Cathy's Art Diary

Fascinating exhibition at the Design Museum looking at the work of Stanley Kubrick and the designers who worked with him. I must admit I went along to with low expectations and I’m not a huge fan of Kubrick’s best known films but it was so well arranged and explained with a wealth of archive material and artefacts and I’d forgotten what a range of films he made. I was grabbed from the first display which looked at how he researched his films in amazing depth taking a film on the life of Napoleon he researched but never made. As a librarian you have to love his card filing system! The show then went through his career film by film using each one to illustrate some aspect of how his design process worked. The films followed in chronological order but for once I didn’t mind this. I hadn’t realised he’d directed Spartacus after the previous director was sacked and added the great battle scene to it. I loved a photo of numbered extras on a battlefield. The section on Clockw...

Stylish exhibition at Somerset House exploring the impact of the films of Stanley Kubrick on contemporary artists. This is where I have to admit I’d not seen many of the films so some of the allusions were lost on me, but there was a good booklet with a commentary. The show created an amazing, slightly threatening atmosphere which was a good reflection of the films in itself. Stand out works included Mat Collishaw’s monkey face in a space helmet. The monkey face was a hologram which overlaid a human skull. The initial view was quite unnerving of this real looking monkey in a helmet which then turned into a skull as you walked round it. Also Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s room of 114 radio sets each playing a different voice singing a Dies Irae used by Kubrick in two of his films. The voices are not singing the same bit at the same time so different harmonies appear and there are also period of silence and broken reception. I also liked Seamus Farrell’s shelf of glass...