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.