Earlier this year the Great Yarmouth-born filmmaker Greg King introduced me via email to a ‘video content producer’ – we’ll call this person ‘Alex’ – for the Guardian newspaper. (Greg, a former professional skateboarder, directed several influential East Anglian scene films, including Reservoir Skates, 1997-98, and Underground and Overrated, 2002, and taught Lewis ‘Chewy’ Cannon,read more
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‘New Order: Art, Product, Image, 1976-1995’, Sprüth Magers Gallery London / BANK: ‘Summa’, Piper Keys London
For the so-called young British artists, 1995 was, according to the writer Michael Bracewell, curator of ‘New Order: Art, Product, Image: 1976-1995’, what 1976 had been for London punk – a mythical Year Zero. Between these zeroes, British self-image and identity – and the ascendant ‘style wars’, as Peter York called them, later brilliantly theorisedread more
Stephan Dillemuth at 3236RLS/LE BOURGEOIS, Eros House
When the French restaurant beneath Eros House in Catford was evicted following complaints of late-night raves-cum-orgies, the new tenants kept its name: Le Bourgeois. It’s an irony not lost on Stephan Dillemuth. Crummy, gleeful, serious, his installations in “Diskodekorationen: From Another Century” literally decorate a disco, or what’d been a sort of disco before theread more
Per Kirkeby Brick Sculpture
Perhaps, we reasoned, Per Kirkeby would allow us to construct a small modular brick column such as those in his solo exhibition ‘Fliegende Blätter’ at Museum Folkwang Essen in 1977. Not a large institution or public-facing commissioning body – the contexts for most, if not all, of Kirkeby’s brick sculptures – but a non-commercial artist-ledread more
Exhibition, Design, Participation: ‘an Exhibit’ 1957 and Related Projects (2016) Afterall Exhibition Histories
Two months after ‘an Exhibit’ closed at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, in June 1957 it travelled to London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, then situated in Mayfair, where it was reconfigured in response to the space. Contrasting with the ICA’s ornamented Georgian interior, the vertical and horizontal, parallel and perpendicular, groupings of Perspex sheets (Richard Hamilton,read more
Lyon Biennale 2017 ‘Floating Worlds’
Few images conjure techno-modern utopia’s discontents like Buckminster Fuller’s Montreal ‘Expo 67’ biosphere in flames. Lit by a welder’s spark during structural renovation in 1976, the acrylic carapace of the icosahedron dome burnt fiercely for 30 minutes before extinguishing. Probably the lean efficiency of Fuller’s structures – he converted, as the critic Martin Pawley nicelyread more
Mindfuckers – 0. Introduction by David Felton
Recently I found a copy of David Felton’s hard-to-find book Mindfuckers: A Source Book on the Rise of Acid Fascism in America in Donlon Books (the full title is Mindfuckers: A Source Book on the Rise of Acid Fascism in America Including material on Charles Manson, Mel Lyman, Victor Baranco and their followers by Davidread more
Filipa César & Louis Henderson: Gasworks
‘We need a lighthouse philosopher,’ suggests Roque Pina, the protagonist of Filipa César & Louis Henderson’s captivating essay-film Sunstone, 2017. Though you would be forgiven for thinking that Pina already fulfils this role as he flatly, matter-of-factly addresses the origins of the lighthouse, its development and future, and reveals its inextricable relations with Enlightenment epistemologies,read more
Who’s Laughing?
Ian Brady, with his girlfriend Myra Hindley branded by the British press as the ‘Moors Murderers’ after the bodies of four child victims were dumped on West Yorkshire moorland, died at 6pm on Monday 15 May 2017, minutes before the thirtieth-anniversary screening of Alan Clarke’s Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1987) at the British Filmread more
Over Hang: W139, Amsterdam
After fifteen hours on the Newcastle-Amsterdam ferry I was hungover for ‘Over hang’ at W139. I arrived, then, in the dual traditions of ‘creatives’ who’ve found that a bastard behind the eyes enables a more corpuscular encounter with art and tourists ruining Amsterdam for the locals. Or maybe, as this show, curated by exhibiting artistread more