Mark Sheerin – criticismism

Follow that taxi!

July 20, 2026

There are several difficulties in following taxi drivers. They know the roads backwards. They love a shortcut. They can be considerate, but equally the converse. And we defer to them at junctions, because they make a living on these roads.

This is a short account in which I followed a taxi driver. It was just off the streets of North London. And we were not on the road but in a gallery. The venue was Holy Trinity Church, Cloudesley Square. As a savvy cabbie could no doubt tell you, this is now home of the Florence Trust, an arts charity that converted this salubrious address into studio and gallery space for contemporary artists.

The driver I was following was Mark McGowan, aka ARTIST TAXI DRIVER. And there was a time when I followed him near daily through prolific video posts on Twitter in which he ranted about political figures of the day. How things have changed, from bad to worse, since Twitter became X! But his incredulous attitude has aged well.

Since I had only ever seen him through a dashcam, where he became a kind of icon for a while in the 2010s, it was a little glitchy to be in the same room as him. Even if that room was white and cubic, windowless, high ceilinged, and populated with sculpture: an artist’s natural habitat after all.

Not just in the same room but on the same bill. Both of us were invitees to a reading of art criticism. Half a dozen speakers were involved and twice as many interested parties were in that space to watch. The space was also occupied by nine warehouse pallets topped with nine waiting chairs. These chairs were in the style of Gerrit Rietveld, all expertly handmade, as were the pallets.

Along with myself, McGowan had four other game passengers on this Saturday afternoon ride: Nat Pitt, Janneke Adema, Joshua Uvieghara and Daniel Pryde-Jarman. Dan was the artist responsible for making the chairs which he then put us in. The 4pm event was called, in a most straightforward way, Critics on Crates on Pallets, and was part of a day of performance staged by the gallery Division of Labour.

Dan briefed us before we took the floor. Sit anywhere he said. Don’t all face the audience he said. It’s not a performance. By this point I was realising that while the other readers had plenty of chops within visual art, I was perhaps the one closest to being what you might call a critic. Having said that, Dan, Janneke, Nat and Josh had all chosen very apt, compelling examples of the form and all read with great conviction.

But I read my own stuff, in accordance with the brief. Here’s the piece, which I printed, held in trembling hand and struggled through. Did I face the audience? No, I took a seat facing the back of the gallery. Could I be heard? No, as the words left my mouth I could hear them dying in the mid air.

None of this is McGowan’s fault, of course, but he didn’t make life easy. In a move which I can see was wise, he sat in a far corner; this offered a vantage point from which to address not only the audience but also all five other critics. He read with gravity and he read just before me.

Before I get into his appearance on Critics on Crates, I want to get into his previous activity. Along with the many films he made from the inside of the cab which he apparently drives for a living, McGowan lays claim to staging some of the most alarming pieces the world has ever seen or read about.

Please don’t take my word for it, and neither should you take his, but his Wikipedia page is stocked with the wild image of this middle-aged south London cabbie getting up to all sorts. Did he really roll along four miles of London pavements in order to raise awareness of people being rude to cleaners? That is the least of it.

There are eight more UK based stunts like this, or nine if you include the time he used his nose to push a toy pig from a London hospital, in which he was diagnosed with bowel cancer, to 10 Downing Street. Another section of his mythopoeic Wiki entry is dedicated to Controversy and Legal action. This alone runs to 2500 words, so this is not the time to get into McGowan’s sensational work

But the figure I formerly knew of as a furious critic of UK austerity governments, was in subdued mood, opting for quiet simplicity, as he read a piece by Tom Jeffreys about a 2008 panel at the ICA, on which he sat, and during which they both saw Russian performance artist Alexander Brener shit into his own hand. A new theme has emerged on this blog at least.

Jeffreys provided an elegant write up of the incident at the time, in which he managed to convey all the horror, astonishment and comedy of such goings on. There is very little I could have read to follow that particular story with all of its shock and entertainment value.

Nevertheless, it was a really interesting afternoon. In 17 years of writing this blog I have never got much sense of an audience so the experience of delivering my work into a heedless void really crystalised a lot for me. If I were a performance artist and not a dumb critic, I would have stood on my crate and retired the blog there and then.

The art world moves fast and crticismism may never catch up. Perhaps a persistent blogger can only attempt to follow people like the ARTIST TAXI DRIVER, who, however low key, burns like one of Kerouac’s roman candles.

I’d like to thank Dan Pryde-Jarman for inviting me to participate in this afternoon’s proceedings, together with Nat from Division of Labour and Steven from the Florence Trust for the infrastructure and the welcome. After the instructional death on stage it was good to unwind a bit in the pub. I wish Mark McGowan could have stuck around; given the presentational format, I feel we would have got on crate!

Critics on Crates on Pallets took place at the Florence Trust, Cloudesley Square, on 6th June 2026.

immersive art

The hope that hurts

July 17, 2026

With so much wrong with the world, I come to the gallery hoping for anger, tears and shit (see previous post). At the Barbican last week I found optimism. It was hard to stomach.

In Other Worlds is an immersive exhibition from filmmaker and architect Liam Young. It comprises of environmental design, spoken word, model making, panoramic animation, projection mapping, and documentary film. It snakes around the Curve Gallery and out through a darkened car park. I found it so difficult to take, I spent over 90 minutes and would have stayed longer had there been time.

As an immersive experience, it was perhaps incomplete. There was plenty to look at and listen to, but it wasn’t fully enveloping; and the final, temporary, cubic space where imagery could be found in 360 degrees (and along x, y and z axes) was disrupted by gaping entrance and exit; though the floor was alive with roiling seas at one point the ceiling was just another dark void.

The lightly makeshift arrangements did not stop one visitor move illuminated hands as if casting LSD trails; this multi-dimensional invite to engage the imagination is indeed quite trippy. The filmic centrepiece is psychedelic, the premise is utopian, the prevailing genre of audio was speculative; and from the open pit mining scene to the vertical cityscape with tumbling greenery, the models held me fascinated in their detail.

By part two, in which visitors were invited to watch actual reports from existing projects that are already re-engineering our planet for a liveable future at some unspecified time, we got the clear message that now was the time for action to avoid extinction with a planet-wide solution to the climate emergency and Anthropocene damage. But this individual requirement has existed for 20 or 30 exhausting years now.

The discursive structure of the exhibition runs a bit like this: imagine a world where all digital tech is recycled, and where oceans are cared for using indigenous wisdom, where self-contained mega-cities allow the rest of the planet to heal; just imagine all that and then take a look at these films that show projects where this is slowly becoming a reality, since some of this stuff is already underway. Cool, huh?

The spoken word grabbed me, padded headphones did feel immersive, and the stories, read by the likes of actors Maxine Peake and Richard Ayoade, were a mixed bag. But they gave an additional layer of messaging, an architecture of ideas, and a chance to partake in the innocence of ‘storytime’.

In short, the vision and the worldmaking on show at the Barbican is very impressive. It was both a tantalising and an absorbing experience where time flew away. But despite the bright positivity of this show, I struggle to see how the notion of a mega-city housing 10 billion people could result in the peace, justice, equity and mutual understanding we need in order to unite in the service of projects like these.

Liam Young brings a life In Other Worlds nearer, which might be a place to start. He doesn’t say how we might stop the raging monsters of capital from snatching these futures away? Don’t we need to fix the world before we fix the planet?

In Other Worlds is on display at Curve, Barbican until September 6 2026.

video art, video art

The saint of shit

July 12, 2026

A spare ticket became available for Paul McCarthy: Selected Video Works (1970-2025) at the Rio cinema in Dalston. But when I tried to interest my brother, he sent a text saying, “I’m not sure I’m really in the mood for 3 hours of challenging and potentially disturbing imagery.” That said, I’m not sure I was in the mood for what was to unfold in a darkened but packed auditorium in East London.

I’ll cut to the clickbait. Across several low-grade black and white videos, we saw the artist raise and lower his exposed scrotum, spit repeatedly on his exposed penis, smear a naked model with ketchup until she was covered, and back up towards the camera – asshole first. The debauch culminated with a film in which he would urinate on himself before defecating in close up, rolling in his excrement and them rubbing his face in it. This was all before the intermission.

And things had started so brightly! There was first an almost funny film in which McCarthy leafed through the LA phone book, laughing in hysterics, as he desecrated spread after spread of this tome with oil, cotton wool and what looked like flour. No one uses a phone book any more, but I am crying out for Google to get this treatment.

Another suitable-for-work endeavour saw the artist dip a ragged bedsheet (or canvas) into a barrel of paint (or more oil) in an empty downtown store premises. Cars cruised past as, again and again, McCarthy held aloft this rag and whipped the walls and the windows. An action painting took place, but the passersby were more interested in the figure of the artist, stripped to the waist and fiercely committed.

But they weren’t that interested. The collection of actions that we saw before the interval were set in a world of everyday madness. Pedestrians looked through the window with incomprehension, but also with jaded annoyance. Background noise for the notorious work Shitface, included muffled conversations, a ringing phone surely, and a women’s clicking heels overhead. The building’s occupants have no idea what is going on in this small neighbouring room pre-prepped with a plastic sheet on the floorboards. Ignorance, I suppose, is bliss.

This would be an odd moment to engage in a bit of ekphrasis, but I’ll try. The camera, you’d notice, is free to explore McCarthy’s body, and its functions; the critic must be too. We pan around the skin rather than the room and this skin is pale and hairy; when filmed at close quarters can lead to disorientation: is that an armpit, or an anal cleft? Is it thigh, shoulder, chest, etc.? Owing to the lack of tan and toning, this nude is not classical, but perhaps it is a body that we must accept, whether that means accepting the artist, or your own body or that of a boyfriend.

But what follows is not always easy to accept. I have not seen pee spout from a urethra at such close range before, and certainly not on the silver screen. The audience here are part of the film, and the act of micturition is inseparable from the audible groans. An embarrassed giggle signals the arrival of emerging faecal matter and we are pretty much unified by horror at the subsequent outrush of a pasty dark matter which we know must be brown and foul smelling but here, thanks to the formalities of an art film does seem like paint coming from a tube.

As if to underline this parallel, the artist proceeds to writhe on his mat as if possessed. He sits on his stool, rolls in it, smears it on his body and plants his face in it. The noxious substance goes a long way to render the mat and the chest of the man impasto with self-abasement. It is a mortifying experience for him, and for the camera operator, and for the audience. I was aghast; the excrement was getting into facial orifices. But it at the same time it is a sacred moment; Paul McCarthy has gone to that place where it seems only artists dare to tread. Artists share this courage with martyrs.

The film ends and we applaud. There are redemptive whoops and cheers! Personally I felt relief, but some awe. The intermission had arrived, but in part two it was about to get so much worse. McCarthy himself made two appearances on stage and both times he gets a hero’s welcome. He tells us there were three versions of the film Shitface (“I got better at it”) and he hopes we’ll stay for part two, until the end of Sailor’s Meat (1975), which he calls a persona film, and takes pain to tell us is an improvisation.

And so, Sailor’s Meat begins and it is in colour. This first means that we can appreciate the artist’s blue eye shadow, silver wig and the black lace panties he also sports. But despite colour stock, various spillages on the shabby waterbed could be anything. There is little point narrativising this 43-minute film; the sequence of events is quite episodic and, like bad sex, broken up by lacklustre pauses in which one can only wonder quite what is coming next.

This review is better served by a list: 1) the artist spends much of the film on all fours; 2) the artist’s penis hangs outside of his skimpy lingerie; 3) the artist plays with a plastic cock sleeve, and then straps it around his own member with medical tape; 4) the artist tries and perhaps succeeds to insert a hot dog in his ass; 5) the artist fucks a mayo jar — an act which is a McCarthyesque trope; 6) the artist urinates onto a tube of sausage meat; 7) the artist goes down on the sausage meat; 8) the artist breaks the jar of mayo and walks on shards of what might be sugar glass. No blood is visible, but we have seen enough.

And it gets worse still. In the next presentation, a recent foray, the colours brighten and the aesthetic is hi-definition and rich colour, as we spy on Adolf Hitler in a tryst with Eva Braun (or is that Adam and Eve we glimpse through branches of pine?) For this is the UK premier of A&E Adolf & Eva Adam & Eve Mother (2022) an ongoing collaboration with German actress Lilith Strangenberg. While much of what is shown during this survey has been taboo and bordering on the pornographic, Mother digs even deeper, ultimately finding itself in another lowly genre. Horror.

I’m going to respect the convention of much film criticism and defer the surprises in order to tell you merely that Mother uses prosthetics to gory effect. Not everyone gets out alive. And this piece features audible dialogue, even if the most common line is “You wanna fuck your mummy!?” It goes strong on costume. McCarthy wears a tan suede jacket with a swastika armband, Strangenberg is dressed like a waitress from a bierkeller. And there is a continuity of frenzied grunting as the couple progress their al fresco tryst. Numb to events at this point, I shall just pause only to note that this film features some more on-screen defecation, a golden shower or two, spitballing mayo, breast suckling, a quite legendary paunch, and all manner of sundry intimacies. I don’t know where reality ended and special effects began, but at this point in the day there was a sense that anything was possible.

It is so gross, yet so comic. And at a time when wannabe Hitlers are saving up to buy rockets in what they must suppose to be the next chapter in human progress, it was refreshing to see a Nazi buffoon smeared in piss, shit and, erm, mayo. For me, McCarthy’s self-imposed trials, along with those of his sometime co-star Strangenberg, bring the entire human race down to earth. As ideals (or lack thereof) can prove fatally injurious in both art and life, this is holy work.

Britpop

The unbearable lightness of Britpop

June 19, 2026

I’m not calling for a cessation of all music and dancing until WWIII ends, but I am calling for a ban on Britpop. It just seemed a bit much to be bouncing around to unofficial national anthems at a time when our nation is aiding and abetting war crimes and an emboldened far right are torching migrant homes and campaigning for office in paramilitary uniform.

That’s not to say that the clientele of this dayrave are actively racist. Most if not all persons of colour here were treated with total respect and gratitude, because most if not all were among those checking our bags and serving the free drinks. Nevertheless belting out the chorus to World in Motion by New Order (“In-ger-land!”) is for me problematic in the shadow of Gaza.

The DJ was good enough to apologise, in the name of football, to any “Irish, Welsh or Scots”, as if it was inconceivable there might be any other nationalities present. It’s not that refugees wouldn’t have been welcome here; as they should be welcome everywhere. Only it was doubtful they would be able to sing along to bands like Shed Seven.

While it had some good tunes back in the day, Britpop is uniquely tone deaf for the quarterway point of the twentyfirst century. Unlike 1960s rock, 1970s punk, and 1980s indie, It was a genre free from revolt. A chart battle between blur and Oasis was the only point of social friction. The pop was for pop’s sake. The rock ’n’ roll, ditto. Those were feelgood times. These are not.

The only political topic for this insular genre was the class system in Britain. That this system was regarded with something like affection is the inescapable conclusion: blur were to amp up their Essex roots in a bid for downward mobility, before running for parliament and hobnobbing with the Cotswold set; Oasis were to heavily trade on scally ways, even as (now-Irish) Noel co-opted the Union Jack; Pulp were to observe that the middle or upper classes will “never understand” what it means to be common.

So here I was, a middle class, middle-aged man, with a group of middle-aged, middle class friends at an event so middle class it stole the Champagne from a well known Oasis title and called their merry bash Prosecco Supernova. And so it was that, as poor relations now to any Mancuinan rock ‘n’ roll stars, we fuelled our own midlife weekend afternoon rockstar fantasies with tasteful, budget alcohol.

As you might be able to work out from the photo I took, the ostensible DJs was Tim Burgess from the Charlatans.* I say ostensible because the setlist was so obvious it had to have been programmed for him. And it irked me that the Madchester scene was folded into Britpop, along with New Order, The Housemartins, The Smiths, and Teenage Fanclub. Will I be back in December to bathe in nostalgia with Bez from the Happy Mondays? Possibly not, but I hear he’s good for a selfie.

We staggered out into the June sunlight, as naive and lightheaded as university freshers. I got the train home to Brighton, which is contender for the most pop city in the UK. I was a few hours late for the Carnival Agaisnt Fascism, where ex-Housemartin and Big Beat DJ Norman Cook aka Fat Boy Slim was spearheading sonic resistance to a delegation of thugs marching, rather than playing, ‘for England’.

*I must point out Tim was not resposnible for either the football banter or the playing of World in Motion. That was a DJ from the organisers Star Shaped who certainly seemed to enjoy fronting tings. Good luck to him, yeah!

Brighton, contemporary art

Brighton in May: home is where the art is

June 2, 2026

I didn’t exhaust the possibilities for seeing art in this year’s Brighton Festival. But I was glad to have caught both the exhibitons here. If you saw either, let me know in the comments!

Tender Exchange

Hold a wooden heart and privately speak into it. Speak what is in your own flesh and blood heart. The wooden heart is anatomical in shape. Your own metaphorical heart impossible to locate. This exercise proves challenging. “It’s hard to say what’s really in your heart” I say to a project facilitator. “Yes, and it’s hard to know where to stop,” she replies, I take the trinket to a nearby tree and as I stand below, in presumable communion with nature, I commit a few words to a discrete inlaid microphone. Then I return the heart.

The artist took it from me and placed it on a dock on a plinth where my innermost thoughts joined a sea of voices which echo from some dozen of these recording devices. I think my exact words were something-something-grateful, something-something-hoped for. As such, it was a generic, if ostensibly heartfelt, message. But on my way home I thought of many things I could have, should have, said to do justice to this quite twee but well-executed art work. Twee is not a dirty word, btw, if like me you grew up to the sound of 1980s tweepop.

I moved around the ring listening to voices drift in and out of ear shot. Here was where prayers, wishes, confessions, confidences and secrets were exchanged and where the contents of your heart were offered up as tender in multiple senses. Currency for what I do not know. But to speak your innermost desires to an archive and hear them carried off by the breeze in this way was to feel like letting go.

Do my spoken feelings register with the universe or have I divested myself of them forever? Only time will tell. Tender Exchange now has knowledge of some of my intimate feelings, but reading news headlines later that day, I realised, we know very little about the human heart.

Tender Exchange was at Moulescoomb Place on May 16-17 2026. It was a Brighton Festival event by Becca Gill of Radical Ritual.

Shadow Light: Songs My Brother Taught Me

I had never seen a white cube as white as the Project Space at Phoenix looked during the recent show by Simon David Eden. And as the artist floated towards me, dressed in white, with a scarf you might wear to an ashram, he took on an inescapable aspect of celestial guardianship.

Shadow Light: Songs My Brother Taught Me is a show about suicide, both its acceptance and its prevention. It pays tribute to the artist’s elder brother, who sadly took his life in 1976, at the age of 20. The musical siblings had played guitar together. And their old acoustic, painted white, strings all broken, lies in a hardshell case loosely wrapped in rusted chains; it’s as if the instrument has emerged in this hallowed space, Houdini-like by its own volition.

The life of this guitar extends to a suite of photographic prints, monochrome with the occasional dangerous red accent; the prints cluster upon all four walls accumulating ‘sold’ dots. If the public clearly wants them up on their walls, these serenely cubist studies (surely the eponymous songs inherited from Eden’s older brother) bear the weight of memory and silence. It’s a silence that not even the murmured conversations here can dispel.

I too enjoy one of these low register chats with the artist. He tells me that the park outside (known in Brighton as The Level) was where his brother once worked as a groundsman. It’s a fact reflected in the two sculptural elements of the exhibition: as dried leaves, elm stumps, Sussex flint, which is as black and white as the prints, and a vicious looking saw blade. And because the artist’s late brother burnt his diaries, lyrics and notebooks, some ashy remains of bound paper are here in a readymade cage.

Eden directs me to a poem on the wall in a quite priestly way and leaves me alone with it. In this poem the facts alone sing, in a concrete form text in which these lines stretch out and loosen as the white page behind them absorbs the pain like a healing hand pressed to a brow. I was moved, with a sadness hard to bear in close quarters. The artist did also say he felt his brother’s presence in the gallery. He has been brought back to us: a resonant gift for anyone who has known the loss of someone to suicide.

Shadow Light: Songs My Brother Taught Me was at Phoenix Art Space between May 1 and 17 2026

relational aesthetics, Uncategorized

Pavillon Simone Weil, Thomas Hirschhorn (2026)

May 20, 2026

“It’s a bubble”, Thomas Hirschhorn confirms. I find him immersed in the Pavillon Sicli in Geneva, where he is resident twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for some 75 days. It’s only half of a surprise that this is a work of what he calls Présence et Production. And I don’t miss the chance to ask him about prehistoric caves. Does this monument to philosopher Simone Weil in some way reflects the subterranean origins of humanity’s image making?

It does. Hirschhorn’s 2002 work Cavemanman was also an immersive piece of bricolage, being a rapidly made assemblages of cardboard, MDF and packing tape. I was able to further check with Hirschhorn that a previous statement on cave art wasn’t intended as a provocation. No he says, it wasn’t: those who painted prehistoric caves and those who come by later and add graffiti, or one supposes to make pavilions, are of equal value.

But perhaps some lives are worth elevating. The current exhibition or current bubble is dedicated to the life and work of Simone Weil. And unlike a palaeolithic cave, the industrial space in the Les Acacias district is inundated with light and activity. By the look of its new facade, of placards and banners, this former factory, where fire extinguishers were made, is occupied by the workers.

On my only previous trip to Geneva, I found myself at a squat party that went on all night, but in Hirschhorn’s squat the locals are sleeping out a bright, warm and sunny day. I count half a dozen recumbent bodies. Others are moving back and forth with plates of free pasta. I queue for a free coffee. The spirit of welcome extended to an approach from the artist, who I recognise at once: imposing height, black rimmed spectacles, papers and paperback books in the breast pockets of dark shirt. He strikes up a conversation with handshake proffered.

I am a bit star struck, but fandom is encouraged here. This all consuming relational art piece is a shrine and tribute to a philosopher who should perhaps be canonised. Frail, bookish Weil took a gruelling job in a factory and even took up arms in the Spanish Civil War. During WWII, she starved herself in solidarity with the Free French and wanted to parachute into her homeland to work as a nurse for the Resistance. But as a myopic and possibly anorexic young woman, she was to be little help in any of these ventures.

After a short journey on this earth, the 34-year-old was outlived by several books of mystical and political writings. It is these which give the pavilion the feel a work in progress, of a notebook or set college text. Her words are all around us: spray painted onto drapes, etched on signage with biro, and printed then curated into a wildly complex mind map of inter-related themes that reflects a deep engagement with her ideas. In both English and French.

My own introduction to her thought is a wartime audit of the spiritual health of the French nation, The Need for Roots (published posthumously in 1949). Hirschhorn tells me that for him Gravity and Grace (published posthumously in 1947) is the best way in. Important texts are so much to conjure with, and even my first encounter with a sculpture by this artist (Drift Topography at the 2012 Liverpool Biennial), struck me for the inclusion of two dozen much thumbed books.

Admittedly an art exhibition based on tracts of theory could be a dry affair. But this expo is more than a showcase for handwritten screeds or manifestos. Along with the local diners, sleepers and coffee drinkers, there are local collaborators who fill the space with edifying, enjoyable sideshows and participatory stalls, all of which reflect the life of Weil and offer continuity with previous works of relational art by this artist.

For example, there was a kickboxing class. Weil was not tough, but she was committed enough to seek out combat given that, in Spain and in her native France, fascists were the enemy. The gasp of knee against training pad and the odd grunt of connection energise the atmosphere of Pavillon Sicli. A dojo, located by an entrance, would be a compelling introduction to any gallery.

There was a stall offering Esperanto; that too appeared relfected Weil’s idealism. And up a timber-frame ramp there was a garment repair desk who are running a couple of repairs a day. At another upper level desk you could learn about a translation project. An artist called Roxanne tells me that in the new French translation of Demanding the Impossible by Peter Marshall (1991), there will be a new section on Weil.

I spent time in a phone box, listening to philosophical vox pops on a vintage handset. I spent time in a screening room, where the words of Simone Weil met with a collage of found footage. I passed much of an afternoon in the courtyard, watching street artists at work while others played football. There was also a bookshop, a library, a house newssheet, an evening talk from German philosopher Marcus Steinweg, and so on

Hirschhorn has made a handful of previous pavilions or monuments along these lines. He took Gramsci to the Bronx, Bataille to Kassel, Deleuze to Avignon and Spinoza to Amsterdam. Local communities have embraced these visitations, in many cases helped to build and run these cerebral spaces, and they have done so not despite being working class but because they are working class.

Those with most to gain from radical theory need these new monuments. Hirschhorn offers us all a break from the tradition in which generals and statesmen look down on us from bronze heights (in work by this artist and others; see my previous posts here and here) The many sofas upholstered in gaffer tape invite the public to simply chill. The stalls and activities invite you to simply think. And the truth demonstrated by the sleepers who are dotted across Pavillon Simone Weil is this: at some point we all awake, and when you do so Weil will be there.

Pavillon Simone Weil can be seen at Pavillon Sicli, Geneva, until June 16 2026.

Uncategorized

It’s 8:30. Do you know where your brains are?

April 13, 2026

Don’t know where my brains are now but last week they were at Goldsmiths CCA where I caught an archival exhibition dedicated to the output of Paper Tiger Television. Beginning in 1981, this collective (aka PTTV) has broadcast some 400 episodes of a public access show that was to turn its gaze back on the media explosion of which it was a part. Many of theire regular, live programmes began with the statement-question: It’s 8:30. Do you know where your brains are?; each would conclude, for maximum transparency, with a caption screen revealing the budget of the preceding show.

So, a typical episode would feature an acerbic media theorist leafing through the pages, with actual print and analogue pages, of one of the twentieth century’s most iconic newsstand titles: sociologist Herb Schiller dissects the New York Times (The Steering Mechanism of the Ruling Classes (1981)); Artist Martha Rosler reads Vogue magazine (Wishing, Dreaming, Winning, Spending (1982)); author Murray Bookchin considers Time magazine (History as a Television Series (1982)). Some later shows have a documentary feel, like Standing with Palestine (2004, but tragically timeless).

If you can make it to New Cross, you have the possibility of stepping into a basement set, through a theatrical arch cut and painted to look like the broken screen of a 1980s TV set. The 80s make a strong reappearance, with slime green video captions on shows with punk energy and, at times, a small audience who resemble a bored CBGBs band. Archival publications and handprinted video backdrops complete this mise-en-scène. And eight monitors, each with remotes, headphones, and chairs all serve up five films each.

If you can’t make it to New Cross before the 19th April, there are 500 eps available to view on the PPTV website. It is a really awesome resource and a chance to experience Paper Tiger Television, on the small screen. A diverting time awaits!

Uncategorized

The war strikes North London

March 18, 2026

The manufacture and sale of a fighter jet entails a complex and shady web; such planes have wide supply chains and reach the market in lots destined for different client states. But research bodies put an incriminating figure on the contribution of UK arms manufacturers towards Israel’s aerial war on Gaza; The Ploughshares Project and Campaign Against Arms Trade both set a figure of 15 or 16 percent, on components of the f-35i joint strike fighter supplied by factories here. F35s have been used in civilian harm events in Gaza.

As a result of domestic manufacturers’ complicity with a genocide (described as such by the UN), many activists have targeted factories across Britain with symbolic and actual damage, which has resulted in the criminalisation of members of Palestine Action, deemed terrorists for a non-violent campaign of opposition to an Israeli war with bewilderingly international support from the UK, the US and various other western countries.

While all this means I’m straying from my lane as an art blogger, it is mentioned as background to the rest of this post, which concerns vandalism and a campaign of harassment against galleries which have bravely carried anti-war messages in the UK’s cultural climate of self-censorship and silence. Several actors from the far right and pro-Israel lobby appear to have targeted three North London galleries in the last six months. These forced the closure of a show at two branches of The Bomb Factory and the third closures of a solo show at Handel Street Projects in Marylebone.

To be clear, I am perhaps conflating two diverse aggressors. Handel Street was targeted by, so it seems, zionists. The Bomb Factory provoked the ire of some individuals more broadly opposed to a progressive, woke and/or pro-Palestine agenda. Veteran satirist Peter Kennard was one of those provocative artists with a work about the tens of thousands of children killled in Gaza.

Matthew Collings, meanwhile, has 21k followers on Instagram, who may be familiar with the rest of the story. Three less well-known art world figures, unimpressed by trenchant posts on IG, and prolific and critical drawings, about historical artists and contemporary politics, were to allegedly threaten artist, curator and building owner, all on the grounds of anti-semitism. Pictured above (in a work by Collings) is some contributory guerrilla signage which appeared nearby. While money is hardly the issue here, curator and gallery director Fedja Kilovac estimates that premature closure of a successful show cost him several thousands of pounds in lost sales.

This was also the London art scene’s loss. Collings will take his integrity elsewhere, to Margate, imminently, and to prospective venues in Europe. I wrote about his amazing show before it closed, and so did Waldemar Januszczak who suggested it deserved to win the Turner Prize. He said so in The Sunday Times, a British paper of record. This is not the first time that zionists have exerted influence over UK galleries, but what events at Handel Street Projects suggest is that even a small show, however brilliant, can become a target.

Meanwhile windows are smashed in further North London spaces. The Bomb Factory, in case its opponents hadn’t realised, is not manufacturing literal bombs. Attack an actual weapons factory in the UK, or express support for those who do, and you risk going to jail. These are such thorny times and feelings evidently run high, but the principle of artistic freedom calls for more respect.

It is linked to the principle of freedom for those living under siege and bombardment in wars that, even as Israel’s supporters cry self defence or anti-semitism, has now spread across the Middle East, killing families, destroying lives, flattening homes and erasing cultures. Since the F35 plays such a nefarious role here, disentanglement by the UK would save civilian lives. Why not that?

Matthew Collings: Drawings Against Genocide can be seen at Joseph Wales Studios, Margate, between 21st and 29th March 2026.

early film

Behold the bioscope

March 4, 2026

Like a steel tiffin box the size of a small packing case, the bioscope gleams in the fairy light ambience of an artisanal market in the centre of Delhi. On its polygonal front are circular portals the size of pickle jars with tin lids hanging on chain. Hurdy-gurdy handles sit atop, used to stir whatever it might contain. And a patient operative waits, patiently, confident in the appeal of his strange cargo. The night air is alive with swinging Indo-psychedelia. The track on his speaker was identified to me as ‘Yamma Yamma’ from the 1980 Bollywood movie Shaan.

I pay 50 rupees (about 40 pence in UK money) and take my seat. It’s a squat toy-like stool, that invites me to regress a little as I put my eye to the nearest porthole with irresistible curiosity. Inside glows and, somewhat upstage from my view-point is a scrolling frieze of images that now move for me, left to right, at unhurried speed. Each photograph or painting seems animated by the music, the magical light, and the stately procession of a spooling roll of thick paper which is tattered, spliced and sellotaped in a way that reflects the age of this technology.

The device, a bioscope, was once used to provide some of India’s most rural villages with a proto-cinematic experience. Of course it calls for some suspension of disbelief. But even as a twenty-first century smartphone owner, whose life has no shortage of striking colourful images, there was a wow factor to this rudimentary display. The bioscope scroll, as fragile as a holy relic, is charged with the historic pleasures it must have given to many a screen-free household.

There was no narrative for me to worry about, not even any clear sequence, and the only link between the images appeared to be that all of them are in some way representative of this epic land that is India. There were tigers. There were Hindu gods. There was a portrait of a beautiful actress, and next to her a cobra. The Taj Mahal was to roll across the golden stage, as was Q’tub Minar. I was also surprised to see a photo of the current Indian PM flanked by ministers. This updated bioscope is clearly adapted for our divisive, populist times.

The presentation finished and I was moved to applaud the eccentric contraption. And to think it was devised for an audience who would value images on the strength of visual or thematic appeal, rather than those viewers of contemporary film and television who, like me, tend to watch for the sake of the story. As such the bioscope is a fine, and globally diverse, example of the filmic attractions that were to inspire western avant gardes from surrealists to expressionists via futurists. As such, it reminded me of Tom Gunning’s influential paper and the film theorist’s argument that cinema was once valued for pure visuality and self-conscious awareness of looking.*

This location is one of the Indian capital’s less hectic spots, and it seems as if no family visit to New Delhi is complete without a couple of hours in this market, Dilli Haat. I haver been more than half a dozen times but, distracted by the shirts and the scarves, the paintings and the carvings, the spices and ceramics, plus the chai and the chilli flavoured momos, I had never noticed the bioscope before. Now I might never forget it.

* Tom Gunning, The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde (1986)

contemporary art, Uncategorized

The cave is basically the data safe: interview with Julius von Bismarck

February 23, 2026

A colour photo of an illuminated network of mine tunnels with a flash lamp in the foreground — Julius von Bismarck, Landscape Painting (Mine), Installation view, Dossena Mines, 2025, as part of the project “The Orobie Biennial – Thinking Like a Mountain”. Photo: Nicola Gnesi Studio, Courtesy of GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo and VG Bildkunst, Bonn 2025

The Orobie Biennial, to be found in the Bergamo Alps of Northern Italy, draws together and curates a rolling programme of many peaks. Exhibitions, installations, interventions are all set among some of Europe’s most scenic mountains. Interesting venues for visual art, in this region better known for hiking, have included a deep chamber in a disused iron and fluorite mine used now for tourism and the aging of local cheeses.

It was here that German artist Julius von Bismarck staged a piece of site specific painting that disrupted the entrance to two or three tunnels by a repetitive pattern of uniform, tight black lines which follow the contours of the walls but which create a remarkable illusion of flatness.

Stand back and, as the corresponding photographic artwork reveals, it could be an art historical etching. Walk inside and, working on viewers like some prehistoric abstract parietal work, it must heighten awareness of one’s body, as well as an effect of proximity to the Underworld.

Given this blog’s interest in what gets called ‘cave art’ and how that relates to contemporary, immersive art environments I was keen to read about this work. But seeing as not much commentary has found its way online yet, I thought it would be useful to interview Julius, virtually, from his studio in Berlin, and he was kind enough to give up his time..

MS: Dürer, Friedrich, Klee and Cezanne have all been cited as influences for this series, but Landscape Painting (Mine) (2025) made me immediately think of parietal works from prehistory. What are the points of difference and similarity with ‘cave art’ and this rare sub-genre of that, which we might call ‘mine art’?

JvB: Yeah, I think that’s a coincidence. Even if cave painting wasn’t a thing, I would have done the mine painting or drawing or etching. The fact that cave painting exists and not just once but over the whole planet and done by different humans in different ages is of course a very interesting layer of the work, as it opens up the question as to what would cave painting be today? Caves were not the only places where humans started to paint or draw what they’d seen (which of course is a very important step in human evolution.) It’s probable they did it somewhere else but it washed away, everywhere except for caves. So the cave basically is the data safe which, by accident, humans have used — without planning — to make these drawings that lived thousands and thousands of years later. It’s a kind of a random archive of human development.

Some years ago, when humans came to picture their surroundings, they created a medium. They created a language, right? One dog barks to another dog; one wolf sings to another wolf; a stag is bellowing to show off his power: language has existed between many different animals, including humans but it was something that only existed in the moment, when it was spoken by our prehistoric ancestors. However, the drawing is an important step in making this medium of communication last, which is a completely new quality of human power in some way. I think it’s really interesting to find out why humans were able to have such a massive effect on their hosting planet or on the biosphere that made them.

Landscape Painting, is a series of projects: The first one I did in Mexico, then I went on to do it in different natural environments, different cultural zones, collaborating with different humans. It’s an ongoing project that I will keep on doing, and the whole project is what you’d call media critique or an experimental media archaeology. I’m trying to find out what it means to depict the world and what change that makes in the world.

My theory is this: if you draw a mountain you will change that mountain. By depicting something you change what you depict. For example, recently you can see it very easily with influencers; influencers can take a selfie on a mountain peak in some National Park and next year there’s thousands of influencers queuing up to recreate the same shot. Thus the act of depiction influences the subject being depicted. Maybe even those early depictions of some bison in a cave painting might give us not only the idea that these bison existed in that time, but also a retroactive effect on the bison, because maybe one day we’ll come up with the idea of remaking the local species from some DNA that we find in the cave. Inspired by that cave painting we’ll bring it back to life!

MS: What specifically entailed you to make work underground

JvB: My Landscape Paintings are always historically inspired because I’m trying to look back and forward at the same time, trying to make sense of what’s happening visually. And yes, many artists before me depicted quarries and mines. It’s a typical sujet of landscape painting, and of etchings that were printed and circulated worldwide in newspapers and books or sold as individual prints. I’m talking about the time before photography was invented, when printing was one of the primary visual mediums through which we understood the world, especially in colonial timeframes.

For example ships were being sent to the other side of the world but these places weren’t known through photos and videos — we encountered these ‘foreign’ lands through etchings and paintings. This work attempts to reimagine that world because mines, caves and quarries were so often the scenes depicted. Humans were fascinated with the power of what they could do. Making a mine is akin to moving a mountain. So it’s an early visual effect corresponding to ways that humans came to affect the surface of the earth

MS: The work raises fascinating questions about perspective and immersion. At Orobie it was presumably in 360 degrees. On screen, it is in two dimensions. Like a cave painting it follows the relief of the subterranean wall, but when photographed it collapses into 2D, looking uncannily like an engraving. Would you prefer it to be seen in reproduction? Are perspectival engravings the first immersive art experiences or is that too simplistic?

JvB: With media tech you can make magic happen, you get that with Van Gogh Live and similar experiences which I find all very interesting. But often they are used in very uninteresting ways: mainly to create a simple ‘wow!’ effect, although admittedly that can sometimes be very nice. Even a selfie-media show can be interesting because you start to question your senses in a way you haven’t done before.

In this case I didn’t expect the landscape painting to feel so intense in person, because I thought it needed the step of being two-dimensionalised again. When you first look at it, it reads one way; but if you look at it for longer it shifts into something else and this transformation is what I’m interested in. When you go into the cave, you obviously know you’re in a cave and you know you’re looking at a drawing, so I didn’t anticipate the effect to be that strong. But standing in there it ‘s as if your brain keeps insisting “Drawing, drawing drawing drawing!” though you know you are inside the cave.

So far my Landscape Paintings have always been very temporary because they’re outdoors and I knew the effect would be short-lived. As soon as it rained or snowed, or there was wind or sun, everything deteriorates. I’m working with organic paint which is not the most durable and will simply wash away. But the cave is the opposite case, because you still have these many-thousand-year-old cave paintings done with paint that would not have lasted long outside. For me permanence was never essential but it’s a nice additional layer and one can only wait to see what happens.

Also the way people encounter the work is not really under my control. The mine is accessible: people come on tours, they wear helmets, it’s almost like a historical site you visit, which is a strange context for an artwork. And I don’t know if this will become a selfie spot or something that people find intrusive. Perhaps they’ll think the cave would be more beautiful without those ugly lines, which is also a completely valid response.

MS: What was your process and what were the physical challenges in making this work? Dark underground spaces can play tricks on the mind after all. Were you aware of any self-conscious heroism coming into play as you entered the mountainside and altered the rock face? As you made this piece what was your awareness of hardship and bodily risk?

JvB: I get this question a lot. Wildfires and hurricanes and Antarctic regions are places not normally known for their comfort. But I don’t experience going there as a heroic challenge. In fact, the idea of “conquering” the world, being a hero by getting to places that are hard to get to feels like an anachronism. People climb mountains to reach the summit. I enjoy that too, as a hobby. But I do it because the view is amazing, and it’s nice to have a personal challenge. I love it because I get to go through totally different climate zones, walking up a mountain. It’s similar with going into a forest fire; it’s intensely compelling because these environments contain so much interesting information you can’t access otherwise.

The attitude of, ’Oh yeah, I’ve been in this deepest cave or mine in the world!’ is really not what motivates me at all .Historically, that may have played a role for many, but if you go back to Humboldt [nineteenth century German geographer, naturalist and explorer] and read his diaries you also see that he didn’t go to these places in order to conquer them but it was predominantly for scientific research. Later on mountaineering became more about proving you could get somewhere, less about gathering any information

As for working in the mine: It wasn’t comfortable at all. It was 10 degrees and super wet in there, which meant the paint wouldn’t dry. lt was warm outside but inside it still felt like winter and we were not allowed to make a fire because nowadays people are concerned about fatal levels of carbon monoxide. (Even though people became what they are by going into caves and making fires; now we’re forbidden to make fires in caves). Anyways, it was cold and wet and the team that I worked with are the real heroes. Those thousands and thousands of lines could only be painted in a team effort.

MS: But I think certain feelings are inescapable. Exploring caves is adventurous.

JvB: Of course, since Jules Verne wrote Journey to the Centre of the Earth, that’s baked into us. Going into a mountain or going underground always carries a little bit of that feeling. When I was a teenager I spent quite a lot of time in the subway system in Berlin searching for secret tunnels. There was this big tunnel system beneath the Wall [the Berlin Wall, 1961 -1989] that had been sealed off to prevent people from escaping via subterranean passages.

It was an adventure going underground, like a secret underground world, and, of course, that fascination, and that romanticism along with it, comes from Verne.

MS: Finally, it seems to me that prehistoric parietal works (aka cave paintings) translate quite badly into two dimensions. They lack the illusion of depth whereas your piece creates the illusion of flatness. Technically how did you achieve this? Was there much experimentation with camera and equipment and were you surprised at any point by the results or lack of?

JvB: Thanks for that question, normally people never ask me that and I put a lot of effort into it so, yeah, it was a challenge. I don’t know how many photos I took, maybe hundreds. But in the end I used probably 50 of them and stitched them together. I took a flash system with several flash units that would bring enough light into the cave, to get a high quality of photo. The thing is, I wanted it to look like a drawing and a drawing has no blurry parts. With an etching, either its black or white; there’s no grey and for that you need very high image quality to not have grainy or blurry parts. That’s a big challenge in such a dark place, so we needed to use flashlights like studio lighting. Those lights make it possible to capture the surface sharply and at high resolution.

MS: Then there was the moment of truth. What was that like?

JvB: Just a lot of excitement because only at the very end it all came together. That was a stressful moment because I tend to use up all the time available and we had to hurry, since we allowed ourselves three days for the shoot and post production. I would spend all day in there taking photos trying to be concentrated, being super nervous because I loved how it looked. Translating that into a photograph was so difficult and it was something I really needed to do myself. Normally I am a team player but I have never met someone who would do that as precisely as I want it to be.

Julius von Bismarck, Landscape Painting (Mine), 2025, could be seen June to September in Dossena, at The Orobie Biennial – Thinking Like a Mountain, GAMeC, Bergamo, 2025.