art blog since 2009
Apologies for sporadic posting of late, anyhow I’m back on the trail: It’s the “art find of the century” (consequently the best Found Object ever). Hyperallergic reports on the discovery of 1,500 degenerate art works in the flat of an eightysomething hoarder Mordovia sounds like the complete opposite of a holiday destination. BBC News explores …
November 5, 2013
It is all very well writing with a skull on your desk (I don’t). But you might still wonder how much thought the saints of old gave to the more practical aspects of death. Now, however, American artist Baseman brings you right into that seldom-explored margin between death and burial/cremation, via an interview with funeral …
October 30, 2013
Patti Smith, writing in her memoir Just Kids, says that by walking a city you can come to own the very streets. She and lover Robert Mapplethorpe attempted and achieved as much in New York City. But that was Manhattan and, to point out by way of a cliché, nobody sane walks anywhere in urban …
October 25, 2013
In terms of medium, Steve McQueen is in unusual territory with his celebrated philatelical artwork Queen and Country. Just don’t expect to see any of this piece come through your letterbox. 179 sheets of stamps now occupy a large filing cabinet at Imperial War Museum North. Visitors can pull out trays and encounter, one by …
October 21, 2013
This sculpture makes a meal of a piece of gum. It may be marble, but it was once a remnant piece of a habit-forming chew. And now it is the size of a torso. Visitors may be struck at the muscularity, which marble will always suggest. There is a body trapped in here, perhaps a …
October 2, 2013
Neo-expressionist painting, if that’s what this be, often has literal depth. Layers of paint come between viewer and canvas. And layers don’t get much thicker than those of this Mexican artist. When you square up to it, there is a material heaviness. And this translates (in our primitive minds) to a metaphorical heaviness: in other …
September 26, 2013
Painting is an empty pocket. The content it once contained, the paint itself, has in many cases gone. In all cases now, a stretched canvas is a blank canvas. Put in it what you will. So the unadorned white t-shirt you see here, the unifying image from a show which shares its name, is more …
September 22, 2013
Japan has multiple ways to say “Iâ€. Artist and multiple-self David Blandy tells us this half way through his new film Anjin 1600: Edo Wonderpark, a film itself part autobiography. The Japanses have a dynamic way of speaking in first person, which relates to the present company; and what artist keeps such interesting company as …
September 13, 2013
Greetings cybernauts: Interview of the week, possibly the month, the Guardian speak with ‘wrecker of civilisation’ Genesis P. Orridge Meanwhile the Telegraph keeps it light with the trailer to a new feature about the most famous cat on the webz These are a pure joy. Music videos chosen by Prosthetic Knowledge. Just why is the …
September 2, 2013
The moon is to be howled at. When it comes to our planet’s only satellite, we have been-there-done-that. If there was a concession selling t-shirts, we missed it. Our arrival, let’s face it, was a disappointment. We struck neither oil nor gold. Bored astronauts batted around golf balls and American footballs in an inspirational void. …
August 30, 2013