Tessa Farmer at the Saatchi Gallery, London

Saw Tessa Farmer's miniscule sculptures at the Saatchi Gallery this weekend. Reminded me of miniature medieval memento moris with the mix of decay and vitality. Could have stared at them for hours.

Sohei Nishino, 'The Diorama Map Series', Michael Hoppen Gallery

 The re-imagined cityscape of an urban flâneur. 

Sohei Nishino’s immense photographic dioramas reify an arresting fusion of past and present, expanse and detail, indexicality and fiction. Like a modern-day flâneur, the Japanese artist trod his way through major global cities, taking thousands of photographs spread across hundreds of rolls of black and white film. He then returned to his studio where he developed the film, dissected whole images and pieced selected fragments together and finally reshot the collage to form his urban topography of memory. Each diorama integrates prestigious landmarks into the wider cityscape. The concrete repositories of history and institutional memory are displayed alongside images selected by the artist for personal or aesthetic reasons, entrenching his personal representation of memory in the reconstructed physical landscape of the city. The  ‘strange tissue of space and time’ the philosopher Walter Benjamin associated with the aura of an artwork seems particularly appropriate in a description of a work that is both strikingly (post) modern in its fragmentary deconstruction and reconstitution process, yet displays elegantly archaic elements reminiscent of pictorialism; at a glance the diorama series resembles the hand-drawn maps of times gone by.  Monumentality and finesse combine in an auratic re-experiencing of the city.  

Norwegian Wood, Anh Hung Tran

Stunned by Anh Hung Tran's adaptation of Murakami's novel. Not sure the transition from text to screen worked; Murakami's interior monologues were translated into beautiful shots of nature and expansive terrains, rendering the characters' development so silent as to be sinister. Beautifully subtle and delicately sculpted imagery meant that almost each and every frame could stand alone in a photographic exhibition, for example. The intensity of imagery, silence and music (by Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood) made this 1960s Japanese love story one of the most harrowing and beautiful cinematic experiences for a while.

Click here to listen to a interesting podcast about Norwegian Wood

Modern British Sculpture, Royal Academy

Tony Cragg's 'Stack'

Mixed review of the Modern British Sculpture exhibition at the Royal Academy. Initally drawn in by the juxtaposition of abstract and figuration, monumental and heroic in the first room. A striking introduction to the range the medium encompasses. The age and detail of the pieces in the second room were engaging. Particularly liked the Egyptian quartzite figure of a baboon dating from around 1350 BC, on loan from the British Museum for its combination of carving finesse and block materiality.

Quartzite figure of a baboon

Interesting exploration of the glorification of monarchy in the ornate statue of Queen Victoria, a tangible memorialisation of national pride, and beautiful display of Moore and Hepworth's romanticism. Of particular interest was the painted red steel piece by Anthony Caro for what it represented in the development of sculpture, with its lack of pedestal and abstract industrial quality, as explored in William Tucker's essay. Fantastic narrative of development up until this point. Disappointed from here onwards however. Left with the frustrating and alienating feeling that I was either missing something, I didn't "get it", with the notable exception of Tony Cragg's 'Stack', or that I was being force fed some sort of abrasive social commentary, as in Hirst's 'Let's Eat Outdoors Today' or Gustav Metzger's wall of page 3 girls. An overall success nonetheless.

Hirst's 'Let's Eat Outdoors Today'

Gabriel Orozco’s 'Empty Shoe Box', Tate Modern.

Orozco's 'Empty Shoe Box'

Is the status of ‘artwork’ contained within the piece or endowed by the surroundings? Is the avant-garde reduction of art nearing the void? These are just two questions inspired by a recent viewing of Empty Shoe Box. Orozco’s piece seems in a similar vein to Marcel Duchamp’s presentation of a glass vial containing Parisian air to an American art buyer in 1919. Is Orozco challenging our perception of the exhibition space or audaciously rehashing an old, provocative joke based on the artistic void and modern consumption, which incites mild confusion and veiled indignation in the average viewer? Whiteread’s sculptures are explicitly concerned with the space between and within objects but they satisfy the viewer’s desire to see something unfamiliar, not merely an unusual context for the most banal of objects. In his focus on containers, including his lift installation, modified Citröen DS and of course Empty Shoe Box, is Orozco alluding to the notion of the artist as a receptacle for creativity? Is he playing with space, as his does in much of his spatially-centred work including the installation of lint hanging delicately and dustily in its own exhibition room? Or is he commenting on the effect institutionalising any object within an exhibition space has on the object, endowing it with a certain distance that gives it value? Whatever his message, it is certainly an interesting one.

Orozco's 'La DS'