Elmgreen & Dragset @ Victoria Miro

Review of Elmgreen & Dragset for January Modern Painters; again click on the image to read.

Thomas Houseago @ Hauser & Wirth

Reviewed Thomas Houseago for December's Modern Painters; click on the image to read. 

Reviewed Gormley at White Cube for Modern Painters. Filed a piece to Museums Journal on exhibition sound design, published here. The Art Newspaper piece was published at the beginning of December; essentially looking into corporation tax paid by commercial art galleries. It's online here.

Reading: What a Carve Up; Robinson Crusoe; Gulliver's Travels; Every Love Story is a Ghost Story; Anna Karenina; William Trevor (picking from The Collected Stories).

So, reviewed the Houseago show at Hauser and Wirth, then Elmgreen & Dragset, at Victoria Miro, for Modern Painters. Have an ongoing piece I'm writing for The White Review. The doc work continued with two hearings at the High Court: that concluded OK and is being broadcast in November. Ongoing investigation for The Art Newspaper and hopefully more specialist work.

I sold this story on an "earlier Mona Lisa" to The Sunday Times. It was a down-page in the middle of the book but was followed fairly widely, though many, I'm sure, wrote it up as it was announced.

Reading (again, the many and varied books I've missed): Scoop, Lot 49, Handmaid's Tale, Consider the Lobster, Joy, Atonement, On the Road, Falling Man, Netherland, Bleak House (finally), Arcadia (finally), Mrs Dalloway, Good Soldier, On a Winter's Night; Rabbit, Run; Pastoralia.

Also read the UEA Creative Writing Anthology 2012; I'd pick out Tom Raphael Eaves and Eliza Robertson as names to look out for.

Started the Amber Room after doing a month of leg-work for Cathy Scott Clark in the UK for a broadcast project. Other reading: Moby Dick, Swag, The Quiet American (with, I guess, one central motivation being the moral mirror image of those seen in Crime and Punishment), Heart of Darkness, Underworld, Crash, C, Lucky Jim, Gatsby, Unbearable Lightness.

Doing something for specialist publication on permanent museum collections, research for various people, continuing website, drafted 30-40,000 words of a novel, trying to gather together pitches.

"You have an instinct for events," he said. "If you were turned into a room with a hundred people you never saw before and two of them were destined to enact a homicide, you would go straight to them as crow to carrion; you would be there from the very first: you would be the one to run out and borrow a pistol from the nearest policeman for them to use. Yet you never seem to bring back anything but information. Oh you have that, all right, because we seem to get everything that the other papers do and we haven't been sued yet and so doubtless it's all that anyone should expect for five cents and doubtless more than they deserve. But it's not the living breath of news. It's just information. It's dead before you even get back here with it."
Pylon, Faulkner (1935)

Here is my piece on the Millennium Seed Bank for the Smithsonian magazine (in Washington DC).

Enjoying the Elkins book. His approach is to disassemble all of the familiar means by which we assess photography - family snaps, fine art, the sublime - and seek out what is unique to the art form.

My interview with Colin Grant has gone live on The Daily Telegraph's website, as has my essay on Robert Nicol for COLE Gallery.

Read Sontag, Barthes on photography along with John Berger's Ways of Seeing (I appreciate rather late in the day). Now hoping to start on James Elkins's What Photography Is. As far as I can tell, the Barthes isn't a patch on the Sontag, but I guess it's (a) much shorter, and (b) his writing style is much less compressed. Refreshingly subjective, i.e. his feelings and emotions are a starting point for a theory on critique, which I guess I've not encountered much before.  Berger's book feels fresh. It's surprising we don't encounter more 'pop' books on aesthetics, given how popular shows in national galleries are at the moment. Maybe TV will do.

So just an update on reading: Submarine, Care of Wooden Floors, Goon Squad, The Teleportation Accident, Casino Royale, The Art of Fielding, Light Boxes, Lee Rourke on fables, The Ongoing Moment, Art Incorporated, Child 44, How To Write A Lot, various Lovecraft stories, along with a Denise Riley essay. Two classics to finish now, then some photography books I think. Reading The New Yorker a lot.

Recent commissions include those for US magazine Smithsonian, The Daily Telegraph and Museums Journal. I am also working on an essay for London's Cole Gallery, on the illustrator, painter and sculptor Robert Nicol, who has an exhibition there next month; the show is based around the life and death of John Franklin, a little-known explorer whose crew died, and cannibalised each other, during a trip to the Arctic in the 1840s.

I've been interviewing lots of former NOTW journalists for Graham Bowley's forthcoming book on Murdoch while the former is in Afghanistan. In addition, we've now got around eight interviews up on MYMZK; please follow the site on Twitter here or mail us with interview suggestions at mail@mymzk.com.

MYMZK

What is MYMZK?

*Commissioned Andy Cole at EnterExit to come up with the design concept, something clean, simple and modern, with Imran Younis then building it in code from scratch. I update and manipulate the HTML with new material in Dreamweaver CS5.5, which helps keep the site as unique as I possibly can. Assuming you've not just left it, you can see the results here.

*The site is fully licensed via the Performing Rights Society (PRS). Delphine Seddon at Statham, Gill and Davies has provided legal advice while Ian Kynnersley has built an iPhone app from scratch. This and an email template have been designed along Andy's guidelines, and will follow the content. The app, once operational, will allow the download of new music along with clean, easy-to-read interviews, which ideally communicate a sense of the acts' local venues and interests.

So I've re-read a couple of novels from last year, seeing how they work. Read The Ask, Fiesta, The Road, alongside The Turn of the Screw, now working my way through Bleak House, hopefully moving on to the Tomalin biography afterwards, and Fitzgerald's short stories.

This Gary Lutz piece in The Believer on prose style is useful.  

Work-wise, have had commissions from The Guardian, Esquire UK, and am helping The New York Times journalist Graham Bowley research a book. I've been commissioned to write a catalogue for Rivington Street's RED gallery, and am likely to be doing quite a lot of freelance PR for various clients.