Comment on art and everything else
Institutionally, the group’s activity is indicative of how both academic and curatorial cultures have become entwined in this wider shift in the locus of political activism, with the art gallery becoming just another channel of dissemination for this broader political culture of independent and quasi-institutional activism.
My review of Forensic Architecture at the ICA, for ArtReview, here
My review of ‘Phantom Limbs’ at Pilar Corrias, London, on Art Agenda. Read it here
“People who have lost arms or legs often report experiencing a “phantom limb”—the sense that the limb is still there, or that they can still move or feel it. It’s a good metaphor, too, for current post-internet art debates concerning the shifting relationship of real to virtual, digital to material.“Phantom Limbs,” Pilar Corrias’s smarter-than-most summer show, does a concise job of mapping the various poles of this cultural and theoretical inquiry…”
My latest review for Art-Agenda
Berlin-based Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s exhibition at Carroll / Fletcher might appear visually spare, but with each work, Haghighian draws you further into a game of institutional hide-and-seek, in which visibility and invisibility, the act of remaining hidden and being revealed, are played out as Machiavellian manipulations of the conventions of spectatorship and exhibition, where voyeurism plays a critical role. Read More
“There are artworks that work on the viewer’s apprehension of an implied absence, and then there are artworks that simply stand there waiting for that apparent lack to be filled in by contextualizing talk. The former has something to do with aesthetic experience, the latter with a loss of interest in it, and standing among Yto Barrada’s work at Pace Gallery London, I get the feeling the talk wins…”
My review of Yto Barrada for Art-Agenda…
http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/yto-barradas-mobilier-urbain/
“I’ve got a game on my phone which consists of a grid of randomly coloured spots. It looks a bit like one of Damien Hirst’s many spot paintings. But at least with the game on my phone, if you get a row of the same colour, the spots go away…”
My review of Damien Hirst’s Spot Paintings extravaganza just up on Time Out…
“Commenting on new work by a “great” artist is always difficult. The task is fraught with paradoxes. After all, the moment you’re faced with recent work from an artist who has long ago been elevated to the canon of contemporary art history, what is there left to say?”
My review of Ed Atkins on Time Out…
My review of Jeff Wall at White Cube on Time Out…
It must be nice to live safe in the knowledge that the human race is rubbish, and that – by the way – art is a load of shit too. Read More
My review of Tracey Emin’s Hayward show out now in the new September issue of ArtReview magazine. Sign in and read it at www.artreviewdigital.com
Is Tracey Emin’s art worth discussing? Thousands of column inches are expended in commenting on her work and career, yet for all the discussion of what Emin’s work bears witness to – her chaotic existence, her lifeworld of sexual and emotional turmoil, her abortions, her small-town origins, her artistic redemption – there’s remarkably little examination of why her work seems to attract such attention and compel the kind of responses it does. Perhaps there’s never enough stepping back: reactions are always of the heavily invested kind. You either love Trace or you hate Trace; despise her for her narcissism and self-indulgence, or admire her for her quixotic triumph over life’s adversity; you love her for her hedonistic, punkish assertion of ordinariness and genuine sentiment over social prudishness, artworld etiquette and artistic inauthenticity, or you dismiss her as a ‘media phenomenon’ and decry her work as artless, technically empty; and so on…