Irish performance artist Amanda Coogan is recognized for creating durational works that explore the intersection of action, materiality and time while testing the limits of her body. Incorporating a range of inspirations and sources, Coogan creates multisensory, aesthetic experiences that are provocative, engaging, disturbing and, at times, hilarious. In the following interview, Coogan [...]
By Jon Seals
It is fitting that Düsseldorf, the city so formative in the life of art shaman Joseph Beuys, would host an exhibition investigating such themes as anthroposophy, bodily suffering, performance, ritual and social philosophy in contemporary art. Rather than attempting to be a shamanistic spirit guide in shaping society, politics or faith, [...]
Artist Jon Field pushes hundreds of thousands of dress pins into yards of black velvet to translate imagery from popular culture into surprising pictures. These reincarnated images of prejudiced materials detach into space, they shimmer, almost radiant, as light plays off pins, as the viewer moves and as the perception shifts from the [...]
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is a Mexican media artist based in Montreal, Québec, who has been developing interactive installations for over two decades. He was the first artist to represent Mexico in the Venice Biennale, in 2007, with a solo show that included his biometric installation Pulse Room: a room composed of hundreds of clear [...]
By Paco Barragán
If we study photographs, articles, manuscripts, books, letters and Salvador Dalí’s autobiography we can easily come to the conclusion that as of today Dalí’s political life is still greatly unknown by most art professionals due to the fact that all exhibits and retrospectives-think of Pompidou and Museo Reina Sofia or the [...]
By Michele Robecchi
Did you know that when The Guardian art correspondent paid a studio visit to Turner Prize finalist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye in London last May, two men were loitering outside the building, mobiles in hand, one yelling, “Are you Becca?” at no one in particular? And that in The New Yorker’s obituary for [...]
By John Valentine
Thesis: Modernist standards of objectivity in aesthetic evaluation are illusory. (Consider Lyotard’s “…incredulity with respect to all metanarratives.”) Art evaluation cannot logically proceed via the traditional deductive model.
Conclusion: The only relevant role for art critics today is not rational evaluation by way of reason-giving, but rather the function of the scout [...]
By Paco Barragán
The suppression of speech or other written information goes back a long way. Just remember how Socrates in 399 B.C. was put to death via the forced ingestion of hemlock because he challenged the Greek state’s attempt to censor his philosophical ideas.
From time to time we are confronted with the control [...]
By Michele Robecchi
One of the acknowledged limits of history, and as such the history of art, is that things are usually recounted along vertical lines. Whilst there is an undisputable logic in the method–evolutions and developments are much easier to read in this way–one of the downsides is that it tends to deny [...]
