Weighing the Africa in South Africa
The morning papers on May 19 recorded a grim scene. A young Mozambican man was pictured on hands and knees, his body engulfed by flames. Set upon by a group of South African youths, the unidentified man had been stabbed and severely beaten before being set alight. Taken in Ramaphosa, an impoverished settlement east of Johannesburg, the photograph forms part of a mosaic of news photographs documenting the ruthless wave of attacks targeting African immigrants resident in South Africa’s townships.
Five days after the publication of the Ramaphosa photograph, the deceased man’s identity remained a mystery. On Friday…
by Sean O’Toole on 11/06/08 | No responses | Read More
Best Before 1995 - Part 2
Over two terms, members of the Bush administration have become remarkably adept at adopting the language of relativism. In 2002 President Bush received a memo from Frank Luntz, an Oxford Ph.D. and Republican lobbyist, titled ‘The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America’. There he writes:
‘The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science […] Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views…
by Ronald Jones on 16/04/08 | 1 response | Read More
Best Before 1995
The idea of cultural relativism is nothing but an excuse to violate human rights.
Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Laureate
The language of relativism projects power by raising doubt or casting uncertainty where none existed before. Its favoured targets are declarations of objective truth and ethical judgment. Relativism peaked when Susan Sontag granted the merit of fearlessness to the hijackers who brought down the World Trade Center in 2001. ‘Where is the acknowledgement,’ she asked in The New Yorker less than two weeks after the attack, ‘that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or…
by Ronald Jones on 08/04/08 | No responses | Read More
Another Fake Obituary
The diagnosis is fatal: art criticism is done for. Hal Foster and Dave Hickey have variously heralded its decline in the US while in South Africa, a 14-hour inter-continental flight south from New York, the withering stature of local art criticism has become a repeat liturgy at various public forums.
‘We don’t have a culture of criticism, just a tradition of bitching,’ intoned poet Lesego Rampolokeng during a fractious exchange at a visual arts conference held in Cape Town some three years ago. Often quoted, his assertion has now acquired the status of a definitive pronouncement.
…
by Sean O'Toole on 31/03/08 | No responses | Read More
Metacritics and Strangers
Imagine it’s 2010. You’re planning a short trip to New York, and you want to see the most interesting exhibitions the city has to offer. Where to start?
Well, you need to know what’s on, so you fire up the web and hit New York Art Beat. This site launched back in the spring of 2008, four years after its invention as Tokyo Art Beat, the first bilingual integrated guide to the Japanese capital’s art scene. NYAB not only tells you what’s on, when and where (with links to…
by Nick Currie on 25/03/08 | 1 response | Read More
Variations on a Theme
Music critic Paul Morley has written a catalogue essay (designed by Dexter Sinister; published by Film and Video Umbrella) to accompany a recent installation by American artist Cory Arcangel, a couple thousand short films about Glenn Gould (2007). Or rather, Morley has assembled most of the text in the same way that Arcangel assembled his video montage – from fragments found on the Internet. Arcangel’s installation consists of a version of Bach’s Goldberg Variations (1741) meticulously constructed from YouTube samples of individual notes played by amateurs. By making the connection between YouTube and Gould, the bricolages invite…
by Mark Fisher on 19/03/08 | No responses | Read More
Very Superstitious
Roman emperors, we’re told, based important decisions on omens divined from the entrails of birds. For centuries, defining certain human behaviours as ‘sin’ or ‘heresy’, believers handed their neighbours over to church torturers and executioners with a clear conscience. But our consumer era – the end of history – represents the end of superstition, doesn’t it? We live now in an era of rational, informed choice, don’t we?
Maybe not, thinks Katrin Tees, an Estonian artist showing her amusingly pointed photographs in ’Don’t Worry—Be Curious!’, the 4th Baltic Triennial of Photographic Art,…
by Nick Currie on 27/02/08 | No responses | Read More
Clearing the Air
For a long time, continental philosophy has dominated large areas of cultural criticism, not least in the art world. Its orthodoxies have infected the way in which artists understand and describe their own work, as well as the critical reception of that same work. Traditionally, continental philosophy’s main adversary has been a dismissive Anglo-American commonsense. But a sophisticated challenge to continentalism is now emerging, drawing upon some of the same theoretical resources but using them for very different purposes.
At the forefront of these developments is the philosopher Graham Harman, whose work on cultural theorist Bruno Latour was…
by Mark Fisher on 20/02/08 | 2 responses | Read More
Off the Wall
‘Art is the New Activism’, or so the New Statesman declared on the cover of last week’s issue (21 January 2008). UK street artist Banksy recently invited a group of artists to his now annual ‘Santa’s Ghetto’ exhibition in Bethlehem; the article contends that this foray heralds a ‘rise of a guerilla movement’. Peter Kennard, one of the invitees and the author of the article, claims that the group stands in contrast to the ‘intellectual interventions’ of contemporary artists, in that Banksy et al ‘want to connect with the real world, rather than work for the market…
by Nicola Harvey on 24/01/08 | 1 response | Read More
Related Matters
At a recent talk at the Architectural Association in London (‘Revisiting Relational Aesthetics’, 30 October 2007), Hal Foster looked again at his arguments about relational aesthetics as well as the artists working with fictional archives, first laid out in the October article ‘An Archival Impulse’ (Autumn 2004). Heard again, Foster’s argument about artists who mine history to create present webs of meaning, or who blend fact and fiction in assembled archives, had an air of existential dispossession to it: the ‘archival impulse’, he stated, ‘is made within a world whose given connections are lost’. Such grey skies hover over the…
by Melissa Gronlund on 23/01/08 | 1 response | Read More
The Desperate Man
In Paris this season the must-see museum exhibition has been the Courbet retrospective at the Grand Palais. It’s a four-curator stunner of a show, the first French outing in 30 years for the man Linda Nochlin once called ‘the Mick Jagger of the nineteenth century.’ The Met’s Woman with a Parakeet has come to town, and the near-pornographic Origin of the World has been reunited with the André Masson landscape that its last owner, Jacques Lacan, used to disguise it. It’s reassuring when such an impressive show pulls such a large audience: the Grand Palais is now opening until late…
by Jason Farago on 14/12/07 | No responses | Read More
Con Man
It goes without saying that critics should know their subject. Ben Lewis’ odd and ignorant diatribe, ‘So Who Put the Con in Contemporary Art?’, was published in London’s Evening Standard on 16 November and belies such logic. Confusing and conflating market forces with what is actually being produced on the complex and multi-layered stage that comprises the contemporary art world, he writes, ‘You will search the colour magazines of the art press, such as frieze, Art Review and Art Forum and barely find a critical article, let alone a critical word.…
by Jennifer Higgie on 03/12/07 | 26 responses | Read More
Fifteen Minutes
The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.
Ecclesiastes
On 20 April 1963 the French Ministry of Cultural Affairs, led by André Malraux, closed the complex of caves at Lascaux to the public. Preservation was the reason; the paintings had become considerably damaged by an excess of carbon dioxide produced by the steady flow of 1,200 tourists per day. The caves, discovered in 1940, had been opened to the public just 13 years earlier to show off the…
by Ronald Jones on 22/11/07 | No responses | Read More
The Life Aquatic
I’ve recently got hooked on SpongeBob SquarePants. It’s a children’s cartoon, but the pure buzz it delivers works just as well on an adult’s sensory apparatus. Partly, this is because of the bright colouring and the cheeky animation style, with which the surreal cartoon universe of Bikini Bottom, the submarine town that the programme’s cast of sea creatures inhabit, is brought to life. But first and foremost the fizz is generated by the exuberance of the programme’s protagonist, SpongeBob SquarePants, a small yellow sea sponge in a schoolboy uniform. SpongeBob’s spontaneity and readiness to instantaneously respond to new situations and…
by Jan Verwoert on 09/10/07 | 2 responses | Read More
Sound and Vision
What connects the following?
1. ‘Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967’, which opened last week at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
2. Jerome Bel’s performance ‘The Show Must Go On’ at the Lyon Opera, commissioned as part of the Lyon Biennial which opened in September, and featuring around a dozen dancers enacting the lyrics to a playlist of songs ranging from ‘Into Your Arms’ by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds to Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On (Love Theme from “Titanic”)’.
3. Sound & Vision by…
by Dan Fox on 04/10/07 | 2 responses | Read More
Search Me
Perhaps it’s because I’m used to writing words for money, or that I lack a certain Utopian drive, but I’ve never quite understood the attraction of contributing to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written, edited and occasionally vandalized by its army of unpaid readers. Why devote precious, unremunerated hours to an un-attributed entry on the wallaby, or the comic actor Steve Guttenberg, only to find that your text has been re-formulated by a passing amateur zoologist, or desecrated by an incensed film fan who’s convinced that Guttenberg should have handed in his badge after Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol (1987)?…
by Tom Morton on 12/07/07 | 1 response | Read More
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