1 Mark Anderson
This summer sees the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, in which 19,240 British soldiers perished on the first day alone. As the youth of Europe died like cattle, a group of pacifist poets and artists opened the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, where they satirised the war with nonsensical performances. Mark Anderson’s audiovisual spectacle Furious Folly remembers the first world war through the shattered lens of dada and is a corrective to some of the more complacent memorial artworks this horrific conflict has recently inspired.
Magdalen College School Field, Oxford, Fri to 18 Jun; touring to 5 Aug
2 The New Tate Modern Opening Weekend
The opening of Tate Modern in a converted power station in 2000 was a seismic event in art that redefined what a contemporary museum could be. Now it is about to happen all over again as the “new” Tate Modern opens, with much more space and even more futuristic ambition. For its opening weekend, a free programme of interactive events, choral music and film and video sets the scene in a gallery that aims to take art where it has never been before.
Tate Modern, SE1, Fri to 19 Jun
3 Georgiana Houghton
The Victorian artist and medium Georgiana Houghton’s watercolours are spiralling abstract visions that, with hindsight, look like precocious ancestors of modern art. Yet she claimed her hand was guided by the spirits of the dead, including the Renaissance artists Correggio and Titian. Did Titian intervene from the otherworld to invent abstract art?
Courtauld Gallery, WC2, Thu to 11 Sep
4 Cecily Brown
Young Spartans Exercising, an early painting by Degas, portrays an erotically tense standoff between half-naked Spartan male and female athletes. British artist Cecily Brown takes inspiration from this fascinating picture in her tumultuous new paintings. Cascades of flesh and faces riff off Degas and turn his classical composition into painterly chaos.
Thomas Dane Gallery, SW1, Sat to 23 Jul
5 Royal Academy Of Arts Summer Exhibition
Once upon a time, the annual Royal Academy Summer Exhibition was a cutting-edge platform for new art. Unfortunately, that was 200 years ago. Today, it’s a terminally genteel affair, although every year the RA tries to invigorate this moribund garden party. This time the coordinator whose job it is to apply the electrodes is subversive sculptor Richard Wilson.
