The Carnival of Popularity

This article illustrates a persistent recent strain in my research invoking the concept of 'carnival and carnivalesque' as a possible interface between art, politics, culture and society. Here, the argument lead into and refers to emergent issues of Nationalism and Populism and pits the artist's interest in Pop and Popularity againsth these more perncius manifestations. Numerous artists and theorists are referred to, covering a long historical arc, while always keeping the most recent developments in politics at the heart of the argument (this article also links to a series of related articles by the author for Third Text Online). 5,000 word article, based on Paul O'Kane's research and lecturing, published in the Online Supplement of Peer Reviewed journal Third Text

Godfried Donkor

Review of the Ghanaian artist Godfried Donkor, in a publication celebrating 20 years of the Camberwell Arts Festival

Post-Perspectival Art and Politics in Post-Brexit Britain: (Towards a Holistic Relativism)

Excerpt: At a Parliament Square rally held this summer in the immediate aftermath of the EU Referendum, several noble-minded, well-intentioned liberal speakers called upon the defeated, deflated and hugely disappointed crowd to ‘understand’ those who voted differently to ourselves, and to ‘empathise’ with working-class communities who, since the decline and demise of the New Labour project, have been gradually but comprehensively moved to think, act and vote with and for the centre-Right, hard-Right or far-Right. This political drift is likely to open a widening gap between core, middle class, fine art audiences and those deemed less or least likely to attend fine art events. So just how should we progress, contribute and critique meaningfully within ‘Post-Brexit’ Britain

‘Islands’ Richard Ducker and Gibson/Martelli

Gallery text/reflection for Richard Ducker and Gibson/Martelli's show 'Islands' at Coleman Project Space, London

Four Thousand One Hundred & Eight Masks for One Imposter

Commissioned Essay to accompany Online-only exhibition for the 'Five Years' art organisation

The Carnival of Popularity Part II: Towards a ‘mask-ocracy’

This is Part II of an article titled ‘The Carnival of Popularity’ that was published here in Third Text Online in September 2019. [1] The original essay grew up around a single stimulus, a 1.5-minute film clip, from 1927, found on social media, showing a pageant or carnival conducted by Shetland Islanders in a poor, rural community in the far north of the British Isles. Here is the link once again: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1943763908999092. On reflection, what made me write about, around and in response to this clip was the hunch or intuition that here might lie some clue, maybe even some possible solution to one of the biggest cultural and political problems facing us today, ie the erosion of a once progressive and optimistic, post-World War II ideal of an increasingly mobile, multicultural and international society, and the threatened collapse of that ideal into increasingly divisive and defensive societies. This direction implies the corruption and diversion of democracy’s promissory trajectory by the rising forces of populism and resurgent nationalism

In And Out Of The City: A walk from Aldwych to Millennium Bridge via St Paul's, Tuesday 17th October 2006

Creative writing and medium format black-and-white analog photography combined in a pyschogeography exercise

Cathy Lomax: Painting the Scene of the Self

This essay focuses on the work of one artist, the painter Cathy Lomax, and on the way in which various aspects of Lomax's practice – invariably informed by cinema – illuminate the theme of ‘the scene of the self’. The essay draws Lomax's work into convergence with the concept of glamour; interprets her prize-winning painting Black Venus; explicates her Film Diary series; and relates her work to one particular movie, Opening Night (1977) directed by John Cassavetes, as chosen by the author – hence the tone of this penultimate section unapologetically inhabits the ‘scene’ of the author's own ‘self’ as signalled by use of the first person ‘I’ and ‘my’. The essay then concludes by returning to a more objective and academic tone, while summarizing the ways in which Lomax's work illustrates a cinematically and theatrically informed sense of a twenty-first century self, as shared and confirmed by leading cultural commentators, philosophers and theorists. This article is the publication of a commissioned 5,000-word essay written as part of Cathy Lomax's prize for winning the Contemporary British Painting Prize 2016

Curating the Legacy of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Between 24 September and 26 October 2013, Bea de Sousa – curator of the Agency gallery, London (renowned, since the 1990s, for supporting and promoting a speculative art of difference) – staged an exhibition at the Korean Cultural Centre, London, which manifested as a research exercise into the work of the late Korean artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951?1982). The show, subtitled ‘A Portrait in Fragments’ was a response to the Korean Cultural Centre's ‘Curatorial Open Call’ and based on limited access to the artist's archive at the University of Berkeley California. The curator used the opportunity to expand knowledge and awareness of the artist, introducing Cha to new audiences. She also commissioned contemporary artists Ruth Barker, Bada Song, Jefford Horrigan and Su Jin Lee to devise, produce, display and perform new works in response to Cha's oeuvre. A co-incidental screening of works by Cha at London's ICA, hosted by Juliette Desorgues, was contextualised with a public discussion between Bea de Sousa, the author, and the audience. At the same time the author began to teach a new, BAFA seminar, ‘Technologies of Romance’, at Central St Martins College, London. This article is a response to these combined experiences

Technologies of Romance: looking for ‘object love’ in three works of video art

In this paper the author discusses three works of video art featured in the Technologies of Romance symposium held at the Science Museum, London, in 2018. The author searches within video art, as a genre or medium, within its technical apparatuses and within the three particular works, for contributions to the particular notion of ‘object love’ as drawn from a paper by Hilary Geoghegan and Alison Hess (2014). The author interprets the three video artists’ works with the aim of gleaning comparative examples that might illustrate or extend the ‘object love’ concept. Mathilde Roman’s book (2016) on the ‘staging’ of video art is an influence on the text, as are two short but profound statements by Walter Benjamin, one from his Theses on a Philosophy of History (1940), another from his essay on Surrealism (1929). History, ‘the past’, museology and ‘object love’ are all woven into the core of the article. As it moves towards its conclusion the author is inspired by the image of an empty, machine-made stocking (a classic symbol of Freudian fetishism) in Elizabeth Price’s video K, in such a way that the article ends by skewing both the idea of ‘object’, and that of ‘love’ in the direction of the fetish, while concluding that the past – just as much as any particular object from or of the past – tends to be subject to fetishisation. Meanwhile, video’s relative immateriality as an art medium, and its current use by artists, is seen as representative of an age of image-based archival practices that, assisted by digital technology, might now divert traditional, object-based processes of the museum – a shift that might be summed up in the phrase ‘screen becomes vitrine’. This shift, from vitrined objects to screened images might then, in turn, have implications for the ‘object love’ that initially interested Geoghegan and Hess and which began the author’s article and this dialogue with the Science Museum. This paper was published in Science Museum Journal's special 'Technologies of Romanc edition, which was based on, and featured several papers from a day-long symposium at the museum to celebrate the launch of my 2018 book 'Technologies of Romance - Part II. Both the symposium event and the spcieal edition of the journal featured my own paper and contributions from leading academics, curators and artists drawn from CSM, ScienceMuseum and beyond