Sacred made real - National gallery

Spanish Taliban

The counter-reformation needed some shock tactics as the chilly iconoclasm of the north crept south and when cornered in the Iberian peninsula art took on a form so extreme that, at times, you feel like averting your gaze. Like a wounded, cornered dog it barks back.

Shock tactics were needed to keep the flock in line so the horror of decapitation, crucifixion and torture is made real. Words were not enough in a semi-literate world, paintings were to flat, so painted sculpture was used to show wounds, blood and fear in three dimensional 17th century technicolour. Hollow cheeked, sorrowful and serious men, and the virgin Mary, were re-created to remind you of the consequences of sin. It worked in a way, and stemmed the tide of protestantism, allowing fanatics like the Jesuits, a sort of Spanish Taliban, to conquer the new world. Martyrdom is venerated and there's no room for doubt.

What of the works on show here?

You know you're in starnge territory aesthetically when you see The Miracle of Lactation in the first room, a painting where the statue of a saint has come alive and squirts milk from her breast a full six feet into the mouth of St Bernard. It's disturbing and debased. In the same room we have the sculpted, wooden, painted, decapitated head of St John th Baptist, with full anatomical detail on the exposed neck.

In room two the painted statues are superb. But this is where we see the fanaticism of saints such as St Francis Borgia and St Ignatius Loyola (founded the Jesuits). You can look them in the eye and let he who is without sin, blink first. Then there's the bitter and twisted Mother Jeronima by Velasquez.

Room three has the Zubaran monks. Not all of his images are of hooded monks, but these are dark and mysterious. In the next room is the true masterpiece, the almost classical Ecce Homo, with his slight twist but strange expression and bloodied and bruised back. The Dead Christ is as shocking as the show gets with his unwashed blood covered body lying prostate.

I was, in the end, relieved to get out of the gallery!

'The Places In Between' by Rory Stewart

You may have seen Rory Stewart on Newsnight and other programmes whenever Iraq or Afghanistan is discussed, and it was one such appearance that made me buy this book. This guy has walked unaided across Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal. This book is about the Afghanistan walk, where he followed in the footsteps of Moghul Emperor Babur.

As he walks, he unwraps the geography and history of Afghanistan, as well as Islam. Tribal, poor, fundamentalist and repeated invaded or controlled by foreign powers, we get to meet this nation at war with outsiders as well as itself. We have the Northern Alliance on one hand and the Pashtun (Taliban from this group) on the others but within these, the four main ethnic groups, there’s lots of other groups who swap allegiances. It’s complex and difficult to see how any form of government can work in a nation that really isn’t a nation.

Stewart takes us into villages, houses and mosques and he focuses on the people he meets, many illiterate, some curious, some not, some violent, others hospitable. But it’s his exposure of fervent Islam that is of most interest. Afghanis constantly quiz him about the cost of a wife in Britain, whether you can marry your first cousin (very common) and so on. This is not anthropological, it’s religious. Islam is the political and social frame for all discussion. He explains why the Koran is not seen as being capable of translation and describes Bush using his unclean hand to pull a Koran (gift) across a table, upsetting the entire Islamic world.

Culture is another theme. He discovers a rare archaeological site being looted, a rare miniaret and describes the various cultures that existed in this region. Many were more liberal and very different from the rule ridden, forbidding rule of Islam. There’s a fine section when he walks past the dynamited Bamiyan Buddas.

He has little contact with westerners, troops, UN personnel etc, and avoids this topic as the book is about the country and its indigenous people, not the temporary invaders.

A lovely sub-story is his relationship with a mastiff who accompanies him for the most of the journey. Afghans regard dogs as unclean and won’t touch them. It’s truly touching.

Afterthoughts on Anish

The Year of Anish was, as they say ‘interesting’, a word that can mean lots of things. First the noise. Anish, Yentob and the gallery owners, administrators have those annoyingly posh accents that make you want to turn the programme to mute. Anish himself, is incredibly inarticulate about his work. He’d say that was deliberate, I’m not so sure.

But then there's the positives. Kapoor understands that art is a ‘process or experience’. He’s Humean in his aesthetic. An aesthetic experience takes place in time with expectations, the experience and its aftermath. The Sky Mirror, at the Brighton Festival, was an ever-changing reflection of the real world, the sky, the Pavilion Gardens, the people who drift by, stop and look. and the landscape, even sheep of the Downs. Its limitation was its small size and limited access. These restrictions were removed at the C-Curve, and what a difference in the aesthetic experience. It was open, unrestricted, panoramic.

One major dimension of his work is light, as reflection and colour. His ‘mirrored’ pieces take you beyond the normal perception of light to its scientific beauty. To understand the effects you need to understand that light travels in straight lines, that it is observer-dependent and that colour is a complex absence. Yellow means that the other colours are missing from white light. He works in simple, often single or contrasted pairs of colours. Their purity is a paring down.

His fondness for ‘red’ gives us a bloody, corporeal experience. It’s too simplistic to say it’s dangerous. Red unbalances the viewer, puts them on edge. When do you normally SEE red – blood, meat, lips, vaginas, roses. It’s a phobic colour, like seeing a snake or spider. It induces intense interest and attention. However, his ‘yellow’ piece in the Royal Academy, had a similar, but different effect. Yellow is the colour of the sun, cheese and daisy hearts, an optimistic colour and being flooded by an expanse of yellow, is like drinking Red Bull, it’s invigorating.

Then there’s the ‘flips’. The sudden contrast in your experience, between the inside/outside, front, back, right/left, upside down, right way up. It takes away your normal perceptual reference points and depth cues.

Remember, he’s a sculptor , and the exploration of light and colour, is best dealt with in 3D. Colour has luminosity and intensity, and varies as the light source and observer moves. This can only be explored half-hearted in 2D painting. He’s a philosophical artist in that he understands that perceptually we recreate the world from our sensory input. Note that WE create the world. The artist creates the stimulus for this experience, but ultimately it‘s the viewers brain that constructs the experience in consciousness. I love the ‘Bean’ in Chicago, but dislike the fact that you can’t touch anything in England.

What I really like about Kapoor is that he doesn’t settle for art as it is. For him it’s a process, for us it’s a process. Shooting into a Corner is extraordinary, painting by gun, what an idea!

But let’s not be too hagiographic. Kapoor has the capacity to literally churn out rubbish. His concrete squirts in the Royal Academy, are second rate.

Anish Kapoor - Royal Academy

We commissioned Kapoor for this year's Brighton Festival, and it was a huge success, indeed the focal and talking point of the entire month. So I was looking forward to this retrospective.

Balls of steel

The RA courtyard has a huge tower of atomic, steel balls, but randomly piled to produce lots of unique reflections, not only of each other but of the buildings and viewers. As they're spheres, nothing remains of the expected perspective. All straight lines become curves. The top few blazed away in the winter sun. The only piece I've seen surpass this in the courtyard was Rodin's Gates to Hell.

Pigment piles

I like the colour rather than the forms. They seem far more intense than paint. Red, black and yellow. But this is like a predictable starter. You already know, with Kapoor, that piles of pigment are on the menu.

Mellow yellow

This huge square is painted in a uniform yellow colour but as it has a deep hollow the light gets progressively weaker and the centre darkens. What really works is getting up and close, so that your peripheral vision is flooded. It's like being in a yellow universe. In this position, as the eye has no depth cues, it's seen as a flat expanse of gradated yellows. It's like walking into colour.

Cannon of colour

A simple steel cannon is primed with pressured air, by a rather serious looking RA bod, then fired every twenty minutes. First time round, we simply saw a sorry slug drop like a slow dogshit from the end of the cannon - a misfire apparently. He reloaded and it was fine. You can see the cylindrical slug of wax move through the air then hit the back wall of the joining room. Our third shot hit the back wall high and hard. You can hear the roar of approved laughter throughout the gallery. Definitely cathartic. This was fun and the mess in the room was true chaos, an absolute cannon up the backside of the stuffy RA.

Mirror magic

Kapoor excels at mirror works and this room allows you to see yourself distorted in a thousand ways. It's fun, and surprising, to work out why you appear upside down, fatter, or in a repeated pattern across a huge concave surface. You forget that light travels only in straight lines.

Vaginal openings

The huge rust-coloured form, that filled the next room, has a vaginal opening at one end, through which one peers into the iron darkness. One then steps through some rather disappointing piles of hardened clay forms to another room with a similar red, crystalline opening and an intestinal tube coiled around behind.

Wax train

This is the centrepiece, a huge block of red wax on rails moving through three doorways across five rooms, being shaped by the doors. The building becomes the sculptor and the form is dictated by the door template and scrapings.

One great frustration is not being able to feel the stuff. You long to stick your fingers into the wax and rub the pigment. For £12, I'd have given everyone a small tub of the stuff to take home and do their own sculpture.

Turner Prize 2009

Usual weirdness in the Turner Prize rooms, but hey, that’s what these turns are all about. If they didn’t surprise, I’d be surprised.

Lucy Skaer seemed lightweight. The whale’s scull is yet another ‘watch through aperture’ experience. I get the idea that she's hiding to slow the perception of the object down, but don't see why this enhances the aesthetic of the object. I’m fresh from seeing Spymonkey perform Moby Dick (see previous review) so am getting mightily sick of seeing whales used as fodder for crap art. As for the chair and sculpture in the centre, language/chair print and book pages were trite, and made no aesthetic impression whatsoever.

YES – Richard Wright was a revelation. Painting, printing directly on to the walls, Wright “challenges the marketability of art”. His works are transitory and are usually destroyed with the surface upon which they are placed. I love this idea, that visual art becomes part of the fabric and architecture of a space. It’s art of the present, not the future. This is an artist with ideas and not just well executed work. The gold wall was a huge, beautiful image against a white background. He’s bound to win (the cards in the hall suggests he should).

Enrico David’s surreal images and sculptures are not only just plain ugly, his verbal exposition on the video was the worst type of reflective tosh. It's all very forced. If he wins, this will be my last Turner Prize visit.

Roger Hioris has a mess on the floor, a liquefied jet engine, apparently. This was interesting, but I liked his bedsit full of copper sulphate, although after seeing his engine covered in copper sulphate at the Hayward some time ago, you could say he’s playing this one out a bit.

Turner and the Masters: Tate Britain

Boat along to the Tate Britain to see the two Turner exhibitions. First Turner himself, and a comparative exhibition, pitting him against other painters. He fancied himself as an old master forgetting that one has be old, and judged, before you get the title. So, as he was so competitive, let’s have some sport.

Turner v Velde England 1 Holland 1

Turner v Rembrandt England 0 Holland 4

Turner v Wilkie England 1 Scotland 1

Turner v Raphael England 0 Italy 5

Turner v Watteau England 1 France 2

Turner v Bonington England 1 England 1

There’s some real disasters here.

Art of darkness? Tate Modern

This is impressive from the outside, as you face a huge rectangle of blackness. It is genuinely frightening, and I really did bump directly into the black, back wall. But, here’s the thing, it was a transitory and brief encounter. The place is packed with people taking photographs, looking around with their mobile light on, and generally being loud and obnoxious. So much for art bringing out the best in people, in this case it infantilised. Ian Jack’s piece on Saturday was spot on. The turbine hall has become a fairground.

It could have been so different. the piece could have been deeper and more frightening, and curated so that you're free to enjoy a personal and not a social aesthetic experience.

Spymonkey dick about

Spymonkey’s Moby Dick is like an extended Goon Show. The whole gamut of funny voices, sexual innuendo and awful puns/jokes is rolled out like a third-rate 'Carry On Whaling' script. There’s that old English favourite; the Spanish waiter voice (for Ishmael read Manuel) the rather forced clumsy oaf (Stephan Kreiss), the Barbara Windsor dolly bird (Petra Massey) and the posh bloke (Toby Park). All of this dicking around the stage like am/dram idiots is just wearing. The writing is that of a second-rate extended sketch and when one of the cast finally shout ‘There she blows!” I couldn’t wait for Ahab to sink without trace. Some of the audience seemed to be having a whale of a time, but let’s be honest, middle-class theatre goers are easily pleased these days. By the end I’d had less of a bellyache from laughing than a bellyful of this nonsense. What was the point of it all?

Brighton & Hove Council have given this lot money and they've received 100% of the Arts Council money they applied for. What's going on here?

I have a half-baked idea on this. The reason this company are so popular down here in the south east is that they're quintessentially middle-England in avoiding politics, controversy, seriousness and, to be frank art. It's like resurrecting Brian Rix and farce - all that physical theatre, puns, confusions - signifying nothing. This is why middle-England just loves the Goons, Cleese and Noises Off. They're inoffensive and unthreatening. You don't have to think.

As You Like It - Globe

Spur of the moment decision but well worth it. Touchstone was hilarious with Eddie Izzard inspired facials and asides. Jaques was just as good. His seven ages of man soliloquy was really moving and got spontaneous applause. Just read this......

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

A bit of a rom-com, as are most of his comedies, and the gender switch is very, very odd to modern eyes.

It was great to just sit back in the sun and let the language do its work. The Globe's often criticised for being too 'heritage' in outlook, but I find the performances thrilling. In fact I'd like them to be even more authentic with drinking and audience heckles. The stewards are like puritan police. I even saw them ask some girls to put their notebooks away!

The groundlings are not what they used to be - as two collapsed because of the heat and had to be carried out!

Love's Labour Lost - Globe

Second play in two days but this is a difficult play, full of tortuous wordplays and difficult to follow, which is why, I presume, it is rarely performed.

It does something quite brave - takes the piss out of schooling and teachers. They're portrayed as boors, full of themselves, producing knowledge filled students through rote learning. Nothing changes then. It's probably the best argument against the teaching of Latin in schools I've ever seen.

The Spaniard is the play's saviour, with his accent and sense of naive fun.