art blog since 2009
Is it fair to say that a monarchist in Britain has an easier life? Certainly, they have a less paranoid one. They have got behind the head of church and state and can accept all that is bidden. It is, strangely, as easy for a contemporary artist. Your collectors are rich. The Queen is rich. …
November 8, 2012
To some degree this is art for the feet. Serra’s eight sculptures invite you to walk them in sequence. In fact they demand it. How else will you get to see them? Thus it takes half an hour to simply cover the ground of this semi-permanent show in the Arcelor-Mittal Gallery here at the Guggenheim …
September 22, 2012
This piece floats on a perilous sea of style mags; they buoy up a marble-effect plinth. Matthew Stone is not cool, he is stone cold. But these publications have more gravity than usual. Their covers are stuck to blocks of wood, giving each more permanence than a sheaf of glossy pages. A muted printing technique …
September 18, 2012
To give this work it’s full title: This is how I roll 24/7…Not Just On A Satrday Night in a Shit Basemnt (sic). And the shit basement in question was Brighton’s Grey Area. It was indeed Saturday night when this work both previewed and closed. The artist was nowhere to be seen. We still cannot …
August 18, 2012
This is not a simple work but it is easy to enjoy. It is easy to enjoy if your idea of fun is lying back in bed listening to breakbeats and watching a movie on the ceiling. The footage shows scrambled data on a VDU, followed by a delapidated caravan in a clearing with a …
August 10, 2012
Democracy has, one assumes, been going downhill since the time of ancient Greece. And here are the ruins of the principle: twelve abandoned, jumbled and toppled lecterns. In the midst of their cluster is a nod to the classical world that spawned public speaking. But the statue which has long sat in the gardens here …
July 25, 2012
If gardens are symbols of mankind’s dominion over the natural world, then fountains are the suggestion of a triumph over physics. That’s one in your face, gravity. Having said that, there is nothing too agressive about the many spouts of water you can find in many a city square, many a palace or not-even-stately home. …
July 20, 2012
Visitors to the Yoko Ono show in London may well come away with a piece of debt to the redoubtable artist. To be precise that would be a jigsaw piece of debt. Early in her show at Serpentine hang some half a dozen WWII helmets filled with segments of a giant puzzle. You can guess …
July 13, 2012
Treehuggers may well like this show in which paper from books is shredded line by line to form a copse of six or seven arboreal candidates for the sentient term Being. The pages now flow down from book shelves just underneath the ceiling. And you have to get within hugging distance to appreciate the painstaking …
June 23, 2012
The Pure Good of Theory is one of the most oft quoted poem titles around. Wallace Stevens seems to have nailed it, but are there more spheres of pure good? Visitors to Brighton University last week might think so. At a degree show, you could argue for the pure good of art education, which after …
June 17, 2012