I’m abandoning the Fruit Store for the [warmer] Biennial, where I’m invited to be art critic in residence during a genuinely exciting opening week. Check the contents of it on the Biennial’s webpage.
My project is to restage Notes from a Fruit Store for the opening week and you’ll find the button -Notes from a Biennial- on Sharjah’s header very soon. For highlights and much more check here from about the 12th March through the 20th. For my part, I can’t wait…
Translated By
[CLICK image for details]
Featuring Douglas Coupland, Rana Dasgupta, Julien Gracq, Hu Fang, Jonathan Lethem, Tom McCarthy, Guy Mannes Abbott, Sophia Al Maria, Hisham Matar, Adania Shibli and Neal Stephenson
*NB [UPDATE] The accompanying book will be published February 10th, details here and below; Continue reading “on ‘translated by’, the details…”
15.01.2011 – 09.02.2011
Architectural Association Gallery
36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES
Private view event on 14 January 6.30–8.30
Curators Charles Arsène-Henry and Shumon Basar
You’ve entered the room. It looks empty, silent. Vinyl text on the wall, like an album track-listing. Writers’ names instead of bands.
You’ve been given a black pamphlet and an electronic device connected to a pair of headphones.
You’ll put them on. Pick a number. Press play. You look for the same number on the walls. You find it. Next to it, an image. Beside there is a seat. You sit. On a beat up office chair dredged from a river. You listen. And you start travelling. You’re on Atlantic Avenue, between Nevins and Third. It’s Brooklyn. 1971.
The voice stops. You go for another track, another chair, a different place. Now on a little stool, you follow a six-year-old girl’s voice in your ears. You’re lost in the Sheraton Hotel. An Aztec spaceship in Doha’s desert.
It will last for 11 tracks. Through Tripoli, Brixton, Ramallah. Sofia, The Metaverse. Ardennes forest. A garden.
Until West Vancouver. Where the world is ending.
NB I have a text, a small excerpt from In Ramallah, Running 2010, in this show and publication in happy company… details to follow.
I’ll also update during January 2011 with news on the book itself as it progresses towards publication which is now scheduled for October 2011.
This complete show of John Cage’s paintings and drawings is one that you need to go see, be with in real time and place. It’s not only that it doesn’t reproduce well [despite there being a very good catalogue with excellent reproductions newly photographed in it here updated link 2020] or that I’ve badly scanned one of my favourite delicate drawings done -in place of meditation- with more than one pencil around stones that were special to Cage [the allusion is to the famous dry stone garden at Ryoan-ji, Kyoto] but that until you’ve journeyed to stand before them, share their space you haven’t actually seen them.
I loved this exhibition of works for their affective simplicity -openness, lack of guile- and transforming leap from the disciplined procedures that generated them to their qualities as visual art. Continue reading “on being uncagey about john, uk tour of cage exhibition into 2011”
“The highlight of this year’s Liverpool Biennial is the art from Palestine on show in Future Movements Jerusalem. It’s art made against the forcings of Occupation, about a city currently forbidden to most of the artists in the show.”
My piece about this excellent show has just been published here on Babelmed, a really admirable and completely independent ‘Mediterranean culture site’ based in Rome, which appears in English, Italian, French and Arabic editions.
Continue reading “future movements jerusalem, startlingly good review on babelmed”
I’ve been enjoying quite a few shows recently which are likely to be blown out of the water by the imminent frieze fair and so with mighty respect to the latter I thought I’d flag them up as alternatives…
Future Movements Jerusalem at Liverpool Biennial [18 Sept-28 Nov 2010] is an essential exhibition of work from and about Palestine. I posted on Raouf Haj Yihya’s Meter Square here, the New Statesman bravely ran a rather muted piece here and my own review will run at Babelmed shortly. Surprise yourself if you can get to it, or wait for it to travel south as I know it is scheduled to do. But be sure to see it.
Otherwise, Liverpool is a far better Biennial than scarce notice of it by lazy old journos suggests; everyone rightly notes the almost painfully compelling acid-Warhol-mashup-vids of Ryan Trecartin’s but there’s much else, including NS Harsha’s very nice installation [right] at 52 Renshaw Street and not least at Tate Liverpool -where a dubiously conceived but actually nicely put together show called The Sculpture of Language by Carol Anne Duffy exhibits some great and rarely aired works.
Dirk Stewen at Maureen Paley [08 October — 14 November 2010] is the most winning new work in town for me. If you do make it to the frieze jamboree then add this show to your bottom-line schedule otherwise you’ll have failed yourself and London. If you’re not friezing it then take advantage and spend some time in a show spread over two floors, beautifully arranged/hung works combining utopian gesture with extraordinary concentration, tentativeness and beauty. The work seems hardly there at all and yet surprises/delights with a precision that makes for indelibility. It’s Stewen’s first show in London, I’d never seen the work before and this exhibition made me happy to be alive; don’t miss it! Continue reading “nb, visual art noticeboard [alternatives to friezing…]”
A previous post on Mohamedi referred to my catalogue text from 2001. Now I’m posting my short review of her recent retrospective exhibition as it appeared in the UK. I was pleased and proud to write something on a show that went almost unnoticed -and was certainly not engaged with- in the UK [again], but there’s much more to be written about her work and its contexts.
For now, here are scans of the pages in Bidoun [below; click to enlarge]. Let me repeat that it’s essential wherever you are in the world to see the work itself -to stand in front of the drawings in particular- whenever the opportunity arises. Until you do you will have missed an important 20th Century artist and maker of our new world.
I’ll return to Nasreen Mohamedi at greater, speculative and more definitive length in the future…
Continue reading “nasreen mohamedi; reflections on indian modernism, bidoun”
I just want to flag up this exhibition curated around Morton Feldman which I haven’t and won’t see [partly because I’m away doing a Residency myself during June] with its intriguing catalogue which I’ve also not seen yet.
Vertical Thoughts; Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts looks like a full-blooded collection of visual materials linked to Feldman and any focus on Feldman is welcome. I wonder why it isn’t travelling to other museums of modern art; Tate Modern for instance?
Kevin Volans has a piece in the catalogue [and a slightly out of date website here]. I caught his 60th birthday performance a few months ago [Wigmore Hall, Nov 09] which was excellent. Afterwards he described how he’s increasingly reliant as a composer and performer on visual art’s receptivity and commissioning resources.
Music-wise, there’s still a performance to come of Rothko’s Chapel and Words and Music by Samuel Beckett on 30th May by the Crash Ensemble here.
This is an audio of Richard Hamilton’s talk, currently up on the Serpentine Gallery’s site. I’ve made extensive notes of what is newest in it below, which concentrates on previously unexhibited work towards the end of the talk. Most of the 119 minutes here is RH himself; beginning at 11 mins in and ending at 87 mins after which is a short discussion with Hans-Ulrich Obrist. The audio ends at 109 mins in fact.
Much of what he says about individual pieces through his career he has said before in interviews recently republished in Richard Hamilton October Files 10, for example. However, even if you know those well it’s different, of course, to hear how he talks about the word pop and his emphases, hesitations, digressions in general. Especially interesting is what he has to say about Palestinian dispossession and the work it has generated.
Richard Hamilton 9 March 10 by Serpentine Gallery
RH starts by saying he wants “to give you some impression of what my work is about” beyond the political works at the Serpentine show. So he begins with the “cool fifties”;
Hers is a lush situation [1958]. “So much was happening at that time … I was fascinated in the uncertainty principle for example … influence I felt most was that it was not a good idea to get involved in value judgments …“
Hal Foster is, as ever, good on the transition from “the “tabular” pictures in the late 1950s. This suite of paintings, still too little known, explores the emergent visual idioms of postwar consumer society … in a mode of suave pastiche…
In subsequent work by Hamilton, this satirical edge subsides, yet a political dimension persists. It is often subtle, however, because Hamilton is concerned to capture less the political event than its mediation -how it is produced for us precisely as an image- and it is this mediation that he both elaborates and exposes.” [my emphasis]
[From Citizen Hamilton, pp 145-159 RH October Files 10. MIT Press 2010 here. MIT have one of the book’s interviews -w. Michael Craig-Martin 1990- online, here.]
Continue reading “richard hamilton v&a talk march 2010; “everybody should read eyal weizman.””
Edited by Dieter Schwarz
German, English
2005. 176 pp.
15,00 x 24,00 cm
€ 25.00
out of print
ISBN 978-3-7757-1611-6
Hatje Cantz Verlag
Zeppelinstrasse 32
73760 Ostfildern
Germany
Tel. +49 711 4405-200
Fax +49 711 4405-220
contact@hatjecantz.de
Amid oceans of mainstream mindlessness, memorabilia and millennial archivism there is a small archipelago where books of this special kind wash up and a mysterious tribe of singular genius make perfect copies of them which they relaunch from a jetty linked to all the islands.
Islanders have always adapted to the difficulty of their shores with mindfulness and without illusion, leaving the oceans to the satiated, including those occasionally fretful about the survival of the kinds of singularity/books that they never actually detain/ed themselves with.
Agnes Martin’s Writings is one of these buoyant survivors of oceanic inanity, treasured by a singular tribe and consistently popular according to its original publisher above. Islanders are willing, the jetty is clear, palms held open…
Whoever it is that owns the rights to this book might welcome reminders that the world and its archipelago are thirsting for Agnes Martin’s words.
Her New York gallery -which manages the rights- is here
Research & Archives is Jon Mason jmason@thepacegallery.com
Her London gallery -which has a show April 21 – May 21 2010- is contactable here
or mail@timothytaylorgallery.com
or publications@timothytaylorgallery.com
An Artist Room of her work will also open at Kettle’s Yard May 15 – July 10 2010 here
Douglas Hyde Gallery is showing Works on Paper May 28 – July 7 2010 here
NOTES FROM A FRUITSTORE 
