Contents
Inscribing Desire
Prem Sahib interviewed by Paul Carey-Kent
It is not my agenda to make work about Minimalism. However, I do like the idea of destabilising some of what we have come to associate it with. Because I often use my own experience of sexuality as a material, I am inevitably queering the associations of that tradition.
Sickness and Solidarity
Sarah E James on transforming privatised despair into political action
For Mark Fisher, the UK’s ‘fatalistic submission’ to austerity needed to be understood in terms of a ‘deliberately cultivated depression’ of the working classes. With Boris Johnson’s recent victory this drive towards a kind of collective depression seems less fatalistic than sadistic, and the task of transforming privatised disaffection into political anger and action both a more alien and pressing possibility.
Sleep
Marcus Verhagen fears the commercial exploitation of the unconscious
The significance of sleep in art has in recent times largely been determined by the interplay of these two conceptions, the surrealist and neo-surrealist view of it as creative motor and the tendency, in the work of Georges Perec and others, to see in it a form of tacit refusal.
PROFILE
Sung Tieu
Adam Hines-Green on the German–Vietnamese artist
Sung Tieu emphasises the threat the displaced body poses, and the necessity for immigrants to assuage those fears by conforming to a certain narrative of productivity, utility and safety.
EDITORIAL
Little Britain
Democracy’s slide into fascism is usually accompanied by costly patriotic festivals to distract the public, so what does this say about the government’s so-called Brexit Festival?
Scheduled for 2022 (presumably Brexit won’t be ‘done’ in time for the centenary of the Festival of Britain), it is hard to see what is being celebrated this time round.
LETTER
Hopeful Futures
Jes Fernie responds to Steve McQueen’s epic Year 3 installation at Tate Britain
The number of homeless children in London has risen by a third since 2014 and is now equivalent to one in every 24 children. This means that many of the photos in Year 3 include a child who is homeless.
ARTNOTES
Creative Appointing
The unelected baroness Nicky Morgan retains her culture secretary brief; the Australian government axes its art department while the country’s galleries contend with the wildfires; Taipei takes up Japan’s exhibition of censored art; Kyrgyzstan’s ‘Feminnale’ of pro-women’s rights art has been censored; Brazil’s culture minister announces the National Art Awards with a speech that plagiarises Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels; the US National Archives blurs out anti-Trump protest placards in an exhibition celebrating women’s suffrage; plus the latest news on galleries, appointments, prizes and more.
OBITUARIES
John Baldessari 1931–2020 Peter Wollen 1938–2019 |