So my pet hate/rant this month focusses on the emergence, over the past 30 years or so, of the requirement for artists to ‘big themselves up’. With the explosion of social media and online content in the past 2 decades I am asserting that the problem is now well out of hand, having reached epic and epidemic proportions (sorry Covid you don’t have the complete monopoly here). read here
As the movie1’s narrator said:
There are 8 million stories in the naked city, and this is just one of them.
In recent months, my art/world dichotomy has polarised itself around the need to reconcile the relative merits of artworks by the great and good on the one hand, and the urgency for all of us to act on climate change on the other. This may seem a very unequal contest in terms of their respective corners and weight divisions, but where is the place for art and culture on an uninhabitable planet? read here
Lately, I have been reconsidering much in terms of the past, present and future of the visual arts. More particularly, the Covid-19 variations (sounds musical), and even more ominously, the climate crisis, are increasingly – and not incrementally – altering our lives for the future. Combine this with escalating global tensions and it’s not a pretty picture, in fact, it’s just about beyond contemplation for us mere mortals. read here
It seems that the human world and the planet may be at some kind of tipping point; not that I necessarily use this term expressly in relation to environmental climate change, but perhaps there is a wider cultural and aesthetic change in the environmental conditions for culture. It is in the light of this conjecture that I explore an unromanticised approach to art-making, epitomised in the work of Hans-Peter Feldmann. read the full article here
In this follow-up to my last article, which covered the work and sensibility of the Italian sculptor Claudio Parmiggiani, I attempted to established a precedent for the synecdochal object and traumatic processes in particular as a way of implicating wider culture. I now want to move on to explore, albeit briefly, what I would see as a conceptually related, but aesthetically distinct approach to creating monuments that similarly collide virtue and terror. read HERE
Some thoughts on the Dark Web land grab of arts and culture: Calling at blockchain, nifties and crypto en route to carbon ruination. Cryptobabble explained HERE
‘Consensual Hallucinations’ courtesy of Serwah Attafuah. NFT artwork, Australia.
This month I touch on what may be a unique, but equally momentary opportunity to forge new partnerships as old orthodoxies are ravaged by the Virus, Climate Change, Brexit, Woke/Gammon, Cancel Culture and all points East. The titular reference is a tribute to both Ivan Vladimirovitch Shcheglov’s Formulary for a New Urbanism (1953), and an idea that one could be applied to create something out of nothing: Enter Fac 51 The Hacienda – and part a Mancunian legend to boot. Read HERE.
For my title reference I would refer you to a punk classic by the Welsh band The Table from 1977. I also thought this captured a certain zeitgeist of the moment. Read the full article for Wall Street International HERE.
Subsequent to the recent ‘Beast from the East II’ storm last week I hereby claim this dislodged fragment of sea defences as a fitting structuralist metaphor for the current state of the ‘self’: a true concrete poem.
Neil Powell 