Exhibitions

After sculpture class I headed to the Hayward to catch The Russian Linesman in its last days ("a glorious ragbag of a show"). It was based on borders, boundaries, thresholds, interfaces, lines of all sorts. Lots of intriguing work in it. Sandback's lines of thread - "sculptures with no insides"; Penone interfering with the growth of trees; Durer's strings used for perspective drawing; Petit's tightrope walk; the Green Line in Cyprus, the Berlin Wall, the German-Russian border 1939; Francis Oakes' glass mobius flask; Joanna Kane's photos of life-masks of 19th century poets; Amie Siegl's remakes of East German films. And below you can see two stones, or rather a stone and its exact replica in bronze, by Vija Celmins. The lady in the mask is used on the posters for the Annette Messager show, which runs for a few weeks yet. I'd seen her obsessive collectivistic work in Paris in 92 (was it really that long ago!) and was glad to see new work - the skull shape on the wall, made of gloves with coloured pencils coming out the fingers; the inflating and deflating shapes; and best of all, the "red room" referencing the magical birthing of Pinocchio, swallowed by the whale and reborn as a real child.

A few days later, Kuniyoshi's Japanese prints, a very different world.