art blog since 2009
Whether you call it a weatherbox or, more correctly a Stevenson Screen, this object provokes even more curiosity than usual. It doesn’t belong in a gallery. It doesn’t often exude a blue light. The light comes from a speaker wired up in there to make this sculpture appear sentient twice over. It glows and it …
June 7, 2012
“Okay, we’re 30m underwater on a ley line and we’re heading for some squid,†or words to that effect. Such is my greeting from artist Kaffe Matthews. My response is helpless excitement. I lie on my back on the shark platform and look up at the murky green light. You can well imagine the hammerheads …
May 8, 2012
If needing just one word to sum up Damien Hirst at Tate Modern, you might resort to some made up slang invented for a work of dystopian fiction. The violence of his killed and pickled animals is horrorshow, as is the vitrine pictured. Real horrorshow, the ultimate accolade for gang member Alex in A Clockwork …
April 8, 2012
As if to save those analysts the bother, Yayoi Kusama has already labelled Aggregation as part of her Sex Obsession series. She describes the white growths as so many phalluses. So you might see her boat as a metaphor for the conscious mind, floating above unconscious depths. Except here, the mind has been overrun by …
February 8, 2012
This semaphore frieze will stop you in your tracks at the Serpentine. Lygia Pape calls her epic a (the) Book of Time. Well, it both is and it isn’t. Yes, it has 365 elements which might be called pages. They are made from wood, which is related to paper. And they have a colourful grammar …
January 25, 2012
Liliane Lijn is such a hands-on artist that, within two minutes of arriving at her North London studio, my own pair were enlisted to help lift a Poem Machine from the floor onto a well-worn work surface. There was an issue with this kinetic, text-bearing sculpture. It creaked as it rotated, so Lijn and a …
January 10, 2012
The ideal place to relate this piece of art might be in a pub. You could try a dinner party, but you may not get the requisite howls of disbelief. “There’s this German artist, see, who wants to fly to the moon. No she’s not in a space training programme. She’s going to let herself …
January 5, 2012
Investigations have taken place as to the feasibility of projecting a single word onto the surface of the moon. But Liliane Lijn is still waiting for a technical solution. In the meantime, we can make do with a simulation. And the word which appears on the virtual moon, both online and at FACT Liverpool, is …
December 21, 2011
Amidst the bright, shiny things one could take home from Frieze to put on your wall was this: a structure of mud, daring collectors to take it back to their bright, shiny homes. Hand made from adobe bricks and modelled on an original in the highlands of Peru, this sculpture brought the outside world into …
October 21, 2011
A film in the back room tells the story of Sein, who seems to be in perpetual flight around the city of Cairo. In piecing together her story, the artist may also be piecing together ours. Like Sein, we find ourselves lost in the city or at least the shop at 87 Sandgate Road, in …
August 23, 2011