Laura Bielau’s Arbeit 2016-2019 (Spector Books, 2021) is a stripped-back and minimal series of investigations that regards the environmental working effects and detritus of art labor in 2021. Though the aims are not overtly class-oriented or political, they function as a personal case study between the artist and the alien consumer objects that become […]
I was confronted with three parts of a mental soundtrack while paging through Thiago Dezan’s new book When I Hear The That Trumpet Sound (Selo Turvo, 2021, ed. 200). The first track based on title and the book’s black endpapers and the ominous black cover was Behemoth’s Blow Your Trumpets Gabriel, a rich and […]
Despite my years of thin gruel during my time in London, I count myself as lucky for being able to divide my time there into simply “getting by” and avoiding bureaucracy. I have little talent for the regular custom of monthly, let alone weekly subscription to anything in which demands of my time are […]
“Ractliffe’s work, whether consciously or not, emerges at a time when the impossibility of representing experience started to gain purchase in discussions around the medium’s shortfalls.”
The gravity of our current moment lies not only in the event itself, but the image that the event has been spun into; namely a large web of the intolerable. Throughout the past year, the constant pressure of the Covid situation has led to a new depiction of the world in which fear, sickness, and […]
“Everything seems somehow familiar and distant at the same time. It is as if time has wedged us between the fever dream of summer and the insoluble gaslighting conjured up from what was believed to be a significantly flawed, but tolerable near past” The way we live now. It all seems so easily […]
“Earlier this year, there were some high-profile twitterstorms, in which particular left-identifying figures were ‘called out’ and condemned. What these figures had said was sometimes objectionable; but nevertheless, the way in which they were personally vilified and hounded left a horrible residue: the stench of bad conscience and witch-hunting moralism” This […]
“The conservative government was in power with reports of David Cameron and his infidelities with swine breaking the news Murdoch-owned dailies” Estate by Robert Clayton was published in 2015 and I am in no way trying to declare any different, but 2015 was a very different year for Britain. It was the year […]
“In contrast to the concrete metaphors in the urban architecture and the materiality of construction, the bodies and flesh of the workers on the beach refer to something humane: of the flesh, tactile and intimate, something that is deeply lacking in these isolated lives.”
“I have assumed this focus on the found vernacular to be American in nature. However, the details of national ownership is missing apart from the rise of American modernism or the focus on its anti-thesis, namely quaint small town America advertising often hand painted and rough” It is somehow impossible not to mention […]
“It would be easy for me to say that this book is published at the right moment and that it correlates a simple reminder about the inhuman conditions of the past…” It is June 9th, 2020 and as I sit here penning this “review” of Gordon Parks perhaps sadly non-anachronistic and oddly prescient […]