Born and raised in south-east London, Iwona Blazwick has been the director of Whitechapel Gallery since 2001 and led its expansion in 2009. She gave Damien Hirst his first solo show at a public art gallery and has helped the careers of many other contemporary artists. She has been a judge on a number of award panels, including the Turner prize, and was on the advisory board for the Trafalgar Square fourth plinth commissions. Blazwick, who is also an art critic and a lecturer, was appointed OBE in 2008 for services to art. This year’s Art Night festival, a collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery and Phillips in which 11 artists transform buildings across London, takes place on 1 July.
1 | Exhibition
Disobedient Bodies: JW Anderson Curates the Hepworth Wakefield
This is an amazing show. JW Anderson puts modernist sculpture in dialogue with couture garments, and it’s really surprising and playful. You see folds and contours, voids and textures that you never noticed before; he’s made the clothes look like sculptures. There were performances throughout the show – I watched two young men who were birthed from sweaters, and then did this incredible performance of pulling their sleeves around each other. They looked like two Bacchus figures. The book that accompanied the show is a work of art, a very unusual kind of catalogue, with amazing photographs by Jamie Hawkesworth. It’s something I can imagine would appeal to anyone, whether they loved sculpture or fashion.
2 | Venue
Every year I go to the Californian desert at Easter time and it’s one of the most beautiful places on the planet. One of the great venues for music that you’ve never heard of is an extraordinary place called Pappy and Harriet’s. It’s surrounded by spiky cactuses in the glinting desert hills of Joshua Tree, where in the summer it can get as hot as 40C. By day it’s a bikers’ barbecue, which is absolutely fantastic, but by night it’s a rock venue with the most astonishing people performing there, from Bob Dylan to Alt-J to Paul McCartney. It’s near a place called Pioneertown, which was built for a TV western in the 1940s and is all made of wood.
3 | Opera
Written On Skin, Royal Opera House
This is a really great work of art. The stage set was an illuminated manuscript with a chorus of minimalist designer angels in the margin, looking down on a medieval scene where there’s three characters: a woman, an artist and their protector. The woman falls in love with the artist, who documents the powerful life of [her husband] the protector, and throughout the performance she keeps asserting that she has a name – Agnès. So it’s a feminist narrative, and the artist also shows truth to power; he’s showing the protector what he fails to see, that his paradise comes at the cost of huge violence. The issues it was dealing with were really contemporary, and it was ravishingly beautiful to look at and listen to.
4 | Museum
I’ve just come back from Lisbon, where I went to see this museum of art, architecture and technology. It’s been converted from a former power station, but a lot of the kit is still there – they’ve maintained its industrial past, but they’ve also got this contemporary architecture, with an extension built by Amanda Levete. At the opening they did a big show about the history of Portuguese performance art, and there were thousands of Lisbonites, who had nothing to do with the art world, vigorously discussing the cool conceptualism of an artist like Liam Gillick. It was an amazing example of a museum that was very experimental in what it showed, but at the same time very popular.
5 | TV
My partner Richard and I are totally addicted to Fargo and we’re now on season three. What I love about it is the way it’s shot – it really contrasts with British television, which is absolutely wedded to gritty realism. It really is refreshing to see something where every camera angle is like a little work of art – the lighting, the composition, the sense of colour – which can make a supermarket in Minneapolis look exotic. It’s reminiscent of great American photographers like Stephen Shore or Garry Winogrand, in the way it’s framed and the surreal quality of it. I like how it keeps true to the spirit of the original film – the slowness of pace, the weird motivation of the characters – but is never predictable.
6 | Book
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
This is the story of a Sicilian prince in the throes of the Garibaldi revolution. The book is really about how corrupt the aristocratic social structures are, and yet cling on to power. The rituals and the aesthetic associated with it are omnipresent, but also very seductive. It’s not just about politics – it’s about culture, sensuality, age; the prince also meditates on the stars and eternity. It’s just a perfect novel, because it’s so evocative. You can taste the sherbets that they have at the grand ball, but you can also feel the tremendous poverty that is right under the noses of the aristocracy, which they fail to address because it’s the status quo. A masterpiece.
7 | Radio
In Our Time (R4)
This radio series with Melvyn Bragg takes you on a whistle-stop tour of one big idea, significant figure, scientific phenomenon or historical event: topics have ranged from anarchism to women and Enlightenment science to the history of enzymes. Bragg’s guests are academics who have to synthesise their phenomenal expertise into a live 40-minute broadcast, and because they are teachers they are great communicators. They translate their specialist knowledge into short pithy answers to Bragg’s questions. He stands in for us – interested but mostly ignorant of the deeper reaches of scholarship. It sets my Thursday morning alight with insights and ideas.
