art blog since 2009
Written for Culture24. Bob and Roberta Smith have called their forthcoming show The Life of the Mind, and the last notable person who offered to demonstrate that burnt down a hotel. The title is a quote from the 1991 movie Barton Fink with the arsonist played by John Goodman. He is very annoyed to have …
January 11, 2011
“If Duchamp or maybe Magritte wrote a novel…it might look something like this remarkable little book of Padgett Powell’sâ€. So speaks American novelist Richard Ford on the topic of recent bestseller, The Interrogative Mood. Yes, that is the novel written entirely in questions. Indeed, there is question after question for 164 pages. Powell will ask …
January 8, 2011
It is quite something to come across an eye hospital in a gallery. Each one could be a metaphor for the other. In both you can expect some kind of operation on your field of vision. But to come across St John’s Eye Hospital in East Jerusalem is stranger still. In this two-channel video installation, …
January 4, 2011
It should tell us something that art has both a world and a capital. Literature doesn’t. Music doesn’t. Film has more than one, perhaps, but these refer to production plants. In the case of art, the capital has been Florence, Paris, New York, and London. For long periods of time there is seemingly no capital. …
December 29, 2010
The season of list-making is upon us. But lists, according to US novelist Don Delillo, are a form of ‘cultural hysteria’. As if the impending winter festival wasn’t hysterical enough. This year, rather than try and minimise the anxiety, I thought I’d crank things up a notch or two by compiling a list of the …
December 20, 2010
The artists on a gallery roster are invited to think of themselves as colleagues and take part in what we know as secret Santa. Instead of bottles of wine, DVDs and chocolates, they must give artworks. Secret Santa operates as a closed, rational system for regulating generosity at work. It brings teams together. It ensures …
December 14, 2010
Even when the profit margin is not immediately apparent, there is something to be said for ivory towers. More of that later. Now it’s time to step outside and comment on real world protests taking place at the Slade School of Art and elsewhere. The student demonstrations and occupations are about more than the right …
December 8, 2010
There is a highlight of the current show at Grey Area. That word is used because the rest of the works are in darkness. Visitors are provided with torches. A lightbulb forms part of Tavasiev’s sculpture. So what it seems to illuminate is the arbitrary way we give a personality to the spirit of the …
December 5, 2010
No, your eyes do not deceive you. Those really are tiny winged skeletons riding on the back of a dragonfly. And there are a hundred or more spectacles like this in Swarm by Tessa Farmer. They give the impression of an airborne war, as if the skeletons are fighting for control of their glass cabinet. …
December 2, 2010
Today I found myself clapping and cheering for a piece of art although I have little idea what the work might look like and am not at all sure if it is any good. Nevertheless, I was participating. 2,000 of us stood on the seafront in minus temperatures for an hour and a half. At …
November 27, 2010