Art / Exhibitions

The assistant curator told me to pick up an orange. So I did. Because this is conceptual art. The orange was part of a sculpture intended to make us think about art as something to be consumed — if not it will decay, be good for nothing. Art depends on active participation, in this case the consumption of an orange, the conversion of matter into energy.

How is that art? It is not an art object as we knew it — the idea is now the thing. This is art as a question: firstly questioning the very nature of art and secondly art as a valid medium for questioning its context.

Muhammad Ali is one of the greatest boxers of all time. He won the world heavyweight championship four times — a record he still holds. This exhibition takes you through his life, centring on his fights, but it also celebrates his resistance to the war in Vietnam and racism in society.

After a short film a maze of corridors leads us from Ali’s Louisiana childhood in the 1940s through to his comeback in the 70s. He grew up as Cassius Clay and changed his name in 1964 to X before being given the name Muhammad Ali by Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad.

The core of the East London Group of artists were East End workers — “a warehouseman, a house decorator, three deck hands waiting for a ship, and a haddock smoker”. They met in classes at the Bethnal Green Men’s Institute and exhibited their paintings from the late 1920s to the late 1930s.

They were best known for their landscapes of the East End, painting the streets and buildings of Bethnal Green, Bow and Stratford, the canals and bridges around the Thames and some of the big workplaces such as the Bryant and May match factory.

Thirteen miles off the coast of Peru lie the Chincha Islands, three small islands inhabited by large numbers of seabirds. These birds produce what became an incredibly valuable and sought after natural resource among competing imperialist powers during the mid-19th century. Large deposits of bird excrement, known as guano, built up over the islands. This guano is rich in nitrogen, phosphate and potassium and therefore makes a great fertiliser.

Hieronymus Bosch was known as “the devil maker”. In honour of the 500th anniversary of his death the exhibition Hieronymus Bosch: Visions of Genius is taking place at his birthplace in the Netherlands.

His paintings are inhabited by all kinds of wretched creatures and monsters. People sometimes assume the artist was on some kind of medieval acid because of his overwhelming web of illusions and hallucinations. Yet his works are filled with a deeper meaning. Bosch presents a piercing vision of society for everyone to see.

This exhibition of work by artists in former Yugoslavia has been curated by Lina Džuverović.

It brings together over 30 leading artists and groups from the “golden years” of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia — the period between the early 1960s and the mid-1980s.

There is a striking collage by Avgust Černigoj from 1972 of anti Vietnam War protesters and a cartoonish, ghoulish face wearing a Stars and Stripes bandana with the name “Nixon”.

Lee Miller, the iconic woman who modelled for some of Man Ray’s most evocative images, was far more than an object of beauty. This photographic exhibition is testament to that.

It tells the story of Miller’s life chronologically, with photographs of her modelling in front of the camera and images taken by her behind the camera.

At first the idea of an exhibition of art relating to the British Empire sounds deeply off-putting. Is it a collection of images celebrating imperial conquest? While it does contain such paintings, Artist and Empire is doing something more complex and more interesting.

Its opening room concentrates on the justification for empire. It contains many maps, while the second has studies of plants, people and landscapes.

The year is 2666 and art galleries are empty. The government has decided what they contained was subversive (and the cash from the sale of the artworks would help the economy). A group of people meet to view grainy photos of the lost works so they can survive at least in the memories of people who can share them with others.

The British Art Show is a five yearly overview of contemporary art and a chance to survey in one place the work of leading, younger generation contemporary artists. Significantly the exhibition tours provincial cities rather than basing itself in the capital.

There are 42 artists represented here and in a welcome departure from past practice curators Anna Colin and Lydia Yee extended invitations to non-British artists who work in the UK and the exhibition is undoubtedly the stronger for this.