art blog since 2009
The fifty donkeys were cute and the labels were amusing. But it was the third element in this piece which packed a real punch. A photo of a real donkey behind barbed wire in a town square. It was a scene was staged by Nazi authorities in 1933 as a warning not to be stubborn and …
October 28, 2014
It is a quirk of perception that we read this as a city. On the face of it, most of Navarro’s work is comprised of regimented obelisks. So it’s not like any city you or I might live in. There’s no chaos, no movement and no colour. The columns are as grave as tombstones in a …
October 27, 2014
Where you might expect to find a detail such as ‘oil on canvas’, or ‘cast bronze’, or even ‘car engine’, Vo gives us the full scoop on his indecorous found object. A wall plaque opens the bonnet. Indeed. This contemporary sculpture is comprised of “The engine of the artist’s father Phung Vo’s Mercedes Benz.†Provenance is all: …
October 26, 2014
It hangs like a chandelier designed to throw shade. You cannot walk beneath it without speculating on your own death. And it’s made of iron, technology of another age. The view’s not so great from this angle, but the form echoes a swastika. And that would be a treacherous swastika with a half yard long …
October 24, 2014
In the event of a submarine attack, the safest place to be in Liverpool right now is on board the Dazzle Ship by Carlos Cruz-Diez. It presents a ‘moving’ target even when moored up. Clashing colours and disruptive patterns were hit upon during World War One as a way of confusing German U-Boats who, after …
October 19, 2014
Athens: cradle of Western civilisation, and in more recent times the canary in Europe’s coal mine. On the face of it, the perfect setting for Simon Senn’s dionysian artwork. Just Let Go is (so far) a single video loop in which three angry locals rampage the length and breadth of a concrete wall, starting fires …
October 15, 2014
Don’t get me wrong. BBC4 presenters do their jobs well. As they pace their way through churches and galleries. As they strike up instant rapports with curators. You’ve got to love ’em. But there’s little doubt that things ain’t what they used to be. If you look at an Alastair Sooke, next to a Kenneth Clark or a …
October 13, 2014
War is a game for boys of all ages. So if that’s your violent gender you might especially enjoy this montage of vintage film in which helicopter gunships rain deafening misery on the Vietnamese. Dinh Q Lê’s film begins gently with innocuous footage of dragonflies and some peasant wisdom about determining the weather from their flight patterns. …
October 11, 2014
“I like the traditional Chinese philosophy,†says Wang Yuyang, “Because it talks about the relationship between 1 and 0, on and off, black and white, something and nothing…†You have to imagine that the thirtysomething artist would also like the branch of post-structuralist theory known, confusingly, as deconstruction. If deconstruction itself has been sparked into …
October 8, 2014
The perversity on display here is not the a tergo position adopted by the blonde mistress or the rake so drunk he has fallen out of the large double bed. No the perversity is that Wächtler uses a medium as gentle as watercolour to incriminate the bad behaviour of this fornicating sot and his willing …
October 7, 2014