dad (2): nutter

My dad has taken to sending me cuttings from the newspaper: invariably from the Times or the Telegraph, and usually obituaries of artists, reviews of art and performances he thinks I might like, and stuff about the mafia, Italian politics, crime writers etc.

A few weeks ago he sent me a lengthy rubbishing of Yoko Ono's exhibition at the Baltic. Today I received a piece cut from the Telegraph, entitled: 'My shocking encounter with a large naked lady - in a cage', by a journalist called Rupert Christiansen. It begins: "I have only to hear, or even read, the name of Tadeusz Kantor to feel a shudder down my spine ...", and continues in similar vein with a description of sorts of a Kantor event in Edinburgh some years ago that evidently appalled him. Purportedly the article is a preview of a retrospective exhibition of Kantor's work at the University of East Anglia's Sainsbury Centre, although its core purpose seems to be to tell us that Mr Christiansen "won't be attending, for fear of reviving my Kantorian trauma".

In the end, inevitably the text tells one a fair amount about its author and his particular perspectives on contemporary art, and very little about Kantor.

Elsewhere, in a section called 'Rupert recommends', Rupert recommends a DVD called 'The Best of the Bolshoi Ballet'. Now you're talking, Rupert.

At the top of the cutting, my dad has written in biro: 'Have you met this nutter?!'

I wonder quite which nutter he's referring to.












For details of the Sainsbury Centre's Kantor exhibition, ' An Impossible Journey', see here

For the Cricoteka ('Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor') website documenting Kantor's work, see here

For Rupert Christiansen's 'article' in the Daily Telegraph (25 May 2009), see here

Photo: Kantor's 'Meerespanorama Happening', 1967