Dive into the archives.
- Cy Twombly in London
Over at WhiteHot Magazine of Contemporary Art, you’ll find my review of Cy Twombly’s current exhibition at Gagosian Gallery.
- 2008: Moments: Harold Pinter (1930-2008)
I haven’t been to the theatre very often in the last ten years. I’ve purposefully avoided it. What a lot of people don’t know is that I actually started off as a writer for the theatre, when I was a teenager. One of my favorite playwrights (and hence formative writers) was Harold Pinter. I read [...]
- 2008: Moments: The Last of Rothko
At the end of his life, Mark Rothko was making black paintings. Black and gray. Like TV static, but without the white: the voidlessness is now upon us. When you get closer, you can make out pale beige shapes, contorted figures, and layers of underpainting - particularly in the lower, lighter panels - something creature-like [...]
- Richard Serra at Gagosian Britannia
The philosophical rigidity of Richard Serra’s sculptures stands for raw endurance. They last, they extend themselves past momentary interpretations, and yet they are not momentous; rather they nearly pass as organic forms. One at Gagosian is a vaginal maze that you can readily get lost in, its walls narrow and claustrophobic — a metallic birth [...]
- Ryan Trecartin at Whitechapel Gallery
Having sat through so much bad video art in the past, I had until fairly recently come close to giving up on the medium altogether. Lately, however, my prejudices have been dissolving, as a new generation of video artists — people like Mark Ther, Keren Cytter, and Ryan Trecartin — has been opening up possibilities [...]
- London Book Launch: November 2nd
See you there!
- Jarman, Julien, Wittgenstein, Martians
Of all the possible mediums he could have chosen, it is somehow curious that Derek Jarman decided to become a filmmaker. He didn’t just do film, of course, but it is for his films that he is best known. Perhaps you get the feeling, when watching some of these movies, that they should have been [...]
- Climbing the Anal Staircase: The Art of No Bra
I.
They say No Bra is all tits and wonder, but they’re wrong. There’s also a lot of cock, and even some fake mustache. This isn’t music for the masses; it’s music that makes fun of the masses - or at least that quotient of the masses that imagines it constitutes an elite.Susanne Oberbeck dreams [...]
- While we’re on the subject of aliens…
I wrote this review for Think Again magazine; I thought I’d include it here because I picked up the book at the Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art show at the Barbican when I was in London. It was actually the only book on ufology that they were selling at the Barbican, which leads me to [...]
- Ground Control
The Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art
Barbican Art Gallery, London
Through May 18th, 2008
The Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art is a hilarious piss-take on the anthropological impulse that tends to taint so much contemporary curatorial practice – not to mention contemporary art.
It all started off with curators Francesco Manacorda and Lydia Yee being asked to organize a [...]
