Next week at Verdurin: The Call of England
A special preview screening of John Gillam’s video travelogue and discussion with David Goodhart and Harrison Pitt.
📅 28 April, 7pm
🎟️ buff.ly/ALT5fYV
The British-Guyanese artist Donald Locke's 1970s practice dwells in black, the colour synonymous both with the absence of any other and the deepest depth of colour saturation.
I reviewed Resistant Forms, Locke's retrospective at Camden Art Centre, for The Critic.
buff.ly/Kps4gS2
Some recent arrivals at the store.
buff.ly/Kuax8Hw
When I interviewed Gregory Sholette, the organisation's head, I described him as "the high priest of social practice". I don't have a joke here.
petitpoi.net/gregory-shol...
Sign of the times. Social Practice CUNY, a quasi-academic institution promoting artistic activism, has run out of steam.
buff.ly/GLLFDpi
"For me, an art critic who was once an art dealer and a faithful adherent of the cult of contemporary art, hindsight is a blessing. But it is also a curse, because it lands me with some responsibility for not halting art’s catastrophic decline."
In confess in The Critic.
buff.ly/F6E4skx
Gay culture "depends for its vigour, and perhaps for its very existence, on a particular kind of social order. The social order that hosted homosexuality in its earlier stages, as a matter of historical fact, was a mostly Protestant Christian society".
notes and notices: Ain Bailey: The Jamaica Project at Camden Art Centre ★☆☆☆☆
For a composer who believes, according to the gallery’s note, that music constitutes identity, Bailey hardly cares about sound. The bassy backing of 5C Jacques Road, an overlong video record...
Read all: buff.ly/onT8afW
The 'I' in LGBTQIA+ is for 'Ivan Illich'
David Moulton went on The Book Club from Hell to discuss the gay art of suffering , the topic of his essay in 'Inversion'.
buff.ly/3OifTn3
The purveyor of liberal truisms flirts with cancellation.
London is getting a museum of espionage. The Trent Park "House of Secrets" will tell the story "from glittering 1930s social hub to WWII surveillance centre."
Can we please have a museum of 2026 surveillance instead?
buff.ly/NKdDCTD
Ran Heilbrunn called for the abolition of queer theory, the topic of his chapter in Inversion, in a conversation with Lee Jones and Alex Hochuli at @bungacast.bsky.social HQ.
Listen: buff.ly/Nnu72pX
A special preview screening of John Gillam’s video travelogue and discussion with David Goodhart and Harrison Pitt.
📅 28 April, 7pm
📍 Verdurin, Hoxton
🎟️ buff.ly/Wm3Mokw
Coming up at Verdurin: The Call of England with John Gillam, Harrison Pitt, and David Goodhart.
What would a journey in search of England reveal today? Following H. V. Morton’s travelogue of a hundred years ago, John Gillam captured a country that is unrecognisable.
With disarming regularity, someone emails me with long-form thoughts on a book they bought at Verdurin or something that came up at our events. The pleasure of this always brings tears to my eyes.
If the project of nation-building will take decades, so might the cultural turn. For now, Britain's culture is in suspended animation.
I wrote about the anxieties and frustrations of our cultural future for The Critic.
notes and notices: Veronica Ryan: Multiple Conversations at Whitechapel ★★☆☆☆
Ryan’s bibelot installations do have a charm to them. Through the ground floor gallery’s window, the retrospective looks like a playground...
Read on: buff.ly/zUptWG0
On doormats today and on newsstands soon, the April issue of The Critic, with me on my shameful art past. And on Tracey Emin’s.
"It is too early to debunk conspiracy as an organising principle and too late to distinguish conspiracy theory from truth."
I reviewed two conspiracist exhibitions — at The Warburg Institute and Pharmakon Bucharest — for The Critic.
-- buff.ly/TPD9ENT
-- link-in-bio
Censoring (in any sense of the word) that art would, therefore, bestow a great power on us, a power once reserved only for the judge.
Our culture acknowledges that a work of art has "symbolic, imaginative, metaphorical and sometimes mimetic dimensions" and "only oblique relation to ‘real life’".
But, like the courts, we prefer to ignore these qualities in search of reassurance that art construes reality.
Reading Paul Kearns's essays on legal understandings of artistic freedom, I am struck by the how poorly applied legal constructs — such as exemptions for artistic expression which courts have repeatedly overlooked in cases where a work of art is considered offensive — have become the societal norm.
Library haul in preparation for a very special event with John Gillam on 28 April.
notes and notices: Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak at Barbican ★★★★☆
No object exists without its double, no form without an opposite. Phillips’s dainty assemblies of ceramic, steel, and PVC tube exist only as much as something else...
Read on: buff.ly/0gGHUX5
The course starts on 15 April at Verdurin.
buff.ly/HOyA9Ff
Here's a selection of the texts in Nina Power's 'Discernment', a course on Taste, Attention, and Literacy. Wow do we make sense of making sense, how we decide, differentiate, and judge?
verdur.in/store/tag/di...
Suzanne Treister's long career has attempted both to critique of and embrace technological and scientific paradigms. The only thing these approaches have in common is her idiosyncratic speculative aesthetics.
I reviewed her retrospective @modernartoxford.bsky.social for The Critic.
notes and notices: Beatriz González at Barbican ★★★☆☆
The Colombian González spent the 1960s studiously rephrasing European old masters into South America’s collage and print culture. She then applied the same exercise to the early Modernists and Western magazine imagery.
Read all buff.ly/NAQTu7B
