Art and culture through the personal
Shortly after Hurricane Melissa, my aunt calls to tell me everyone’s roof caved in. The magnitude of this causes me to elide grammar in my retelling: surely I should write everyone’s roof has caved in, roof should likely be in its plural ‘roofs’, the tense of the sentence is both present and past. And of course it wasn’t necessarily ‘everyone’; she was referring to her own home …
I’ve been accused of being insincere. In March, I had a Paris love affair. The shooting of Braquâge (une évasion) caused Jacques Rivette to have a nervous breakdown. Shot in June 1975, but only released in 1978, the film, a western set in Paris about a jewel thief and her sales girl accomplice whose title combines the words braquage (robbery) and âge (age), was intended to be the third filmed and fifth released in a quintology of films Rivette called Scènes de la Vie Parallèle …
Votives, archives, storehouses, bric-a-brac shelves, the magnetic side of my boiler, mantlepieces, picture galleries, display cases, messy drawers, white IKEA Kallaxs and shelving units from Habitat, pinboards, Pinterest, the area of skin that starts under my right arm and goes down to my knees, Encyclopedia Madonnica, hard-drives with the orange rubber lifejackets, a jeweller’s well-worn fingers
Taking on a lecture titled ‘Why I Write’, Lydia Davis struggles with the why and decides instead to focus on the how. Into the Weeds, a book edited from this lecture, delivered annually to commemorate the awarding of the Windham-Campbell Prizes, started by Donald Windham and Sandy M. Campbell and administered by Yale University, opens with the initial invitation.
I know people know what death looks like and I knew what it looked like before I saw how my mother wore it but there was no way for me to know what she would look like dead until she had died which feels unfair.
The winter wind hitting your exposed skin feels sore; the two collide to create a fissure on the plain of your neck like brittle land. Your hands are red and swollen, ankles charred from the chill.
When she was a little over seven years old, her mother, Mrs Roy, found a family who could take care of her when Mrs Roy was overwhelmed with running a one-of-a-kind school in Kottayam, in the southern state of Kerala, India. The chosen family lived in a big, airy house. The problem, however, was the “respected” senior who was the patriarch-grandfather.
My grandparents’ house had a large garden which bordered three-quarters of the property. The walls were painted a dark, earth green to blend in with all the plants, trees, and flower bushes they had planted and tended to over the years.
Image: Untitled (Face in Dirt), David Wojnarowicz, 1991
In the 1990s, the Jenny Holzer truism "It is in your self-interest to find a way to be very tender" became an art world mantra. In the 2010s, Tumblr fed it to the masses and a backlash ensued, labelling its admirers basic. Another decade on and the scales tipped again as millions of us baked bread, banged pots for frontline workers, and embraced Arlo Parks the moment we met her music.
Filmed inside the home of the artists Phillip Maberry and Scott Walker, the music video for The B52’s Love Shack is everything you would want a campy and eccentric New Wave party to be. Bang on the door of Mayberry and Walker’s Shaque D’amour and you'll find cartoonish crayon striped walls that collide with zebra print …
I like a painter with a landscape obsession. I feel at home with a Cezanne, returning over and over to the edge of Mont Sainte-Victoire as he tries to capture the ever-changing colour of its sloping sides. Or an Etel Adan, who did the same to Mount Tamalpais, rendering its hues in both paint and words.
I was sitting in Sadie Coles HQ, on a black beanbag, surrounded by imitation Persian rugs, for over two hours. In front of me was a large single-channel video, composed of approximately ninety individual screens to produce a whole, …
