art blog since 2009
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
One (the?) aim of art writing is to interpret with words. But the imagery of so much art is so strong, that verbal language can only play an ernest second fiddle, happy just to be at the gig. (Works of literature isolate themselves on shelves and in libraries. Aware they fail to represent the visible world, …
March 13, 2016
Long after his death, forensic photographer Luigi Tomellini has become an ‘artist’. Producer Stefano Amoretti and photographer Mino Tristovskij have put him in a book and a show. This could not have happened had not his analogue photography lost its value as evidence gathering. The very obsolescence of the medium gives these documents a certain …
February 26, 2016
To begin again by stating the obvious: you can’t eat art but artists have to eat. And so from early times, the hunters and gatherers of this world have shown a great degree of largesse towards artists. But in recent decades, that same largesse has become a focus for the visual arts. Since Rirkrit Tiravanija cooked …
February 22, 2016
Skate parks are paradoxical places: social enterprises often supported by local councils which still manage to attract, engage and win over even the most disaffected kids on two to four wheels. Contemporary art can be this way. Projects with an ‘edge’ can still attract funding. You might even say that funders like a soupçon of youthful …
February 18, 2016
Some say, “From each according to their means to each according to their needsâ€. Some say, “Do as you would be done byâ€. But very few live up to either of those incontrovertible principles. And though I have witnessed several decent people buy sandwiches for homeless individuals in Brighton where I live, I have never …
February 15, 2016
How can one comment on a work of art based on an experience of no more than 10 minutes with it, when the entirety lasts an entire day? Well, the elevator pitch for Gordon’s film tells you enough. This is the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Psycho (1960) slowed down from 24 frames a second to just …
February 11, 2016
The Instruction Manual by John Ashbery is a poem of some 74 lines, which mentions more than 30 colours. And these colours evoke Guadalajara, Mexico, a place the speaker hasn’t even seen. But having said that, he pictures it well. His senses appear to have been sharpened by the deadline for a technical writing gig, and they …
February 10, 2016
As 1968 begins to pass out of living memory, the date begins to lose its power. Sadly. We are by now a long way from barricades and a long way from a revolutionary tipping point. It seems. Perhaps to keep the memory alive and honour the students who could have brought down a Western government, …
January 30, 2016