The Bard stands with the Reformers of Peterloo, and their shared genius in teaching history with music and song
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A challenging spectacle
Mark Dion’s imaginative installations at the Whitechapel Gallery explore our often fraught and changing relationships with the natural world, says CHRISTINE LINDEY
SUE TURNER is fascinated by a book that researches who the largely immigrant workforce were that built the Empire State
MARIA DUARTE and MALC McGOOKIN review Sirat, The Testament of Ann Lee, EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, and All You Need Is Kill
STEVE ANDREW recommends a Marxist analysis of the long chains of production that global corporations exploit
MARY CONWAY relishes the period detail but misses the drama in this unsatisfactory dramatisation of the subjugated life of George Eliot
IAN SINCLAIR welcomes a mainstream scholar to the ranks of left-wing critique of US foreign policy
PETER MASON is disappointed that the eponymous Count fails to put in an appearance
Mark Dion: Theatre of the Natural World
Whitechapel Gallery, London
IT'S rare to be met by birdsong in an art exhibition, but New Yorker Mark Dion’s installation The Library for the Birds does just that. Beautiful white, orange and grey zebra finches tweet and chatter convivially on the branches of a dead apple tree in a capacious aviary well stocked with seeds, fruit and water.
Individual birds suddenly swoop off in graceful elliptical flights or dart busily here and there for no apparent reason. They seem oblivious to the books or objects such as catapults and shotgun shells shelved on the tree’s branches and tucked at its base, yet these are potentially useful to bird survival, since they relate to the human pursuit of birds, whether benign or predatory.
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Read Sisters, the journal of the National Assembly Of Women, below.