contemporary art – Page 6 – criticismism ii

November 20, 2013

Sean Scully, Stare (1984)

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,…

November 18, 2013

Found Objects 18/11/13

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…

November 14, 2013November 14, 2013

Tom Dale, Department of the Interior (2012)

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…

November 11, 2013November 11, 2013

Found Objects 11/11/13

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…

October 30, 2013December 2, 2013

Jordan Baseman, A Cold Hand on a Cold Day (2013)

It is all very well writing with a skull on your desk (I donâ€™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,…

October 25, 2013October 25, 2013

ASCO, Asco (1975)

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 clichÃ©, nobody…

October 21, 2013

Steve McQueen, Queen and Country (2003-08)

In terms of medium, Steve McQueen is in unusual territory with his celebrated philatelical artwork Queen and Country. Just donâ€™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…

October 2, 2013October 2, 2013

Alex Hoda, Schliere (Streak), 2012

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…

September 26, 2013

Bosco Sodi, Untitled (2013)

Neo-expressionist painting, if thatâ€™s what this be, often has literal depth. Layers of paint come between viewer and canvas. And layers donâ€™t get much thicker than those of this Mexican artist. When you square up to it, there is a material heaviness. And this translates (in our primitive minds) to…

September 13, 2013September 13, 2013

David Blandy, Anjin 1600: Edo Wonderpark (2013)

Japan has multiple ways to say â€œIâ€. Artist and multiple-self David Blandy tells us this half way through his new film Anjin 1600: Edo Wonderpark, a film itself part autobiography. The Japanses have a dynamic way of speaking in first person, which relates to the present company; and what artist…