‘Okay, do you wanna hear another Flint story? This one’s super weird and really cool.’ It’s one of many Flint stories Jamie Stevens, incumbent curator at Cubitt Gallery, London, has told me so far. ‘… So Flint gets on stage wearing an Arnold Schwarzenegger mask with a flashing strobe light inside and begins reading aread more
Month: March 2017
Alien Encounters: Nottingham Contemporary
Herman Poole Blount first visited the planet Saturn in 1936. There, he received his calling: quit college and pursue music for one day your vibes will deliver a world in chaos. By the mid-1950s Blount’s birth date, names, addresses and memories had become opaque, concealing, or perhaps revealing, the accruements of identity as a myth.read more
Condo: Various venues
Billed as “a collaborative exhibition by twenty-four international galleries across eight London spaces” and coordinated by Vanessa Carlos, director of Carlos/Ishikawa, Condo has generated discourse largely centered on the economic straits facing younger commercial galleries in the city. You might be the hottest ticket in town, but cultural capital alone won’t pay your invoices. Forread more
The Influence of Furniture on Love: Wysing Arts Centre
‘The Influence of Furniture on Love’, along with the exhibition ‘Hey, I’m Mr Poetic’, staged at Wysing Arts Centre between April and June this year, are both pauses to reflect on the institution’s 35-year history. Although Wysing has an exhibitions and events programme coordinated by in-house curators, and on-site studios and specialist workshops, over theread more
DeWain Valentine: Almine Rech Gallery
DeWain Valentine’s jewel-like cast polyester resin sculptures at Almine Rech, London, are an unexpected compliment to the Barbican’s survey of that prodigious Californian partnership, Charles and Ray Eames. Aside from being long-term adoptive Angelenos – wisened to the ways of smog-enhanced light and space – both artist and architects were, as Rowan Moore wrote ofread more
Stuart Brisley: Modern Art Oxford
Celebrated as one of Britain’s most compelling post-war performance artists, Stuart Brisley had, by the early 1980s, begun to suspect performance’s limitations, seeking to expand it by incorporating sculpture, photography, film and painting. At the turn of the millennium, Brisley instituted the Museum of Ordure – ordure: shit, trash, dirt, entropy – to build aread more
Akram Zaatari: SALT Beyoğlu
Only later, reconstructing my visit, did I realize SALT Beyoğlu’s elevator had both deposited me into stratified earth and lifted me amid exploding fireworks. This feeling spanned the three floors of Akram Zaatari’s survey exhibition: a tender tryst of inward- and outward-bearing forces, graveness defused by airy affection, and vice-versa. Zaatari has long used archaeologicalread more
In Focus: Alice Theobald
Acting, therapy, song and humour In both title and content, Alice Theobald’s recent video work, and the wanderers wandering at the wonders of themselves (2015), accesses a situation that is already in full flow. There is no establishing shot, no exposition of what the ‘and’ of the title is a conjunction for. Circling a cameraread more
From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy
From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy Boîte Serie G, 1968, Designed and edited by Mathieu Mercier, König Books, 14 March 2016 A decade before the French Minister of Cultural Affairs, André Malraux, published Musée Imaginaire, often translated into English as Museum Without Walls, the itinerant French grand-père of conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp, beganread more
Bob Cobbing: Exhibition Research Centre
‘Adventure, Aventure, Aventereure, Adventure’ – the iconic opening words of Bob Cobbing’s Sound Poem, 1965, otherwise known as ABC in Sound. Over the duration of 22 minutes, beginning with A and ending with Z, Cobbing recombines letters, words and sounds to effectively rewrite the linguistic institution of the English language. It is a mythic rebeginningread more