[for AnOther, 23/4/18]
People will always be drawn to the superficial, however ‘problematic’ they’re told it’s become; fashion is only a consequence of caring what others think.
andrzej wróblewski, 'blue works & beyond'
[for Frieze, 16/4/18]
That single dark bullethole in the baby’s luminous flesh is freshly shocking each time you look.
richard serra, 'rifts'
[for Apollo, 13/4/18]
You peer at the ridges and bumps of each work, distracted by multi-directional surface rather than being lost in projected depth.
megan broadmeadow, 'seek-pray-advance'
[for GARAGE, 27/3/18]
Space is hell: unfathomable depth, sheer emptiness. Stare into the abyss, as Nietzsche said, and it’s nothing that stares right back.
sofia stevi, 'turning forty winks into a decade'
[for The White Review, 24/3/18]
We’re prone to speak as if dreaming were either too much or nothing at all. One person’s ‘dreamer’ is a radical, someone who’d storm an old order; another’s is irresponsible, their head in the clouds. The Greek artist Sofia Stevi studies both.
mary miller, 'after happy hour' + chris power, 'mothers'
[for the Telegraph, 24/3/18]
Short stories are objects of conspicuous, intensive craft; like younger children, they tend to be compared to the accomplishments of others.
josé damasceno, 'RE: PÚBLICA'
[for GARAGE, 22/3/18]
As República looks for her public, her new eyes tell us she doesn’t know who she’ll find; they meet the eyes of the viewers, who aren’t sure what she represents.
annabel's reborn
[for AnOther Magazine, 15/3/18]
Glamour is a rarefied form of everyone’s need for validation. People want to be seen; they want others to confirm they matter.
roy oxlade, 'works from the 80s & 90s'
[for Frieze, 12/3/18]
Oxlade's critical essays, written throughout his career, consistently sent the 20th century to the wall. ‘Shakespeare’, he wrote in 2005, ‘was onto people like Marcel Duchamp.’ He threw out Amedeo Modigliani, Henry Moore, all pop art. Only a few escaped.
erica scourti, 'spill sections'
[for GARAGE, 12/3/18]
Scourti remixed her “archive” with the joy of a child taking risks, but it was her software that messed with it first, eating her paper trail and throwing it back up.
jeremy gavron, 'felix culpa'
[for the Telegraph, 3/3/18]
This is a genre that hangs on blanks and lacunae, the things that people don’t yet know. (If Philip Marlowe could just interview God, Chandler novels would be short.) In that sense, they’re stories of trying to listen: the investigator strains to pick out a clue, match his account to hers, track down a dingy address based on a name half-heard in a bar.
an interview with anthony mccall
[for Apollo, 1/3/18]
McCall admits that there’s a ‘social’ element to his light works. Their space is never entirely dark, even outside the membranes, because the sheets give off a silvery glow.
willy vlautin, 'don't skip out on me'
[for the Telegraph, 24/2/18]
Vlautin thinks in B-roll footage: broad sighing vistas of the Nevadan hills, wild horses bathing in the sun, pinyon pine and birch trees and creeks that trickle along. That characters have to live here, punctuating nature with their mess of cause and effect, seems like an imposition.
laurie simmons, 'fake fashion'
[for GARAGE, 14/2/18]
We learn about ourselves by looking at others. It takes the radical inauthenticity of the fashion world to remind us of that.
bill knott, 'i am flying into myself'
[for the TLS, 8/2/18]
Bill Knott was a learned man. Introducing his selected poems, I Am Flying Into Myself, his editor Thomas Lux claims that he “had read all of English and American poetry . . . twice”.
neville gabie, 'experiments in black & white'
[for Apollo, 19/1/18]
During the opening night, the audience saw his efforts in the flesh. Gabie walked over to a giant block of chalk, which had an axe tucked underneath it; he took up the axe, and hewed an edge from the chalk; then he hefted the chalk, moved towards an empty black wall, and began to scrape backwards and forwards from left to right.
lana and the bomb
[for GARAGE, 23/1/18]
Del Rey was born for the Bomb. Her voice is languorous and slow; her lyrics make emotion all too obvious. Everything’s so elegantly shaped and irresponsible that it challenges you to stay invested.
at the thames barrier
[for the LRB Blog, 27/12/17]
For two hours, I was the only person there. The weather was overcast, and not warm. The Thames looked drab, as it often does.
leonor antunes, 'the frisson of the togetherness'
[for Apollo, 13/12/17]
For every Ernö Goldfinger, there was an Alison Smithson. It was the latter who coined the phrase ‘frisson of the togetherness’, when she was talking in 1989 about fashionable kids. You couldn’t atomise their style, she said; you couldn’t treat it item-by-item.
black cats, small victories
[for White Noise, 8/11/17]
At the match I attended in 2015, everything looked pleasantly wonky; during half-time, we could buy only one kind of beer and one kind of pie. This was the kind that came, inauspiciously, shrink-wrapped in a photo of a much better pie.