Reviewed by Declan Tan Steve McQueen’s second feature is a visually arresting, thematically dense piece of cinema, that may, and probably will, prove to be an important film in years to come. That is, if enough people get to see it. Having been cursed with a NC-17 rating in the US and a limited release […]
London’s Epstein Sculptures: Part 7: Hyde Park
The final photo-essay by Dr Nick Maroudas on Jacob Epstein’s public sculptures around London. The series begins here Epstein lived at no. 18 Hyde Park Gate, and it says much for the civic pride of this ultra-respectable neighbourhood that he was twice commissioned to make a sculpture for the Park. Both of them have a […]
London’s Epstein Sculptures: Part 6: Portrait Busts and Elemental Carvings
The sixth of Dr Nick Maroudas’ photo-essays on Jacob Epstein’s public sculptures around London. The series begins here These little works are scattered round the world, but I happened to snap them on exhibition in the West End. The Epstein centenary exhibition of 1980 was not your modern blockbuster, with a glossy colour catalogue and […]
London’s Epstein Sculptures: Part 5: Parliament Square
The fifth of Dr Nick Maroudas’ photo-essays on Jacob Epstein’s public sculptures around London. The series begins here “The finest body of mounted riflemen in the world”. Generous tribute to a former foe of the British Empire, from Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples – a history of the greatest body of armed robbers […]
London’s Epstein Sculptures: Part 4: Victoria and Battersea Park
The fourth of Dr Nick Maroudas’ photo-essays on Jacob Epstein’s public sculptures around London. The series begins here Victoria – For London Transport Transport House at 55 Broadway, over St James Park tube station, was the tallest building in the London of 1929. Fascism was in the air, Signor Mussolini (as the Press politely styled […]
London’s Epstein Sculptures: Part 3: Cavendish Square – For The Convent of the Holy Child
The third of Dr Nick Maroudas’ photo-essays on Jacob Epstein’s public sculptures around London. The series begins here One side of John Lewis’s (“never knowingly undersold”) fronts bustling Oxford Street with its rabbits that dart on and off the buses to do their shopping. The other side of John Lewis backs onto a little oasis […]
London’s Epstein Sculptures: Part 2: The Strand – For The British Medical Association
The second of Dr Nick Maroudas’ photo-essays on Jacob Epstein’s public sculptures around London. The first is here “Let’s all / Go down the Strand”. Walking along the Strand is always a pleasure because of its variety and the nearness of the river. “Hear the little German band / Ach du liebe Augustin”. Entertainments abound […]
London’s Epstein Sculptures: Part 1: Bloomsbury
The first of seven photo-essays by Dr Nick Maroudas on Jacob Epstein’s public sculptures around London Prologue I had read Epstein’s Let There Be Sculpture in South Africa, along with many other books, when I came to Imperial College of Science and Technology in 1956. I vaguely recalled some passages: a penetrating judgment on Rodin […]
PK: BibliOdyssey: Amazing Archival Images from the Internet
“…BibliOdyssey started its journey as a cabinet of curiosities of visual Materia Obscura, collected and curated from the depths of public internet archives…”
TV Eye: BBC Fours’s All American season
Jacob Knowles-Smith sits down for a TV dinner with Tom Wolfe Thankfully BBC Four hasn’t been demolished just yet. If it had been, we wouldn’t have had chance to enjoy its recent ‘All American’ season. They say that BBC 2 would absorb the channel’s role, but doubtless this would come with – if not dumbing-down […]
Jonathan Walker and Dan Hallett: Five Wounds: An Illuminated Novel
Reviewed by Declan Tan Not every book looks and feels like an artefact when you pick it up. Oftentimes it is just words printed across cheap paper, the literal form of it separated from its content, cased in a merely functional cover with some gluey binding. But with Five Wounds, an “illuminated novel”, the very […]
100 Artists’ Manifestos – From the Futurists to the Stuckists: Selected by Alex Danchev
Reviewed by Ben Granger 1. The purpose of politics is to inspire art. The only useful thing it has ever achieved When Marshall Brennan argued “The Manifesto is remarkable for its imaginative power… It is the first great modernist work of art”, he referred specifically to The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels. While the […]
Hit By The Eidôlon: Abstraction as Phenomenal Experience
MANIAC (Multi-media Artist Network Idea Exchange and Collaboration) is a loose collective of twenty-three international artists connected principally through social media. Thyrza Nichols Goodeve introduces MANIAC’s second exhibition, first shown at Sacramento’s Brickhouse Art Gallery in June 2011. Manic Episode 2 explores the relationship between image, material and space in media such as site-specific sculpture, […]
Dream Team: The Brothers Quay
In 1995, Thyrza Nichols Goodeve interviewed twin brothers Timothy and Stephen Quay about their beautiful full-length debut Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life. Many thanks to the author for permission to reprint in full. The animated-puppet worlds of the Brothers Quay have entranced art cinephiles since 1979. Seemingly made by miniature shadow-fairies […]
Performance and the Art of Lesley Dill
Lesley Dill’s work begins with language and extends, through many shapes and forms, to the body and the community. Thyrza Nichols Goodeve’s essay ‘Words have Wings that Fly from the Mouths of Others’ (1, see footnotes below) first appeared in the catalogue for Dill’s 2009/2010 retrospective I Heard a Voice. Many thanks to the author […]
Female Stockholm Syndrome: Beauty CULTure
Vanessa Libertad Garcia drops into Los Angeles’ stunning Annenberg Space for Photography for an exhibition exploring how processed imagery influences our notions of beauty In Los Angeles, we drive a lot. It can take anywhere between half an hour to two and a half hours depending on traffic to make it from one part of […]
James Barsness: Icons of Comic Relief
Drawing on comic strips to explore “crackpot ideas” about social interaction, the Barsness universe recalls the playful chaos of Bruegel. In this catalogue essay from 1997, Thyrza Nichols Goodeve considers drawing and doodling. Full thanks to the author and the gallery for permission to republish “For all drawing depends, primarily, on your power of representing […]
The Design of Jonathan Walker’s Five Wounds
Five Wounds is something of a contemporary classic: a manuscript crossed with Kit Williams’ playful imagination, informed by the language of graphic novels. Although very much a book, in the tactile sense, it has half an eye on what a book might be in a digital era. Jonathan Walker, the author of Five Wounds shares […]
Self Made (Gillian Wearing)
Declan Tan finds the artist Gillian Wearing lives up to her surname in the full-length film project Self Made Gillian Wearing has a history of getting people on camera and making them open up. In the 1990s, she placed an advert in Time Out asking people to “confess all on video”. Now, she is doing […]
The Shape of Sound: Shannon Novak
Sourav Roy interviews New Zealand artist Shannon Novak about the history of synesthesia and how his practice focuses on the relationship between sound, colour, form, time, and social context Just what shade of orange is a hemidemisemiquaver? If you could hear a Mondrian, what would it sound like? The works of Shannon Novak, an emerging […]
The Queerest Of The Queer: What It Means To Be A Queer Punk
Luke Velazquez on the singular experience of the queer punk scene, reflected in the work of sculptor Fernando Carpaneda In our society, people are expected to behave in a certain way. To grow up, go to school, work a soulless dead end job, squirt out a few kids for the good of the commonwealth and […]
Reflections On An Omnivorous Visualization System: An Interview With Matthew Ritchie
This dialogue between Matthew Ritchie and Thyrza Nichols Goodeve first appeared in the catalogue for the artist’s exhibition Proposition Player, organized by Lynn M. Herbert, December 12, 2003-March 14, 2004, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in association with Hatje Cantz Publications Many thanks to Thyrza Nichols Goodeve for permission to republish I always thought the best […]
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SUSPENSION [Cremaster] SECRETION [pearl] SECRET [biology] by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve “…what others call form I experience as force” – Roland Barthes LAYER 1: SUSPENSION Begin with iridescence and force. A force without form or home or convention, almost more like “a diagram without a will” (1) – suspended and hung. Send it at a line, […]
Giving and Taking: Arts Funding and Philanthropy
In the wake of this month’s funding announcements by the Arts Council of England, Joseph Spencer offer an American perspective on the philanthropic model for the arts As the arts in Britain undergo significant changes to their funding structures, debates are sparking up as to alternatives that could save the hundreds of galleries, orchestras, theater […]
Creative Industries: Bookbinding: Saviours of The Lost Art
Jeanette Hewitt learns about a different kind of book technology from Judith Wiesner In a time where digital technology appears to be taking over the world, I deemed it necessary to pay closer attention to a more hands on, artistic approach to our crafts, to find out if our paper bound books are a dying […]
