art blog since 2009
Tooling presses once used to manufacture a dream sports car of the 1980s are now to be found 18m below sea level, a habitation for crabs, sea cucumbers and a lobster. This is not a metaphor. A metaphor would be the 1981 commercial for the DeLorean DMC-12 which showed the car by the ocean with …
January 25, 2011
Studio Apparatus for Camden Arts Centre – An Introductory Structure: Introduction; a lexicon of phenomenon and information association; futurobjectics (in three sections), mysterious island*, or Temporary Monument *See Introduction The full title of Mike Nelson’s work is so verbose there’s no room for anything else in that opening paragraph. It is, like the work itself, …
January 22, 2011
One way to define contemporary art may be to include anything which provokes the reaction: “That’s not art!†And Damien Hirst is certainly no stranger to this reaction. But the genius of this previously unseen work is that when it asks, ‘Why can’t this be art?’ as it surely does, the immediate response is it …
January 20, 2011
Here is an urgent response to so-called Neo-Futurism: criticismism feels obliged to vehemently oppose it, although I realise this blog is probably doing a minor service to Joseph Young and his colleagues by doing so. Nevertheless, it is to be condemned. The original futurists were seductive right wing agitators who celebrated the advent of World …
January 16, 2011
If you were to purchase work from Cindy Sherman‘s new show, someone would apparently come to your home and fit the piece to your room. Her photographic prints fill the whole wall. They are, in other words, wallpaper and their decorative potential is exaggerated by toile patterning in the background. This puts one in mind …
January 15, 2011
Written for Culture24. Unlike most investigations of Loch Ness, Gerard Byrne’s new show is not at all interested in the existence of a monster. His first major solo exhibition in a UK public space is about Nessie as a photographic phenomenon rather than a flesh and bone saurian. Speaking via phone, the Dublin-based artist explains …
January 14, 2011
For all the world you expect this image to move. It is a back lit screen with a casing as substantial as a cathode ray tube. We have come to expect computerised tablets to sing and dance, why not this? But no matter how long you watch, the piece is static. The TVs in the …
January 13, 2011
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