I love Marla Beethoven Bach, a lot of contemporary composers yeah so yeah I'm just so uncool. Would you choose a symphony over an opera or is it a matter? Well yes we went last week to the new production of Rheingal the Robert Jones one and it was astounding just absolute. He really rammed it kicking and screaming into the 21st century. It was just an astonishing production and absolutely remarkable singing but for two and three quarter hours it could hold the audience. The Matthew Passion is one of my greatest pieces of music that I always look forward to this time of year because they usually do a recording of it. You ought to write something about
In March this year, we went to Finsbury Park in London to the home of Phyllida Barlow to interview her for the A brush with… podcast. Tragically, Phyllida died just a few days later. So this conversation is a tribute to one of the most significant British artists of recent years. Ardently committed to sculpture and convinced of its special power, she was coruscatingly erudite and perceptive, yet also irreverent and suspicious of orthodoxies. This was evident in her combinations of simple materials such as wood, plaster and scrim, cement, paint and fabric in extraordinary sculptures and installations. She managed to achieve at once awkwardness and grace, humour and pathos, the grand and the intimate. Among much else, Phyllida discusses the morality imposed on sculpture in her art school days, the underacknowledged “dirty side of making” in Marcel Duchamp’s work, her admiration for Louise Nevelson and Eduardo Chillida, the writing of Fyodor Dostoevsky and the films of Robert Bresson. Plus she answers our usual questions, including a moving response to the ultimate question, “What is art for?”
Phyllida Barlow, Chillida Leku, Hernani, near San Sebastian, Spain, until 22 October; The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Toronto, 8 September-4 February 2024.
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