art blog since 2009
Truth, it is sometimes argued, is an effect of discourse. And discourse in this case has given rise to a nebular, eerie-glowing alien life form. You cannot hear it, but it speaks many tongues. We realise almost at once this is a sound installation. Those are not tentacles and suckers but speakers hanging from the …
February 7, 2011
What could be more uncanny than neat piles of books actually underneath a desk, if not neat piles of books on a decidedly uncanny subject? In this case, automatic writing. For Gertrude Stein, to whom this sculpture is intended as a homage, the books represent a return of the repressed. The writer went from experimenting …
February 4, 2011
Looking at art and reading can seem poles apart. Galleries are public spaces in which we move from one room to another. Reading is usually sedentary and usually in some way private. But The Wanderer by Franz Kafka, by Rory Macbeth, suggests otherwise. The title promises a mobile activity, while the reading which took place …
February 1, 2011
These two mismatched halves, screwed together and suspended out of reach, bring to mind both the promise and the pitfalls of romantic love. First there is the seedy, fruitful aspect of these two fruits pushed together. But then there are the unavoidable differences as they find themselves hung out to dry in a marriage from …
January 27, 2011
Tooling presses once used to manufacture a dream sports car of the 1980s are now to be found 18m below sea level, a habitation for crabs, sea cucumbers and a lobster. This is not a metaphor. A metaphor would be the 1981 commercial for the DeLorean DMC-12 which showed the car by the ocean with …
January 25, 2011
Studio Apparatus for Camden Arts Centre – An Introductory Structure: Introduction; a lexicon of phenomenon and information association; futurobjectics (in three sections), mysterious island*, or Temporary Monument *See Introduction The full title of Mike Nelson’s work is so verbose there’s no room for anything else in that opening paragraph. It is, like the work itself, …
January 22, 2011
One way to define contemporary art may be to include anything which provokes the reaction: “That’s not art!†And Damien Hirst is certainly no stranger to this reaction. But the genius of this previously unseen work is that when it asks, ‘Why can’t this be art?’ as it surely does, the immediate response is it …
January 20, 2011
Here is an urgent response to so-called Neo-Futurism: criticismism feels obliged to vehemently oppose it, although I realise this blog is probably doing a minor service to Joseph Young and his colleagues by doing so. Nevertheless, it is to be condemned. The original futurists were seductive right wing agitators who celebrated the advent of World …
January 16, 2011
If you were to purchase work from Cindy Sherman‘s new show, someone would apparently come to your home and fit the piece to your room. Her photographic prints fill the whole wall. They are, in other words, wallpaper and their decorative potential is exaggerated by toile patterning in the background. This puts one in mind …
January 15, 2011
Written for Culture24. Unlike most investigations of Loch Ness, Gerard Byrne’s new show is not at all interested in the existence of a monster. His first major solo exhibition in a UK public space is about Nessie as a photographic phenomenon rather than a flesh and bone saurian. Speaking via phone, the Dublin-based artist explains …
January 14, 2011