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Friday 9 January 2009

Missing the picture

And the Academy Award Goes To... (BBC Radio 4); Art Made in China (BBC Radio 4); Between the Ears (BBC Radio 3); A Good Read (BBC Radio 4)

Later in the week, another new series left its audience, i.e., me, begging for some pictures — a panning shot across the city taken from a helicopter, or a scene-setting photo-montage, blending documentary footage with images from now. (I know, I know, such techniques have become a cliché, and yet sometimes it is jolly useful to be able to see what everyone is talking about.) Roger Law (co-creator of Spitting Image) took a sound-recording team to China to investigate the astonishing boom in the art market there. Art Made in China (Radio Four, Monday to Friday) told an extraordinary story.

After decades, if not centuries, of the state banning creative freedom and only allowing government-supervised ‘art’, there are now estimated to be one million ‘artists’ living and working freely in Beijing. To prove it, Law took us to the construction site of a whole village that is being built solely for these artists, complete with concrete studios and glass-walled houses. (The state, weirdly, now seems to be encouraging what it formerly tried to repress as a way of tempting the West to come visit and spend, spend, spend.) Along the way we visited trendy installations in what were once ancient warehouses and frenzied art-world parties fuelled by dollars and euros. We heard about artists like the man who spends his time creating pumpkins of all shapes and sizes and colours because he wants to see how many varieties he can come up with. His one-man show consisted of 200 of them. ‘It’s an artwork,’ he insisted. How could we tell without seeing his vegetarian heaven?

Thank goodness, then, for Between the Ears (Radio Three, Saturday), which week-by-week takes a different subject and is not afraid to interpret it solely through its aural qualities. This week we were in Belfast, in a programme devised by the film-music composer David Holmes, who was born in the city. In The Wall of a Million Bricks (produced by Declan McGovern) we heard from all sorts of people affected by the euphemistically called ‘Peace Lines’ that still exist in Belfast despite the Agreement. Their stories and thoughts about these monstrous carbuncles, one of them even carving in two an area of parkland on the outskirts of the city, were underlain by a soundtrack of music that subtly worked against what was being said.

More articles from: Kate Chisholm | this section

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