The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 52

52 ARTS 2 SUNDAY 19 SEPTEMBER 1993 THE OBSERVER Art William Fcaver Jeff Koons's Jim THE END, at first sight, is a virtual crash landing. American Art of the 20th Century goes out with a soundtrack roar and shots of mountain tops careering by in a darkened room. Bill Viola's 'Room for St John of the Cross' is a room within this room: a cell the size of a coal bunker, equipped with table, jug and miniature TV. Here, maybe, art will survive. That concludes the Royal Academy's big exhibition (to 12 December).

It has been a bumpy ride over the master-peaks: Mts Calder, Pollock, Rothko, Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, Warhol and Judd, then a rapid descent in Part Two (at the Saatchi Gallery) over the badlands of Schnabel and Koons. St JohnViola's minimalist cell, set against a juddering back-projection of the sublime, turns out to be no disaster, after all, but a last-minute recovery. Norman Rosenthal and Christos Joachimides, the curators piloting this blockbuster, file the same flight plan each time they do a twentieth-century national survey for the RA: peak-to-peak, no detours. BeatnJ. B.

Turner Train', 1 986. The Royal Academy's big exhibition on American Modernism provides a bumpy ride via the heights of Calder, Pollock and Warhol and rapid descent over the badlands oSchnabel andKoons. Modern America's and troughs bunch of 5's. Stuart Davis simply states: 'Odol: It Purifies'. Eventually, this peremptory look degenerates into Claes Oldenburg's line of trade, the overblown goodies of gimme-culture.

Gimme prime cuts in bloodied plaster, a gloss-painted slice of fur coat, a deflated typewriter. People, too, are reduced to signs. Marsden Hartley makes telling patterns out of disembodied German dress uniforms. Garbo lurks in a Cornell box, Marilyn smiles mechanically for Warhol. Hopper's people, trapped in situations, stare into their coffee.

Jasper Johns uses, people as templates. The post-war American ascendency, first identified with Abstract Expressionism then promoted along a Holly wood-Duchamp axis under the Pop trademark, was largely a matter of presentation. Scale increased, and sales patter. Paintings had to be as big as picture windows. hectic spread, and 'Palisade', with its slash of blue Hudson River, demonstrate Abstract Expressionism in spate.

The other Abstract Expressionists look institutionalised. Franz Kline's big black strokes and Clyfford Still's sheer drops are inert. If they were Tarmac they would be due for resurfacing. These aspirations to the sublime fail now on material grounds. The paint has deadened.

Protective sheets of Plex-iglas mock their obsolescence. Happily, though, there are some choice Rothkos and Newmans, enshrined in a rotunda. Part One ends with Carl Andre squares underfoot and Donald Judd wall-mounted copper boxes. Minimalism makes such perfect sense: the reliability of symmetry; the art of the burglar-proof. A Dan Flavin fluorescent-tube ladder, laid across a floor, leads towards the RA shop and the bus to Part Two.

Cinema Philip French CRITICS' CHOICE Disgusted of Macon At the Saatchi Gallery the exhibition resumes, post 1970, with an inaccessible corridor by Bruce Nauman, illuminated green for go. With the confidence of Laurel and Hardy delivering a piano, Rosenthal and Joachimides blithely hump their story line from bad to worse, to Haring, Basquiat, Koons, to James Lee Byars's encounter group of couches and a banking-hall Stella, forgetting perhaps that they have left out George Bellowes, Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, Milton Avery, Richard Diebenkorn, Morris Louis, Ed Kienholz, and many more recent. There are moments, though, in this pushy show: the shiver of lamps receding into the night in Hopper's 'Automat'; a better group of Georgia O'Keeffes than at the Hayward recently; and the Rothko-Newman room is fine. So is Rauschenberg's 'Canyon', with its dusty stuffed eagle dangling a pillow representing, perhaps, the infant Ganymede or a bombing run. More symbolic still, in Viola's rumbling darkness we watch the mountains being continuously riven with camera shake.

Lieder, Temirkanov conducts. The London Philharmonic season begins on Thursday, with Strauss's Also sprach Zara-thustrd. Also on Thursday, the London Symphony season, at the Barbican (071-638 8891), begins with Michael Tilson Thomson conducting Britten's Sea Interludes, Ravel's Sheher-azade (Maria Ewing soloist), and Nielsen 5. Tomorrow in the Purcell Room (071-928 8800) there's a recital of recent chamber music by Berthold Goldschmidt, the 90-year-old composer I wrote about last week, whose career was cut short by the Nazis, then by British indifference, but is now flourishing again. On Tuesday at Sadler's Wells (071-278 8916), Glyndebourne Touring Opera presents Don Giovanni the Peter Hall production; Simon Keenlyside sings the title role.

On Wednesday, Opera North revives its Love of Three Oranges, in Leeds. On Thursday, the Welsh National Opera is reviving Eugene Onegin in Cardiff. DANCE Jann Parry Vivarta festival of contemporary South Asian dance opens at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Tuesday (7.45pm), 071-928 8800, with commissioned works from radical veteran choreographer Kumudini Lakhia, performed by her Kadamb company from Ahmedabad. Roger Sinha and Tim Ward Jones challenge preconceptions about 'Indian' dance at The Place on Wednesday and Thursday (8pm) 071 387 0031. Changing Planes, Phoenix Arts Centre, Leicester, 0533 554 854.

Mallika Sarabhai sets the shapes and rhythms of Indian dance to music by Japanese composer Toshi Tsuchitori. Jiving Lindy Hoppers join the Stan Tracey Octet at the QEH on Friday and Saturday (7.45pm), 071-928 8800, for a celebration of whole-heartedly Western jazz dance. Futurism got their 'Italian Art in the 20th century' cracking; Expressionism hit Germany ditto. Though delayed by provincialism, America, too, was suddenly struck by Modernism, they argue. The American moment came when Duchamp exhibited in the Armory Show in 1913.

With Duchamp in place (a dozen assorted replica Ready-mades, among them a remake of the long-lost urinal, flat on its back), Rosenthal and Joachimides play the century Duchamp's way. Retrospectively, practically everything is somehow related to him. Man Ray is Man Friday to Duchamp the New World Crusoe. Eager to assimilate, Ray photographs the untrod dust on Duchamp's 'Large Glass' and Duchamp dolled up as Rose Selavy. Neat tie-ins keep the story moving.

Man Ray wraps a sewing machine and calls it 'L'Enigme d'Isidore Ducasse'. behest of the holy child. Subsequently, she suffocates the child before the cathedral altar and is punished (with the bishop's blessing) by being raped to death by 208 members of the militia. As the ritual begins, the actress is told that this is no longer a play she is to be genuinely ravished by her fellow-performers. The dead child is subsequently divested of his treasures and his body carved up for relics.

The Baby of Macon is an oppressive, claustrophobic experience, unrelieved by humane feeling or humour, unless you find funny the bishop's banal line, 'Who will rid me of this turbulent Rather than considering human gullibility, the historical behaviour of the Church and other dealers in icons, we worry about the condition of Greenaway's psyche. At the end he attempts to indict us, to implicate us all in his project by showing that the people we've seen in the movie are actors, that they've been observed by another audience, themselves actors, and they in turn, so on ad infinitum. I left the cinema chuckling at an old New Yorker cartoon by George Booth the film brought to mind. A preacher is fleeing for his life from an angry congregation pouring out of a small-town church. On the notice-board beside the porch is the title of his sermon: 'Are We All Brian Gibson's Tina: What's Love Got To Do With It (Odeon West End, 18) traces the career of Annie Mae Bullock from a broken family in the rural black community of Nut Bush, Tennessee, where at the age of eight she's thrown out of the local Baptist choir for shaking her stuff too provocatively, to her present position as Tina Turner, the world's sexiest rock star.

The 54-year-old Tina herself peaks You want white? Try Agnes Martin, or Robert Ryman (subject to availability). Informal? The sterile scribble of Cy Twombly comes highly recommended. You want black? Pinstripe Stella should suit you. Young Stella, that is. Like young Rauschenberg and young Johns, young Stella was quick to establish a look.

Rosenthal and Joachimides seek to re-establish these looks: initial excitement, sudden turnaround in taste. It rather suits them if the artist dies prematurely. Eva Hesse, for example, had no time to become less interesting; unlike Robert Morris who hasn't been up to much since the early Seventies. Jackson Pollock's death was timely. In the space of a mere five paintings, from 'Guardians of the Secret', 1943, where Gyp the dog scowls under the table, to the black and silvery vertical collation of 'Number 2', 1950, and the soused black and red of 'Num their own folkways, eclectic religion and language.

Will a way of life and a distinctive culture die with their departure? She hardly needs to ask. My heart started to sink before the picture began when I read that the director had decided to adopt the non-linear style of the West African village storyteller-historians known as grtots, one of the people from whom Alex Haley claimed to have learnt about Kunte Kinta My griot expectations were realised. There is a wonderful subject here. Julie Dash is a tal ented film-maker; her movie (photographed by Arthur Jaffa) is full of haunted and haunting images. The narrative, how ever, is infuriatingly, wilfully obscure, the overall effect sopo rific rather than hypnotic.

Arthur Dove, another native learning to be a Modern, paints and collages a sewing machine on a sheet of aluminium. 'Fifty years later, Frank Stella drops the sewing machine but retains the sewing patterns, fabricating giant whoopsies in honeycomb aluminium. Dove's 'Goin' Fishin', 1925, a collage involving bits of blue jeans, anticipates the faded patches of Robert Rauschen-berg's 'First Time Painting', 1961. Man Ray's bunch of coat hangers, dangling like fishing tackle, are linked with the Calder mobiles, which help relate Joseph Cornell's baited boxes to Arshile effusions. Whereupon de Kooning butts in and consolidates Gorky.

Abruptness is typically American. Signs say it all. The words Ex-Lax, emblazoned on a Hopper drug store, bring cold comfort to a deserted street. Charles Demuth apostrophises a takes over for the triumphant final version of the title song, but before that she is admirably impersonated by Angela Bas- sett. The always excellent Laurence (formerly Larry) Fish-burne is variously seductive, despicable and heart-rendingly pathetic as Ike Turner, the singer-composer-bandleader who discovered Annie Mae in a St Louis club in 1958, gave her a new name and took over her life: Tina is a standard story, familiar from endless Hollywood biopics about female showbiz stars whose macho partners cannot accept the superior success of their consorts and turn to drink, drugs and violence.

At times Tina is like a concert movie interrupted by horrendous intervals of wife-beating. The passing of time is signalled by fashion changes in Tina's clothes, Ike's hairstyle (from short back and sides via Beatles' pageboy and wild-Afro to short back and sides again) and the development of rock 'n' roll. A major high spot and a pivotal point in the couple's troubled relationship comes when Phil Spector intrudes to produce 'River Deep, Mountain High'. The power of the song embodies the drama. The Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia is a product of the school of Pedro Almodovar (Grunge Hill, it's probably called) and his flashy, black comedy Accion Mutante (MGM Haymarket, 18) turns on the antics of a gang of deformed terrorists taking a terrible revenge on the healthy, handsome and fit.

By the time the characters have been introduced, the director has run out of inspiration. Thereafter the screen is filled with people being killed and mutilated limbs flying through the air as contributions WAILABLI NATIONAL ToMOffOW Wedat730pm 2A5pM 7.30pm and cortdnuing 071-928 2252 071-497 9977 34 HRS( 7 DAY CC HOTLINE BOOKING FEE) IMIIiBl ber IP, 1951, he fulfils their curatorial requirements. The centrepiece is the mural he painted for Peggy Guggenheim's front hall. A jitterbug-ging stampede of black stalks, and tabs of pink, yellow and blue picked out in white: it isn't his greatest, but there is plenty of anecdote attached. The Pollock myth is all-important, particularly the notion of feral sublimity.

It may help to know that Duchamp was present to advise cutting eight inches off the left-hand side of the painting in order to fit it on to the wall. 'No he said. Trust Duchamp to edit a Pollock. Typical of Pollock to get the measurements wrong, and while Duchamp was pronouncing to go and pee in the fireplace. De Kooning has lived on, decades past his heyday.

Even then, his work was hit and miss: 'Woman bad, 'Woman VI' good. 'Composition', 1955, a THEATRE Michael Coveney On Tuesday, Simon Callow directs and stars in The Destiny of Me at the Leicester Haymarket (0533-539797), Larry Kramer's raw, funny, almost unbearable autobiographical play about living and dying in Aids-age America. The hit musical Les Miserables opens at the splendidly refurbished Edinburgh Playhouse (031-557 2590) on Wednesday, booking until 8 Jan. Julia Foster and Helen Sheals lead the touring Bristol Old Vic company in Jim Cartwright's The Rise and Fall of Little Voice at the Marlowe, Canterbury (0227-767246), this week; next week, Croydon; then moving to Oxford, Darlington, Richmond, Crawley and Bradford. In London, the original Mari Hoff in Little Voice, Alison Steadman, opens Wednesday in more subdued vein at the Comedy (071-867 1045) in Marvin's Room, Scott McPherson's decent, adroitly written play about facing death, first seen at Hampstead, with Phyllis Logan in the flashier sister role.

The Gate, Notting Hill (071-229 0706), re-opens tomorrow in its expanded auditorium with Valle-Inclan's Bohemian Lights. The new regime at the Young Vic (071-928 6363) revives Julia Bardsley's stunning 1991 Leicester Haymarket production of Therese Raquin, Anastasia Hille (the latest Lady Macbeth at the National) in the lead. Simon Donald's wildly funny hit play at last year's Edinburgh Festival, The Life of Stuff, opens Thursday at the Donmar Warehouse (071-867 1150). At the National (071-928 2252), David Hare's play about the Labour Party, The Absence of War, with John Thaw, starts previewing in the Olivier on Thursday (the David Hare trilogy of Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges and the new play opens officially on 2 Oct); in the Ly ttelton, Tom Stop-pard's spellbinding Arcadia plays Monday to Thursday, with two matinees, and'John Osborne's coruscating Inadmissible Evidence is on Friday and Saturday; in the Cottesloe, there are performances on Monday, Friday and Saturday of Stephen Sondheim's highly recommended Sweeney Todd and four performances, Tuesday to Thursday, of Pirandello's slightly disappointing The Mountain Giants. ART William Feaver Lucian Freud (Whitechapel to 21 Nov): 60 recent paintings, some small, some enormous, involving people and dog treated with marvellous candour.

The Waking Dream: Photography's First Century (City Art Centre, Edinburgh to 2 Oct). Plunged in conservators' gloom, but the images are astonishing, Daguerre to Rodchenko. Claes Oldenburg: Bottle of Notes in Central Gardens, Mid-dlesborough. An 8-tonne, 35ft ARTISTS usually produce their worst work, not when attempting something new, but when at their most self-consciously characteristic. An arrogant egotism can lead to a parodic exposure of weaknesses.

Such a point occurred in the career of John Boorman with Zardoz in 1974. It has now come to Peter Greenaway, another director I admire, with The Baby of Macon (Lumiere, 18). Sumptuously costumed and designed, beautifully lit by Sacha Vierny, accompanied by enchanting baroque music, The Baby of Macon is the most determinedly disgusting film from a major director since Salo, Pasolini's orgy of sodomy, coprophagy and ritual murder that purported to be a commentary on the fascist mind. Exhibiting most of Greenaway's stylistic tropes and intellectual preoccupations, the movie presents itself as an examination of the exploitation of babies, from Bethlehem to Benetton, in the form of a play presented in the mid-seventeeth century in the environs of Macon cathedral. This singularly unlikely drama, performed before an effete Prince Cosimo and designed to restore a blighted land, begins with a son being born to a grotesque crone.

After Cosimo has sampled the afterbirth, the old woman's virginal daughter Oulia Ormond) claims the child as her own and enters into an uneasy alliance with the local bishop and into conflict with his son (Ralph Fiennes), a devotee of science and opponent of the miraculous. Play and audience, stage and backstage, rapidly merge in a way that creates an embarrassing uneasiness for both the cast and the cinema viewer. The virgin seduces the bishop's son into being her Joseph and, while making love to her on the manger floor, he is graphically gored to death by an ox acting at the leaning bottle of Cleveland composed of words from Captain Cook's diaries in tempered steel is to be unveiled on Friday. Late Pop in giant container. J.W; Inchbold (Leeds City Art Gallery to 23 Oct).

A Pre-Raphaelite landscape painter; sharp, detailed landscape of Victorian dreams. Prunella Clough (Annely Juda, Dering St, London Wl, from Thursday to 30 Oct). Bubbly, tangly, shadowy examples of the well-worked abstract by eminent senior painter. American Prints from the Twentieth Century (Fine Art Society, Bond St, London Wl, to 9 Oct). Parallels the RA's bumper show and proves more choice in some respects.

FILM Philip French The Firm (Empire). In Sidney Pollack's smooth morality thriller, Tom Cruise discovers that the high-paying Memphis law firm he coins is a Faust-aid post in league with the mob and tries to renege on his deadly bargain. Gene Hackman gives the film depth. The Lie (MGM Trocadero). Natalie Baye has her best roles in years as a successful Parisian journalist and mother who discovers her long-time partner has made her pregnant and HIV-positive.

A fine debut by writer-director Francois Margolin. In The Line Of Fire (Release): In the year's best thriller, Clint Eastwood gracefully acts his age as a presidential bodyguard on the point of retirement taking on his greatest challenge. MUSIC Andrew Porter The Philharmonia season begins tonight in the Royal Festival Hall (071-928 8800); Sino-poli conducts Wagner's Wesendonk Lieder (Margaret Price soloist) and Bruckner 4. The Royal Philharmonic season begins tomorrow: Ann Murray sings Mahler's Riickert New Displays 1993 at the Tate Admission Free Information: 071-887 8008 Sponsored by British Petroleum Tate Gallery. Millbank London SW1P 4RG Star performer: Angela Bassett impersonates Tina Turner in the movie of the provocative 54-year-old rock singer's life.

NOW BOOKING TO 0 EMBER SOME SEATS SI ILL to Spain's gross national product. The week's most disagreeable experience Accion Mutante or Baby of Macon? That's like asking: would you rather be caretaker at Three Mile Island's Unit-2 Reactor or head of the tourist bureau at Chernobyl? Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust is not, sad to say, a feminist remake of Laurel and Hardy's Sons of the Desert. Her account of an extended black family gathering for the last time on Sea Island off the coast of Georgia in 1902 is no laughing matter. The following day they will leave to start new lives in the ghettos up North. Cut off from the Deep South, they have retained stronger links with their African past than mainland blacks, creating.