The title of this group show, “EX VOTO”—a truncation of the Latin ex voto susceptor—translates as “from the vow made.” Curated by Lucy Stein and Sarah Hartnett, a duo also known as the Mary Ley Line Pilgrimage, the exhibition offers works from thirty contemporary artists who share an interest in a secular sense of the divine,read more
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Ghislaine Leung: ‘Bosses’ (Divided Press, 2023)
Literal descriptions of things intersperse Bosses, 2023, Ghislaine Leung’s new collection of texts: ‘Index of Services’; ‘Air Passenger Duty’; Avoidable Mortality’. They might be titles for works, such as Public Sculpture, 2018, which I encountered in Suffolk earlier this summer, a taxonomical lineup of toys from a Reading local authority lending library. Produced according toread more
T.J. Clark, ‘If These Apples Should Fall’, in conversation with Jonathan P. Watts
Celebrated art historian T.J. Clark discusses his new book ‘If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present’ (Thames and Hudson Ltd., 2022) at Josey, Norwich with gallery co-director Jonathan P. Watts. The event took place in front of a live audience on Wednesday 19 October 2022. Copies of Clark’s book were provided by Theread more
Naomi Pearce: ‘Innominate’ (Moist, 2023)
Innominate is a hybrid novella – part auto-fiction, part historical mystery – that is the culmination of seven years of research by Naomi Pearce into the undervalued and forgotten work of female administrators in London’s artist-led organisations of the 1970s. Set around a post-industrial factory in the East End’s London Fields, the novella’s structure comesread more
Tower block boy
Maybe all forms of music have their symbolic numbers. Plotted against a conversion table, the letters of J. S. Bach’s surname (2 + 1 + 3 + 8) equal 14: double the seven days of creation – a cipher of perfection that structures many compositions by “the Old Wig”. John Cage used the duration 4’33,read more
Discontents Capitalised
Rachel Maclean’s new video installation in the British Art Show 8, Feed Me, Scene 1 (2015), is a dystopian vision of a city where consensual surveillance, based on visual and consumptive evidence, is used by the corporate director of Smile, Inc. to quantify, optimise and sell happiness and productivity to its youth. Children complete customerread more
There Goes the Neighbourhood
1 September 2014 was supposed to be terminal exodus date. Yet despite its exhortation, the ‘LET’S ALL MOVE OUT OF LONDON’ Facebook page created by London-based artist Sara Nunes Fernandes didn’t have the desired effect. ‘Now that London has been nuked by gentrification,’ the ‘About’ column reads, ‘foreign investment and criminal and corrupted councils, let’sread more
A Postcard from Suffolk
Along Suffolk’s Heritage Coast, a new kind of seaside resort has emerged in the image of its London diaspora that could be called ‘provincial-metropolitan’: homespun seaside charm with impeccably good service. Southwold and Aldeburgh are cases in point. Several years ago, former British PM Gordon Brown holidayed with his family at the former; judging byread more
David and Samantha Cameron meet Kurt Schwitters: On the restoration of Cumbria’s Merz Barn
November 18, 2015. Rain-flecked mobile phone footage on YouTube follows the cascades of Aira Force in the Lake District in the north-west of England. This typically picturesque waterfall, which makes cameo appearances in several of William Wordsworth’s poems, looks as if it might sweep away the bridge below. It’s one of the wettest and warmestread more
Revolt of the Sage, Blain|Southern, London
When Italy entered the First World War in Spring 1915, the Greco-Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico departed the Paris of Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire to enlist with his brother. They were billeted with the 27th Infantry Regiment in Ferrara, far from the front line, where their mother rented them furnished rooms in the viaread more