art blog since 2009
The vital importance of visual art, in this emerging plutocracy, is without doubt. Even though, for most politically engaged artists, it can seem like swimming against the popular tide. But the cultural reversals of 2016 are, in fact, just a reaction against the false promise of aesthetics. They are anti-art, anti-intellectual, anti-fashion, and opposed to …
January 2, 2017
The time tested way of introducing a story (“Once upon a time…â€) is little help when writing a blog about art. And so faced with the most narrative-driven work in this year’s Liverpool Biennial, I don’t know where to begin. HFT The Gardener is a multi-faceted piece display which comprises of some 174 works on paper and a …
September 26, 2016
Brighton Photo Biennial 2016 will look at the way photography fosters our understanding of style, the body, gender and subcultures. It is arguably the biggest visual art event on the city’s calendar, and this year the month-long festival issued a call out to BA students on Brighton Uni’s acclaimed photography course. Four chosen artists, who appear …
September 14, 2016
Art Rules was a shortlived online experiment from the ICA and in 2013 I was one of many people asked for some wisdom. “Don’t plan on getting paid or laid,†I wrote. “The work is its own reward.†Well, Lucky pdf, an arts collective who are much cooler than me, wrote “Don’t work for freeâ€. But …
September 7, 2016
The artist appears to have a simple and urgent proposition: to render the past absurd is to neutralise the rhetoric of the political right. Without a golden age to hark about, no one can promise to make America, the UK, or India ‘great again’. And we can instead progress to a state of internationalism, equal …
July 30, 2016
We can tell a number of things about Mark Leckey from this autobiographical film. So, the Merseysider grew up in the shadow of the Beatles, the A-bomb and the 1999 solar eclipse. Dream English Kid is a life story made with footage found online. So we also pick up on memories of motorways, pylons, football crowds, …
July 11, 2016
It surprises me that the artist filmed this himself. It looks like a degraded home movie, out of focus, a bit over exposed. But no, it’s an afternoon of fieldwork into a four second loop. Indeed, it is a loop within a circular loop. The carousel offers what Nietzsche might have recognised as an eternal return, …
June 17, 2016
“Strafing is the military practice of attacking ground targets from low-flying aircraft using aircraft-mounted automatic weapons ranging from machine guns to auto cannons or rotary cannons.†Armed with this knowledge, if not this hardware, we can safely say that Williams’ picnic suite appears to be the worse for an encounter with an airborne machine gun. …
May 31, 2016
Saint Mark’s chapel in Kemptown has been throbbing for five days straight. That is what you get from this piece, a relentless pulse of skuzzy, kilowatt-heavy hum which envelops you. Where’s the band? You might ask, if you are keen on music of this persuasion. Well, they’ve left behind some eight unmanned guitars leaning on a similar number …
May 17, 2016
The drug addict and the contemporary artist share a certain flair for rebellion. And so the sight of a high tensile steel cable threaded with roaches from spliffs makes perfect sense here. We are told that Leirner is/was an addict and that the work here in her blue-chip show at White Cube was originally put …
April 18, 2016