Brian Dillon’s books include Affinities, Suppose a Sentence and Essayism. A memoir, Ambivalence: An Education, will be published next year.
Leigh Bowery (1991)
On 28 September 1992, the artist and London nightclub impresario Leigh Bowery took the stage at Kinky Gerlinky, a peripatetic club then established in Leicester Square. Wearing sunglasses, a headscarf and a striped cotton dress, the imposing Bowery had got himself up as Divine – his most obvious precursor – in John Waters’s film Female Trouble...
Peter Kennard is an expert in the obvious. His art – if that is the word – seems all polemic and assertion, with little in the way of ambiguity, connotation or aesthetic import. Photomontage, which has been his primary form for more than fifty years, is always in focus, its borrowed elements (however grainy, stark or blurred) arrayed on the same legible plane, all to the point...
Entering Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death, Roni Horn’s retrospective at Museum Ludwig in Cologne (until 11 August), you’re flanked by 96 photographs of her niece Georgia. The two grids of 48 seem to match until you’ve swivelled back and forth a few times and started noting certain fine disparities. Georgia’s grin slips, her head tilts, she peers at us through...
The first room of Zineb Sedira’s exhibition Dreams Have No Titles (at the Whitechapel Gallery until 12 May) is both inviting and confusing.
Jade? Arsenic? Celadon? Eau de nil? I can’t remember ever worrying so much about the way I might describe the colours at an exhibition. A glass vase in the shape of a grasping hand, from which emerges the outline of a photographed bunch of dead blooms, and beside this a lacquer box panelled in a similar green: many such artefacts and finishes in Marc Camille Chaimowicz: Nuit...
The essay can seem to be the cosy heartland of belles-lettres, a place where nothing urgent is ever said. Recently, though, publishers have seemed willing to take on and even promote this...
I once knew a man, a Jamaican, who when he first came to England always answered truthfully when asked ‘How are you?’ A bit sniffly, he might reply; or he would describe his...
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