There’s something curiously out of time about Art Sheffield 2016. While this year’s Glasgow International largely sidesteps political engagement – sidelined for a bohemianism of the senses, Art Sheffield addresses big humanist themes: underlying scientific patterns of life, legacies of de-industrialization, utopianism and freedom. Curated by Martin Clark (co-curator of the 2009 Tate touring exhibitionread more
Month: March 2017
Beatrice Loft Schulz: Arcadia Missa
To enter Beatrice Loft Schulz’s “Living Arrangement #” meant passing through a ten-foot-wide, New Agey, patterned curtain of glass beads laboriously threaded by the artist. In advance of the exhibition’s opening, Arcadia Missa director Rosza Farkas told me, Schulz and her assistant, Ruby Read, performed a magic spell to harness the earth’s energy for theread more
Amanda Beech: BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art
When Sunderland City Council announced last September the imminent closure of its City Library building, the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, which had occupied a floor since opening in 1995, received notice of eviction. Venueless, NGCA negotiated with the Baltic to host Amanda Beech’s upcoming exhibition, ‘Covenant Transport Move or Die’, at short notice. Whileread more
‘Ideas of Disorder’ published by Occasional Papers
Ideas of Disorder is a detailed portrait of 3 Church Walk, the home of British modernist architects H.T. and E.R. Cadbury-Brown, which they jointly designed and built in 1962. Published to coincide with the artist Emily Richardson’s film about the house, the book expands on the film’s script by Jonathan P. Watts by bringing togetherread more
Edward Thomasson: Southard Reid
Unwittingly enacting something central to Edward Thomasson’s exhibition “Other People,” I reflexively supplemented its title to constitute Jean-Paul Sartre’s familiar aphorism “Hell is . . .” Abstracted from its context, the line has become the meme-like slogan of misanthropes. Its separatist ideal, latently theological, envisions withdrawal into the self, the logical consequence of which isread more
Poser Punks
It’s been a baffling week. But then when is it not? On Friday evening my friends (lesbians, feminists too) and I joined a memorial service at King’s College Chapel on the Strand to commemorate what would have been Derek Jarman’s 72nd birthday. Gilded twin arches of the George Gilbert Scott interior framed a bed sheetread more
Bass Instincts: This Is Grime
This Is Grime, by Hattie Collins and Olivia Rose. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2016. 320 pages. The only stateside photograph in Hattie Collins and Olivia Rose’s book This Is Grime flickers at the edge of abstraction. Illumined by camera flash, a hazy specter—the fug of weed smoke, maybe—renders the signage of Williamsburg’s Music Hall barelyread more
Longing for the Future
‘The consideration of the future makes us take responsibility for our nostalgic tales.’ – Svetlana Boym I no longer remember how I related to Blackstreet’s exorbitant display of emotion in ‘Don’t Leave Me Girl’ when it charted in 1997. Between school and shooting hoops up the field, as an 11 year-old I spent as muchread more