this sold-out headline gig by an orchestra of strings and cellos that adds gravity to his fearsome vocals and masterful piano-playing. Opener “Winston Churchill’s Boy” silences all murmurings from the packed courtyard, the husky refrain of “home, home, home” on “Cornerstone” shakes with the emotion of heartbreak and “St-Clementine-on-Tea-and-Croissants”, a dazzlingly unhinged weirdo of a song, transforms its singer into something possessed.

Clementine is captivating. “Then I Heard a Bachelor’s Cry”, about the inherent pain in love, channels a barely, yet crucially, anchored rage before “London”, a highlight from debut album At Least For Now, prompts the closest to a sing-a-long heard all night. His virtuoso shifting from quavering falsetto to full-bodied baritone is so magnificent on the frenzied “Adios” that it elicits audible gasps while his command of the gorgeous Steinway grand that dominates the stage is enthralling.

Clementine speaks minimally throughout his 90-minute performance but when he does address the audience, it is to ask them their views on the price of art. It is to bemoan Brexit in mumbles, to reveal his melancholic reason for not voting (“It wouldn’t have made a difference”) and to reply to a fan’s declaration of love with “I hate you” amid awkward laughs from a crowd of music lovers who have perhaps never felt quite so comparatively uncool.

The set reaches its all-consuming climax with “Nemesis”, angry strings and crashing drums whirling up a breathtaking storm of passion and catharsis. Mining the depths of darkness in the stately vein of late Romantic-era composers while lyrically confessing his loneliness in a nod to Sylvia Plath, Clementine takes on an otherworldly majesty, leaving the audience hypnotised by an utterly transfixing talent.

Jess Denham in The Independent