art blog since 2009
What’s behind a painting or drawing, literally? The reverse of a canvas is a necessary mystery, with its potential for jottings, classifications, signatures and in some cases failed attempts. In terms of drawing, Serra knows enough about failure. The 14 works made for the Courtauld are to some degree beyond his control. So the rejects “far …
December 5, 2013
A queue is a Q is a question. Perhaps ‘what are we waiting for’ or ‘why are we waiting’. The answer will depend on your location, class and political circumstances. In the West we are on the whole happy to queue for a checkout or a cash point. It is, as Jessica Lack points out …
December 1, 2013
Is the title of this Sean Scully work an imperative? I only ask because gallery visitors can do little else when confronted with this three-panelled masterpiece from the 1980s. So we stare . . . but whatever we seek, paint is all we might find. Bands of off-white and off-black, inspired by bleached bone and …
November 20, 2013
Seven more days slip by with but a handful of stories to cling to. Click on: There’s now a Kafka angle to the Munich art hoard story (interivew with Cornelius Gurlitt) Here’s another good Nazi art theft yarn. What became of the Mona Lisa? Museum-show of the season is not in a museum at all. …
November 18, 2013
While there may be plenty of government departments in castles all around the world, we are lucky in Britain to broadly avoid that particular Kafkaesque motif. And yet the darkness of a homegrown bouncy castle made of leather, with its many turrets, and its relentless air pump, is every bit as oppressive as the Czech …
November 14, 2013
Your usual mix of the good, the bad and the trivial (art stories from around the web): Look on the bright side of any imminent apocalypse. Colleen Fitzgibbon interviews filmmaker Ben Rivers for BOMB Magazine Found poetry of Google autocomplete demonstrates that the hivemind sure has an active muse. Read about it on Hyperallergic Here’s …
November 11, 2013
It is all very well writing with a skull on your desk (I don’t). But you might still wonder how much thought the saints of old gave to the more practical aspects of death. Now, however, American artist Baseman brings you right into that seldom-explored margin between death and burial/cremation, via an interview with funeral …
October 30, 2013
Patti Smith, writing in her memoir Just Kids, says that by walking a city you can come to own the very streets. She and lover Robert Mapplethorpe attempted and achieved as much in New York City. But that was Manhattan and, to point out by way of a cliché, nobody sane walks anywhere in urban …
October 25, 2013
In terms of medium, Steve McQueen is in unusual territory with his celebrated philatelical artwork Queen and Country. Just don’t expect to see any of this piece come through your letterbox. 179 sheets of stamps now occupy a large filing cabinet at Imperial War Museum North. Visitors can pull out trays and encounter, one by …
October 21, 2013
This sculpture makes a meal of a piece of gum. It may be marble, but it was once a remnant piece of a habit-forming chew. And now it is the size of a torso. Visitors may be struck at the muscularity, which marble will always suggest. There is a body trapped in here, perhaps a …
October 2, 2013