Art Influence is an arts journal that will be a premier forum for critical debate on an international scale, by commissioning writing by eminent people on culturally and politically significant events here and overseas; by including on the website an archive containing all of the lectures hosted by the Peter Fuller Memorial Foundation over the last two decades, and by gradually introducing on its pages the writing of Peter Fuller. READ MORE
I am aware that this sounds arrogant and, no doubt, discourteous to the artists concerned, but then serious criticism is often that way. And, after all, such criticism itself springs out of a ‘journey’. As it happens, I agree with Gilbert, one of the contributors to Oscar Wilde’s famous dialogue on, ‘The Critic as Artist’. Gilbert argues that higher criticism is ‘the record of one’s sole’. He goes on to describe it as ‘the only civilised form of autobiography, as it deals not with life’s physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind’. READ MORE
In his etchings, Lucian Freud uses the body’s underlying bone structure as a typological marker or foci to distribute rhythmic, darting, and calculated lines. These lines describe his encounters with specific human beings, their bodies and psyches. Freud’s etchings are built upon reiterations, repeated articulations of contours, which lead to meticulous descriptions of tonal values and surfaces... READ MORE
This paper was originally written in response to a request from the Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima as a talk for his students in Kyoto about why art matters. He was dismayed by his students’ haste to become superstars and their relative lack of curiosity. This tendency is being felt worldwide and may simply be an effect of the materialism that has distorted public life since the 1980s... READ MORE
As his art throughout the decades has no traceable progression, as one would expect when reviewing a retrospective, it seems he is three artists operating under the same pseudonym - ‘Baselitz’. The first is a patriot with a strong grasp of his country’s ideals and history. The second is a violent man, disfiguring and slashing his medium. The third must be the most prominent, a little boy playing with his willy in defiance of authoritative figures. READ MORE
For some hidden agenda of Peter’s I wrote an article on the market in Auerbach, Kossof and Freud for the back page of Volume 1 No 1 of Modern Painters in Spring 1988. I guess that gives a poetic symmetry to my introduction here. READ MORE
My mother was a nurse for more than thirty years (for more than half of them she was referred to as a ‘sister’). After she retired she had to have an operation on her wrist. Years of lifting patients had taken its toll. She said there were many rules that have disappeared in that time. Like standing to a sort-of attention with your hands behind your back when a doctor entered the room. But hospital corners, when making a bed, stayed. Maybe only for neatness, maybe due to habit – I don’t know. Either way there was (and apparently still is) no cause for re-inventing how to make a bed. READ MORE
Thirty artists from what is presumed to be one cultural background have been chosen by Brenda L Croft, the curator for this inaugural Australian Indigenous Art Triennial. In fact these artists come from diverse backgrounds in each of the States and Territories of Australia and from the Torres Straight Islands, and what they have in common is that they are indigenous. This exhibition purposely coincides with the fortieth anniversary of the 1967 Referendum, whereby non-Indigenous Australians voted overwhelmingly to include Indigenous Australians on the census as citizens for the first time. Culture Warriors pays tribute to a specific group of artists whose careers span the forty years since the Referendum when they were first made Australian citizens. READ MORE
It has already been dubbed the “Facebook” Biennial. New York Magazine’s Carly Berwick has charted how for the thirtysomething year old curators Shamim Momin and Henriette Huldisch, being spun from one artist studio to the next by the buddy system, or bypassing the convention of the studio visit altogether and “getting to hang” instead in the cafes and artist salons of the intensely social generation who are the focus of the 2008 Whitney Biennial, is a defining aspect of the selection process. Many of the artists collaborate on projects, as often as not extra-studio ventures such as dance parties, community gardening, and running bars or radio stations. READ MORE
From what I have seen of the European art world Marcelle Hanselaar is one of the best. You will not find her works in the most obvious places, much to the loss of those institutions in Britain that have overlooked her work (with the exception of the British Museum who currently own a portfolio of Marcelle’s prints Le Petite Morte). Much to the gain of collectors, for their sake I’m happy her works are what I consider affordable, but I have no idea why. This show is Marcelle’s affirmation that she is of the very best in Europe and will be overlooked no longer. Baselitz has a firm contender for the role of a leading contemporary expressionist. I have no doubt in my mind that as Marcelle’s collectors grow in number and influence you will see more of her work in institutions. Where the collectors go, the institutions will follow. READ MORE
David Tucker's 2007 exhibition at the New England Regional Art Museum, This Body of Life Journey, beckons the viewer into an intimate, yet starkly lit space and presents just three bodies of work: A Local Girl Comes Home, Floods and Hurricanes and Undone. Each reveals a lifetime of conscious, subliminal and environmental influences on the artist. READ MORE
This article aims to address the social meaning of representing female body in photography. In contemporary art, particularly in conceptual photography, body is politicized and becomes a discursive text that is encoded with social criticism. Focusing on the relationship between artist and city space, this article examines how a photographer explores the hidden corners in public space and examines how the artist explores the identity of female sex workers through representing their bodies... READ MORE
Guided by the young artist Kerri Meehan I drifted through the maze of experimentation and immense institution of human thought that is St Martins. By chance, passing through a block named D3. Hanging in the corner of the corner of the building was the intensely eerie Randy. What was immediately impacting for me was not necessarily the photo-realistic technique but the visceral air surrounding the figure, almost like the atmosphere of that person, made visible... READ MORE
One of many mysteries attaching to Picasso and more importantly to his position as the defining figure of Modern Art involves his almost total rejection of the modern world as subject matter. Well, this might not be true of the Picasso of John Richardson’s second volume, covering 1907 – 1917, but it certainly seems to apply to the third, THE TRIUMPHANT YEARS 1917-1932. The terrible First World War - that ‘great’ war - was in full swing in 1917 and with it the European world discovered a fuller and more affecting modernism than the art world could offer... READ MORE
