art blog since 2009
Seeing this film, you’d want to allow a certain innocence to the terrorist gunmen who haunt our dreams here in the West. They too, it seems, are only doing their job. In found audio, we hear onesuch maniacal footsoldier entertain doubts before taking a pair of lives. We watch another confess that he was on the mission to raise …
February 25, 2015
Do vast spaces bring forth big art, or does big art call for vast spaces? I ask because the current production at the South London outpost of White Cube is a monster of wholesale appropriation. Artist Christian Marclay occupies all five galleries and includes a performance space, a screen-printing operation by Coriander Studios, along with …
February 17, 2015
“There’s a metaphor in there somewhere,” says Guardian critic Adrian Searle, as he contemplates this film. criticismism would like to pick up on those words: parrot fashion, naturally. But that is what Glossolalia makes me think of: art criticism, mimicry and even plagiarism. To look at reviews for this pair of Portuguese artists certain phrases do …
February 12, 2015
While this show must have been a logistical headache, the extensive catalogue of objects in Back to the Fields points to an impossible dream. And it’s the most beautiful and sad dream: revolution. This is not the first time Ewan has visited post-revolutionary France. You can read about her doomed experiment at Folkestone in 2011. That was …
February 12, 2015
Welcome back to the new monthly survey of great shows from public institutions who’ve got their act together online. Cold outside, but it’s quite warm in the UK’s galleries. James Bridle: Seamless Transitions, The Photographers’ Gallery, London, 6 Feb – 15 Apr. Using planning apps and first hand accounts, tech artist Bridle has visualised some of the buildings which …
February 1, 2015
Since the days of King Cnut, few public figures can have had such an impossible relation with the sea. In the paintings of John Virtue the viewer finds themselves lost in the surf. But each work represents the most fleeting of moments, as waves break quicker than the hand can sketch. And this artist’s hand …
January 27, 2015
For many on the Left, the Spanish Civil War may have been a somewhat romantic affair. But it soon turned into an epic disappointment. It was a disappointment on the scale of WWII. Pallant House in Chichester is currently showing the first exhibition devoted to British artists during the Iberian conflict. It makes a good …
January 8, 2015
Of course, buildings cannot have souls. We are cannot even install them in computers. But a new 3D film by six directors, which began life as a TV series, sets out to demonstrate the improbable. You have to admit these are personable buildings. The roving cameras are accompanied by first person voiceovers which bring us into the …
January 2, 2015
Happy New Year to readers everywhere. Here’s the first of a monthly round up of shows in (usually) public sector spaces around the UK. So, if you’re in Britain in January 2015, you won’t want to miss… Grace Schwindt: Only a Free Individual Can Create a Free Society, Site Gallery, Sheffield, 10 Jan – 28 Feb. …
January 1, 2015
The LED blinks on and off. We could be here a while. As deep history has shown, a rock like this can take its own sweet time to breathe forth life, or yawn and swallow us all. Just whose hand might go to the remote to activate a 80kg lump of sandstone? Would it be a …
December 18, 2014