“There is perhaps nothing in the Louvre as widely depicted as Jesus and his life. He dogs you down every hall and corridor, fabricated by so many hundreds of dead hands.”
Category: Art
[Essay] Wang Zijun and the Involution of Chinese Art — Shu Hu
“As the country has begun to stagnate economically, so too has the development of its contemporary art scene.”
Published in partnership with Everything Forever, organised by Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art.
[Review] How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dumb: Ed Atkins’s Old Food at the Venice Biennale 2019 — Patrick O’Neill
“What does it mean to describe something as more than real; as ‘hyperreal’? If something can be more real than reality, then reality itself seems to be a rather precarious concept.”
Published in partnership with Everything Forever, organised by Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art.
[Essay] TV Bra for Living Sculpture With(out) Charlotte Moorman — Eloise Crist
“As TV Bra is a record of Moorman’s corporeality, its reception without Moorman is burdened by the complications of mourning.”
[Review] Dhaka Art Summit 2020 — Jonathan Webster
“Dhaka Art Summit seeks to generate multiple international centres in a globalised art world, built from the rich, yet often ignored (or worse co-opted) art histories outside the canonical Western traditions.”
[Essay] Painting Anxiety: Berthe Morisot’s ‘Julie Daydreaming’ — Connie Sjödin
“Lit from the viewer’s direction, the painting invents a singular viewpoint and even predicts the camera flash, freezing the image against ‘time’s relentless melt’, as in Susan Sontag’s evocative phrase.”
[Essay] Bacon’s Hysteria, van Gogh’s Shoes: Deleuze and the Problem of Affect — Josh Mcloughlin
“In Bacon’s hysterical painting and Proust’s literature of memory, sensation works to peel apart affects and bodies, unmooring physical entities from emotional resonances, and ensuring that Deleuze’s attempt to grasp an ‘interminable presence’ remains frustrated”
[Essay] Grayson Perry and the Politics of Taste — Jonathan Webster
“Perry submerges himself in these cultures without judgment and, through his art, communicates and legitimizes alternative forms of cultural capital.”
[Essay] ‘Becoming-Animal’: Idle Bodies in Marie Darrieussecq and Lucien Freud — Susannah Farrell
“In Darrieussecq and Freud, the possibility of becoming is tied to the in-human and to nothingness, so that idleness and animality, no longer nihilistic, render affirmation.”
[Essay] On the Aesthetic, Psychoanalysis and Dasein — Josh Mcloughlin
“Like theory, Dasein emerges as the allegory of an allegory.”
[Essay] Consuming Fragments: Performance Art and Spectatorship — Jasper Llewelyn
“Although championed as the quintessential practice of contemporary postmodern practice, recent trends for disrupting the spectator’s viewing process through fragmentation are based on a long history of performance and installation.”
[Essay] Dérive: Situationist Architecture and the Modern City — Matilda Roberts
“For Raoul Vaneigem, creativity, love and play are life’s nutrients – the only real ways in which we can participate in the world.”
[Essay] Art and Ideology: Clark, Courbet, and Althusser — Josh Mcloughlin
“Courbet makes visible (donner à voir) the interpellation of rural subjectivity not only in the gaze of urban bourgeois ideology but in the equally culpable stare of genre painting itself.”
