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.
Latest Content
Remarks Concerning Walter Benjamin’s Stockings
An introduction to a seminar session on ‘The Stocking’, ‘Hiding Places’, ‘The Sewing Box’, and ‘Colours’, from Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood Around 1900 at a conference on Matter/Materie in Benjamin’s philosophy, held at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of London,…
Adorno’s Essay on Ideology: A Commentary in Three Parts
An extended commentary on Adorno’s ‘Contribution to the Theory of Ideology’ published in Volume 4 of Selva: A Journal of the History of Art – also accessible on the Selva website
Theodor W. Adorno: ‘Contribution to the Theory of Ideology’
A translation of Adorno’s ‘Beitrag zur Ideologenlehre’ (1954) published in Volume 4 of Selva: A Journal of the History of Art – also accessible on Selva’s website
The Future of Kansas City Rents
Arriving in Kansas City from London sometimes feels like being a messenger from the future. The place where I grew up has been subject to enormous speculation on residential real estate over the last 25 years. In the neighbourhood where…
The Writing on the Wall Destroyed
This talk was given on 22.02.2022 at the Institut für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Technische Universität Graz & Annenstrasse 53 Galerie. The recording is missing the first sentence, which reads “I long ago fell in love with two sentences from Heinrich von…
On Putin’s Claim to Denazification
A note on denazification, because lots of people have not understood the issue. Meanwhile this BBC report comes to the disturbing conclusion that because neo-Nazis in the Ukraine are a small force, and because they are fighting on the correct…
A History of Dreams: Reading Benjamin and Adorno through Memory and Forgetting
My PhD Thesis was written at Birkbeck College, University of London, between 2011 and 2021. A PDF of the whole work can be found below. If you read it and have any comments or thoughts, then do get in touch…
Two Small Brecht Translations on Memorials and Statues
From Journeys into Modernity After the great wars, my work was discovered in the vault of a fascist national library alongside other ‘degenerate literature’. An equestrian statue of me was erected on a children’s playground. I hurried along to see…
Towards Pure Machines: A Benjaminian Footnote
Published in Refuse to Collaborate, for an exhibition by Sophie Carapetian, February 2022, Stadtgalerie Bern