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
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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
Art Sheffield 2016: Various venues
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
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