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
Category: Book Review
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
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
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