art blog since 2009
It seems about time criticismism did some aggregation. So from now on I’ll try to post links to some of the news stories, features, blog posts, videos etc, which I’ve enjoyed on any given week. So here goes: My first virtual found object has to be the first show by Dead Hare Radio. It features …
April 3, 2011
If you’re heading out to look at some art this weekend, it may be with some relief. Chances are that on Wednesday your nearest gallery made it onto Arts Council England’s list of National portfolio organisations. NPOs will continue to get funding, albeit reduced by some percentage figure: typically 11%. So most galleries are going …
April 1, 2011
Leading agriculturalists, politicians and intellectuals got together this March to explore how Roman farming techniques can help us protect the environment in 2011. The setting was Italy’s leading school of agriculture in Florence and the occasion was to mark 50 years of a journal of farming history, namely Rivista di storia dell’ agricoltura. This publication …
March 29, 2011
There is nothing like an early death to fuse an artist’s biography and work in the minds of his audience. Here is Pino Pascali, beside one of his best known works, inseparable. Common sense tells us that a motorcycle crash should not affect the worth of the Italian sculptor’s art. Yet it does, and this …
March 25, 2011
Antonin Artaud only wrote one play, said to be impossible to restage. So we might now find the best example of the writer’s so-called Theatre of Cruelty at a Nancy Spero show Certainly, the only performance of Spurt of Blood which this blogger ever witnessed would be difficult to review. Shouts, cries and physical convulsions …
March 21, 2011
Most of those lucky enough to see Edwina Ashton’s performance at Jerwood Space in the next five weeks will be, presumably, non-plussed. How else to react to people dressed as lobsters? For three hour stretches the lobsters may be seen to rearrange objects. There may be more to it, but that’s the gist. It’s a …
March 18, 2011
Brand power is interesting because brands are power. They can attract money and votes. They can set the conditions for certain types of behaviour. Even weapons have brands. This show makes a target out of one luxury fashion brand and at first you wonder why. It is after all only a designer label. Chanel is …
March 15, 2011
Reality can seem a debatable term. But is worth considering that the word came into use in the 1540s as a legal reference to a fixed property. Of course, the word realty still means possession. So you could make a case for Fake Estates being a realist artwork par excellence. Because Matta-Clark took ownership of …
March 11, 2011
There is something unholy going on, although it is not clear quite what, and there was nothing about bones and hair in the manifesto for the show. “Voodoofesto,†Melissa Logan corrects me. Stacks of folded t-shirts are laid out on a white shelf. The logos say Chanel, but the slogans add “voodoo”. I look around …
March 9, 2011
Novelist Philip Roth is known for having said: “When a writer is born into a family, that family is finished.†And this work by Gordon Matta-Clark suggests a comparable model for artists. The house which he literally saws in two is described in a caption to the film of the event as a “typical family …
March 6, 2011