avant-garde
Album: Slikback - AttritionThursday, 17 July 2025
In the eternal now of the strobe-lit sweatbox, innovation functions in a different way to the rest of culture. Yes of course, the thrill of the new has consistently been a vital part of dancefloor culture, but so has the familiarity of particular... Read more... |
S/HE IS STILL HER/E - The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary review - a shapeshifting open window onto a counter-cultural radicalWednesday, 16 July 2025
“I like guns. At school we had to fight with guns in the army cadets. I’m actually a first-class sniper. I could shoot people from half a mile away.”So says Gen, AKA Genesis P Orridge, AKA Neil Megson, in David Charles Rodrigues’s intimate portrait... Read more... |
Album: Mark Stewart - The Fateful SymmetryThursday, 10 July 2025
I met Mark Stewart once. It was on a platform at Clapham Junction, I wouldn’t normally approach a famous person like that, but I felt I had to pay my respects. It turned out he was getting on my train – going down to Dorset to “visit his old Ma” –... Read more... |
Tom Raworth: Cancer review - truthfulnessFriday, 04 July 2025
I recently heard a BBC Radio 4 presenter use the troubling phrase: "Not everyone agreed on the reality of that." Once the domain of Andre Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme, such sentiments are now alarmingly commonplace: part and parcel of the BBC’s... Read more... |
Hamlet Hail to the Thief, RSC, Stratford review - Radiohead mark the Bard's cardSaturday, 14 June 2025
The safe transfer of power in post-war Western democracies was once a given. The homely Pickfords Removals van outside Number Ten, a crestfallen now ex-PM and family mooching about, for once trying not to be on camera, it's a tabloid front page... Read more... |
Zsuzsanna Gahse: Mountainish review - seeking refugeTuesday, 29 April 2025
Mountainish by Zsuzsanna Gahse is a collection of 515 notes, each contributing to an expansive kaleidoscope of mountain encounters. Translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire in Prototype’s English-language edition, a narrator travels in the... Read more... |
Rhinoceros, Almeida Theatre review - joyously absurd and absurdly joyfulSaturday, 05 April 2025
Is the theatre of the absurd dead? In today’s world, when cruel and crazy events happen almost daily, the idea that you can satirize daily life by exaggerating its latent irrationalities seems redundant. For this reason, perhaps, revivals of plays... Read more... |
Ed Atkins, Tate Britain review - hiding behind computer generated doppelgängersFriday, 04 April 2025
The best way to experience Ed Atkins’ exhibition at Tate Britain is to start at the end by watching Nurses Come and Go, But None For Me, a film he has just completed. It lasts nearly two hours but is worth the investment since it reveals what the... Read more... |
The End review - surreality in the salt mineFriday, 28 March 2025
The End, a quasi-musical from Joshua Oppenheimer, who has previously only produced documentaries, is a surreal examination of a group of individuals isolated from the chaos of a collapsing external world. Sheltered (or trapped?) in an eerily... Read more... |
Album: Tim Hecker - ShardsMonday, 17 February 2025
The question of personality in abstract and ambient music has always been a fascinating one. Without conventional signifiers of expressiveness, and especially in the age of AI, it’s easy for people to think “a computer could have done that”. Indeed... Read more... |
The Maids, Jermyn Street Theatre review - new broom sweeps clean in fierce revivalMonday, 13 January 2025
There are two main reasons to revive classics. The first is that they are really good; the second is that they have something to say about how the world is changing, perhaps more accurately, how our perception of it is changing. Both are true of... Read more... |
Best of 2024: Visual ArtsMonday, 30 December 2024
I thought I might never be able to say it’s been a great year for women artists, so forgive me for focusing solely on them.Things were kickstarted with a retrospective of Barbara Kruger (Serpentine Gallery) who uses words and images to illuminate... Read more... |
- 1 of 18
- ››
