art blog since 2009
Towards the end of this 35 minute film, a horrible thought occurred to me. Maybe Marcus Coates is making the whole thing up and playing an unethical trick on a terminally ill man. In voiceover, with a view from a hospice room, he describes a trip up the Amazon in vivid detail. It is lush, …
March 3, 2011
Not everything that gets hung on a wall purports to be art. Certificates, contracts, constitutions; all these have at one time or another been framed and put on display. Counter Offer is hardly an aesthetic statement. It comes across as a legalistic exhibit, a founding document of the type which reminds you how much weight …
February 27, 2011
According to a 2003 book, there were 3.6 million Anderson Shelters in use during WWII. They must have been a common sight, as common as catching a glimpse of your parents having sex. Mary Kelly, b.1941, has spoken of the War as a political ‘primal scene‘ for people of her generation. And so into this …
February 23, 2011
Good news comes by phone, as the old adage goes. It has even been said more recently that it’s good to talk. So visitors to Carey Young’s show may already be keen to pick up this phone. In a gallery context it promises even more excitement. As Alex Farquharson points out in a highly informative …
February 19, 2011
This post, about art hacks, has almost nothing to do with cultural journalists. It has more to do with a visit to the Cory Arcangel installation at the Barbican and computer hacking. Arcangel has taken 14 games consoles and fitted a chip which allows the system to play itself. His coding dictates that the central …
February 15, 2011
Since singer/songwriter Tom Verlaine cropped up in a recent post, it seems excusable to quote him with regards to the subject of this one: a re-staged gig by The Cramps. Both emerged from a scene based around New York venue CBGB’s during the mid 70s, but the gig in question was played in 1978 to …
February 10, 2011
Truth, it is sometimes argued, is an effect of discourse. And discourse in this case has given rise to a nebular, eerie-glowing alien life form. You cannot hear it, but it speaks many tongues. We realise almost at once this is a sound installation. Those are not tentacles and suckers but speakers hanging from the …
February 7, 2011
What could be more uncanny than neat piles of books actually underneath a desk, if not neat piles of books on a decidedly uncanny subject? In this case, automatic writing. For Gertrude Stein, to whom this sculpture is intended as a homage, the books represent a return of the repressed. The writer went from experimenting …
February 4, 2011
Looking at art and reading can seem poles apart. Galleries are public spaces in which we move from one room to another. Reading is usually sedentary and usually in some way private. But The Wanderer by Franz Kafka, by Rory Macbeth, suggests otherwise. The title promises a mobile activity, while the reading which took place …
February 1, 2011
These two mismatched halves, screwed together and suspended out of reach, bring to mind both the promise and the pitfalls of romantic love. First there is the seedy, fruitful aspect of these two fruits pushed together. But then there are the unavoidable differences as they find themselves hung out to dry in a marriage from …
January 27, 2011