20 August 2009
Jarman Award Shortlist
The shortlist for the second annual Jarman Award has been announced. Launched last year, the winner of the inaugural award was Luke Fowler. The 2009 shortlisted artists are below; follow the links for more about each of them from the frieze archives:
Anja Kirschner & David Panos (published in issue 125, Sept 2009)
Simon Martin (first published in issue 113, March 2008)
Lindsay Seers (first published in issue 124, June 2009)
by Sam Thorne
| 1 response 23 June 2009 This has been circulating since the weekend: (Above image from http://iran360.posterous.com/) An article from The Wall Street Journal on the sophisticated software provided by Siemens and Nokia that allows the regime in Tehran to monitor the Internet appears by Jörg Heiser
| No responses 27 May 2009 Sat in the cinema the other day, waiting to see Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, I caught an advertisement for Absolut Vodka. In 60 syrupy and platitudinous seconds, we see a sequence of common transactions such as buying a bus ticket or giving money to a busker. Instead of exchanging money, a hug or a gentle peck on the cheek is given for each service or item bought. The range of people and locations is demographically and geographically balanced, in the heavy-handed, focus-group driven sort of way that only expensive advertisements seem able to achieve: good-looking white 20-somethings…
Categories: Art, Film, Television
by Dan Fox
| No responses 01 May 2009 The predictable, outraged reactions – how strange, bizarre, crazy it all is etc etc – to the annual Turner Prize short list never cease to amaze me, if only because they make me wonder: where do these so-called critics live? On some planet, where people’s lives and imaginations are marked only by their similarity of thinking, appearance and mood? A place where difference exists only as an aberration and where creativity functions purely as a tool for the dissemination of sameness? ‘There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion’ wrote Francis Bacon. I tend to…
Categories: Television
by Jennifer Higgie
| No responses 13 March 2009 This may not be news to those who have US high quality TV series pumped straight into their homes via cable, but for me Breaking Bad is a revelation. It does so many things at the same time it’s nauseating: it takes an ordinary family which could well be an ordinary sitcom family and plunges it straight Categories: Television
by Jörg Heiser
| No responses 21 January 2009 A few thoughts on the idea of humility halfway between art and politics: Obama’s inaugural address started like this: ‘I stand here today humbled by the task before us’; in his inaugural address of January 2001 George W. Bush’s stated that he wanted to be ‘viewed as a humble person that is not judgmental’. Fred Barnard’s drawing of Dickens’ Uriah Heep (1870s) Since enlightenment, the idea of humility is anything but undisputed: from François de la Rochefoucauld who asserted that ‘pride is never better disguised and more deceptive than when it is hidden behind the mask of humility’ to Karl…
Categories: Art, Events, News, Television
by Jörg Heiser
| No responses 03 December 2008 In an interview with Charlotte Higgins, published today by The Guardian, 2008 Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey makes two remarks that I think are well worth further consideration. First: “What I was warned to expect, but still shocked me, was how much obloquy and hatred the prize generates.” Secondly: “I love the Stuckist conspiracy theory, that Nicholas Serota is a kind of machiavellian Skeletor who manipulates the government and the people.” (For the benefit of non-UK readers, the Stuckists are a group of British artists vehemently opposed to contemporary art but who have a disproportionate voice in the…
Categories: Art, Museums, News, Television
by Dan Fox
| No responses 11 October 2008 We’ve just observed Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, and the sins and transgressions of the past year have been more or less absolved. Which may be just as well, since another major guilt-trip may loom on the horizon: ‘If Barack Obama doesn’t become the next president of the United States, I’m going to blame the Jews.’ Or so threatens Sarah Silverman, the aggressively sardonic and deadpan comedian (Jesus is Magic, The Aristocrats), in her new web video The Great Schlep. Noting that Florida is yet…
Categories: News, Television
by James Trainor
| 1 response 06 October 2008 A recent episode of the television show Mad Men – a brilliant series about Madison Avenue advertising executives in the early 1960s – featured a work of contemporary art as its surprising symbolic centrepiece. In this episode, the boss of the ad agency, the eccentric Mr. Cooper (who always makes employees remove their shoes before entering his office) is rumoured to be calling his executives to his office, one-by-one, for a personal meeting. His workers are convinced that the meetings are a cover-up – that they’re actually being tested on their reactions to Mr. Cooper’s new acquisition, a painting that…
Categories: Art, Magazines, Television
by Christy Lange
| 1 response 02 October 2008 So, to reiterate, what would be a counter-example to Damien Hirst’s recent refusal to explore anything with his ‘new’ works but the lows to which bidders allow themselves to stoop to by even considering buying them?
Set your location to Tehran and your time zone to GMT +3.30
‘If anyone is on twitter, please set your location to Tehran and your time zone to GMT +3.30. Iranian security forces are hunting for bloggers using location/timezone searches. The more people at this location, the more of a logjam it creates for forces trying to shut access to the Internet down. Cut & paste & pass it on.’
Stage Directions
Excellent Beauty
‘Breaking Bad’ is baaad!
into the nastiness of real life tragedy, and then, by letting things turn far more worse, comes out as black comedy. It has the downward spiral of mishaps plotting of Curb Your Enthusiasm (only, as said, in the form of tragedy), the…
I’m a very ‘umble person
Prize Fights
Schlepping Toward Election Day
It’s a Mad World
What is ‘What is art’? Hirst, Manifesta, Fey as Palin Pt. 2
If art is really simultaneously the exploration of possibilities of communication (i.e. future) and a self-reflexive memory system (i.e. past), then there were some pieces in Manifesta 7 that did give good counter-examples. Namely in the part curated by Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg in Trento, entitled ‘THE SOUL (or, Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls)’, emerged a theme that…