Live Rats or The Art of Poverty
This is a version of an invited guest lecture given to first year Fine Art students at the Edinburgh College of Art.
Art Criticism and Exhibition Texts
Notes to Sean Bonney (1969-2019)
Written December 2019, soon after Sean’s death. A part of this essay was published in 2022 in Slovenian in the journal Maska, alongside Sean’s Lamentations.
Conversation with David Panos about The Searchers
The Searchers by David Panos is at Hollybush Gardens, 1-2 Warner Yard London EC1R 5EY, 12 January – 9 February 2019 There is something chattering. Alongside a triptych a small screen displays the rhythmic loop of hands typing, contorting, touching,…
A broken type of grace: on David Panos’ Time Crystals
For quite some time I believed that Novalis had invented techno. Sifting through fragments in the silence of a library, a single one exploded out of the page at me: “The play of movement – joy at the diverse movements.…
Of Barenboim’s Schubert
Long past four in the morning an old man sits at the piano. Outside the shaded sky turns azure, its mottled urban-orange clouds invisible from within the concert-hall, windowless as the rest of them. His fingers have struck the same…
All the world’s a platform: dispatches from Berlin on post-Internet art
Strewn across the pavements around the Volksbühne are quotations from Rosa Luxemburg’s books and letters. As rags or ribbons, they look like the rubbish of the city’s day, to be cleared away before the beginning of the work of the…
Against Pocket Money Loans: Critique of an Artwork
I have just seen a photograph of a new artwork that has appeared on Stroud Green Road in North London. A shop is decked out to look like a payday loans shop, but aimed at kids. There’s even a promotion…
New Essay up on Mute about Dries Verhoeven’s ‘Wanna Play? Love in the Times of Grindr’
I have a new report/essay up on Mute Magazine’s website. It discusses Dries Verhoeven’s artwork ‘Wanna Play: Love in the times of Grindr’, which caused enormous rage in the Berlin queer community in the last week, and how the theatre…
A Letter to Goldsmiths art students on capitalism, art and pseudo-critique
Dear Goldsmiths Art Students, I attended your MFA show two nights ago. I apologise to an extent: with so many artworks on display it was difficult to digest any of them. That situation was exacerbated by the fact that so…