Unsent Letter to an Old Art Teacher
Dear Adrian, I’m not drawing anymore. There, I’ve said it. I didn’t become an artist like you always said I could. I write stories now instead. I have always wanted…
painting
Keep the Ink Moving
The art of Maxim Peter Griffin attunes itself to the spirit of a place. Or is it spirits? His work taps the frequencies that thrum, seldom heard, through the worlds…
Gordon Cheung – Unknown Knowns
Unknown Knowns is Gordon Cheung’s third exhibition at Edel Assanti, London. The exhibition’s title is drawn from Slavoj Zizek’s observation that Donald Rumsfeld’s theory of knowledge omitted a crucial fourth…
The World Without Us
Deborah Westmancoat is a British contemporary painter based in Somerset, UK. She has a long term interest in alchemy and the philosophical sciences and how they help us to understand…
![12. RX15260 (The Bestowal of the Order of Saint-Spirit, in the Chapel of Versailles Palace [3 June 1724]), 2016 -® C2RMF_Alejandro Guijarro, courtesy Tristan Hoare](https://www.thelearnedpig.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/12.-RX15260-The-Bestowal-of-the-Order-of-Saint-Spirit-in-the-Chapel-of-Versailles-Palace-3-June-1724-2016-®-C2RMF_Alejandro-Guijarro-courtesy-Tristan-Hoare--600x425.jpg)
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…
Duelling Hagiographies: Mao and Modernism
The world is yours as well as ours: a statement in which ancestry maintains a dialectic with reconstruction; engineered to mobilise disjunctions with the past over a period spanning sixty…
Workers Hammer
The following is an edited extract from the conversation between artist John Stark and anthropologist David Graeber, author of Debt, the first 5000 years and The Utopia of Rules. The…
HOUSEWORK
In November 2015, eleven artists took on a Victorian ruin. I was one of them. The resulting exhibition, HOUSEWORK, set out to re-inhabit the stripped-out terrace. In it, paintbrushes and…
Bench
A little over eight years ago Jeppe Hein, the Danish installation artist, gave a presentation at the Barbican at which he talked about his Modified Social Bench series. His installation…
Reliquiae
If writing is an act of preservation, it is a flawed one. Words change their meanings, books rot, papers burn, whole libraries are lost to time. The longevity of a…
On a Headland of Lava Beside You
Joanna Kirk and I are both artists living in Blackheath and have become good friends over time as our children are the same age, friends and at school together. This…
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