There’s an exhibition of British conceptual art, 1964 – 79, at Tate Britain at the moment. The catalogue sees stages in the development of conceptual art: – new frameworks: slightly childish reaction against contemporary Modernist art as described by Clement Greenberg, although many early UK conceptual artists did not knowof US equivalents and worked in…
Richmond May Fair last weekend. Amidst the crowd, two men sit alone at a stall. Richmond Green was crowded, yet (at that moment) no-one was interested in their stall. The standing man turns his hands outward in a gesture that could be despair or resignation. The seated man smiles as if to reassure him. No-one…
A conference at Kings last Friday had something of the excitement, the sense of destiny, that delegates must have felt at the early socialist meetings (perhaps the Second International meeting in London in 1896, held not so far away from Kings). Here was an international group of people making new things happen in politics, people…
Sharon Irish‘s talk on Stephen Willats last night was also remarkable for the presence in the audience of George Mallen, who contributed some fascinating reminiscences of working with Willats and Gordon Pask in the latter’s company, System Research Limited, based in Richmond. This was in the 1960s/ 1970s, when computers were neither as developed nor…
Last night, Sharon Irish gave a talk on Stephen Willats at the CAS. I find it very difficult to get my mind round Willats’ work. I’ve admired him since reading in A Computer in the Art Room by Catherine Mason that, in one of his teaching projects, “students dug a hole at a point determined…
A day long meeting about ‘Mythic London’ at Treadwells yesterday brought together several psychogeographers. Iain Sinclair, author of ‘London Orbital’ about the M25 and ‘London Overground’ about the Overground line, is perhaps the best known. “The heartbeat of the new London might be revealed, I felt, by tracking the acoustic footprints of the railway for…
Four copies of a free newspaper on the floor of a District Line train in London. The paper has 52 pages, with type faces as small as 6pt. Some of the pages are totally taken up with adverts – eg for half price shelving bays. Others provide an…