9 March 2006
Thursday 9 March 2006 21:30-22:15 (Radio 3)
Gabriel Gbadamosi explores the bloody history of art and self-mutilation and talks to a contemporary practitioner who abuses her bodies in the name of art: Alice Newstead.
Playlist
Artists have done many dramatic things to draw attention to themselves over the centuries, but perhaps none more so than the current crop of body artists. To coincide with a new television series, Art Shock, Night Waves discusses the ways in which the body can sometimes violently and bloodily become Art -with British body artist, Alice Newstead. Alice Newstead pierces her body and suspends herself in the air using hooks. Why does she do it? How does it fit in with our traditional understanding of what art is? And how should we, the viewer, approach such work? Gabriel Gadamosi explores the human canvas on tonight's Night Waves.
The singer Nick Cave has written the story and music for The Proposition, a new film set in the outer reaches of the British Empire and featuring a strong British cast including Emily Watson and John Hurt. A policeman hunts a renegade gang in the Australian wilderness in the 1880's. Adam Mars Jones reviews this particularly violent tale and powerful evocation of frontier life.
Also on the programme; the American writer Barbara Ehrenreich goes undercover in white collar America to investigate the problems facing middle-class executives. And Francis Wood of the British Library celebrates some of the rarest and earliest Chinese books which happen to be kept in Britain .
Night Waves - presented by Gabriel Gbadamosi, tonight at 9.30, here on BBC Radio 3.
