Since our last issue Laurence Fuller and I have been working with the TATE to increase public interest in Peter Fuller’s work and his archives at the TATE. As part of TATE public programmes they will be hosting a lecture on Peter Fuller around the 20th Anniversary of his death in April 2010. We are also looking at screening Peter’s documentaries at the same time. READ MORE
Beginning with the sensibility of the painter, Stephen Newton illuminates the psychic essence of ritual procedure as practiced universally since the dawn of man’s self-consciousness. By drawing on his own radical experience as an abstract painter, Newton excavates the elemental inner processes that are finally manifest in the wider cultural arena. He locates the common roots of art and religion at the hidden source of timeless ritual and its cathartic transforming power. As the esteemed American art critic Donald Kuspit has said, “This book is truly major.” READ MORE
It is October 1986. I am in Bath’s Royal United Hospital a few days after the birth of my first child, Laura. My bed is next to Stephanie’s, who a few days earlier gave birth to Laurence. Stephanie and I have chatted a little, bonding over our bewilderment at being new mothers, both sore from our unplanned caesareans. It is early evening and we have visitors. Peter is there with a male friend and they are sitting at the end of Stephanie’s bed engrossed in conversation. . READ MORE
My wife is holding our cat, Sophie, in the garden. My wife says: “Good news!” I think shouldn’t I be the judge of that, she may well be right, but what if her ‘good’ news is that Sophie is pregnant. I don’t want a litter of kittens. Her ‘good’ news may be my worst nightmare READ MORE
ART OF AUSTRALIA! It could be that this title suggests art necessarily belongs to a place. And maybe art does. Can there be anything too bad about that? Well, in the case of Australia, declared by one marginally nationalistic poet to be the “oldest of lands” (or something along those lines), the ‘art’ that Australian people think of when they write or say ‘art’ is mostly the art of Europeans. Even those within the non-Aboriginal community who have miraculously, albeit belatedly, pretended to bond with their Aboriginal brothers and sisters, tend to turn to European aesthetic principals when writing or talking about Australian art. READ MORE
