The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: art

  • Mhadaidh, Maddy, Mad

    Mhadaidh, Maddy, Mad

      Corrie nam Fiadh, Deer Corrie the gentleness ………of browsing deer Allt a’ Mhadaidh, Wolf Burn will never ………dissolve the wolf   Some place-names refer to one-off events, like pegs stuck in the ground of memory. Others reckon the catastrophe of species loss over centuries. In his pioneering study of the influence humans have on…

  • Crossing Over

    Crossing Over

    Late November in Malaga is beautiful and easy: sun, cloudless skies and highs in the upper twenties. The olive trees bask in the late late heat, the Mickey-Mouse-head-shaped cactuses bloom with geranium-pink blossoms and the tourists still soak up rays outside cafés like solar batteries. But drive two hours inland to Granada and the temperature…

  • Asterisk

    Asterisk

    High electric masts broadcast the turnpike’s hyphenations: Flat, dashed boxy. Their bold yellow glow adumbrating distance, blinking smaller then vanishing. The slow-going traffic signals our taking it for granted, this mousetrap of freeways diverging to crowded intersection, their outer limits disappearing into darkness. While the avenues less taken are singled out and swarmed, I reassess…

  • Zone de sécurité temporaire

    Zone de sécurité temporaire

    There is a strange but commonly used French phrase with no precise parallel in English: entre chien et loup – between dog and wolf. It refers to twilight, when the light has dimmed and one can no longer differentiate between a wolf and a dog (as if it were once so simple to tell the…

  • LEAD

    LEAD

    If, as Rebecca Solnit has argued, “science is how capitalism knows the world”, then it should not be surprising that, as new auction records are broken seemingly every week, it is to technology that the business of authentication must increasingly turn. The studied perusal of the expert is no longer enough; now it is the…

  • Great and Small Mythologies

    Great and Small Mythologies

    Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, released last year in a posthumously published translation by Seamus Heaney, is concerned, amongst other things, with the inadequacies of art. In it, Virgil describes a mural painted by Daedalus, the mythological artist, which fails in its attempts to represent the death of his son, Icarus. In Heaney’s translation: ……………………………………………………………….Twice…

  • Sparrow Come Back Home

    Sparrow Come Back Home

    Sparrow Come Back Home, Carmel Buckley and Mark Harris’ exhibition at the ICA, examines a reflective side of the display of archive as monument. Taking place in the Fox Reading Room, a space where archival materials are at the heart of each show, the exhibition transforms the gallery into a visual library, a silent record…

  • Unrelated

    Unrelated

    A young woman slams her naked body furiously against a wall, again, again, and again, so brutally that I have to remind myself to breathe. Only moments before, I’d carefully sidestepped her as she lay on the floor, unclothed, motionless, and with her eyes shut. I filed into the studio along with the rest of…

  • Hello, World: Making Nature at Wellcome Collection

    Hello, World: Making Nature at Wellcome Collection

    Karl Reich’s 1913 recording of a nightingale – among the world’s earliest extant recordings of bird song – feels like a bottled metaphor for modernity. Trapped in shellac, this sweet twittering turned stand-in for nature, poetry and sex all at once, becomes a ghost of its living and mythical self, haunting us with questions of…

  • Chroma Hunt

    Chroma Hunt

    From cave drawings to medieval tapestry, classical pottery to Rubens or Rembrandt, the hunt has provided artists with powerful subject matter for thousands of years. Much of this power has to do with power: the physical prowess of early humanity, the great gods of Graeco-Roman mythology, or the wealth of the landed aristocracy of the…

  • Lives, Loves and Loss at Fenton House

    Lives, Loves and Loss at Fenton House

    The silvery tinkling of servants’ bells welcomes me into the house of merchant Joshua Gee. There’s a fire in the grate and sweet treats on offer in the Still Room where I’m handed a candle to illuminate the winter afternoon, a parchment inventory of household goods and a quill pen so that I may note…