Tag: art

  • Visceral Gestures: Writing Susumu Kamijo’s Art

    Some months ago, in a haze of art talk and chats about Samuel Beckett and Kobo Abe, I told Susumu Kamijo that I would love to write about his art. It was an impulsive thing to say, considering that I have never written about any art that I have loved or hated. Usually the marginalia of my notebooks, littered with thoughts about Ivan Kožarić’s (radical) ideas regarding public space and how Francis Bacon lights upon a dark background, is just that—thoughts that remain somewhere unwritten in sentences. They are reduced to ideas I want to pursue but do not. They are my private consumption habits about art and the artists. My strange forays into rabbit holes that make me look up strange art movements and its off-shoots.

    With Susumu Kamijo’s art, the thing that attracted me is the apparent lightness of it. It still seems to me like it is an elaborate and large-scale trick where everyone is only pretending that his poodle paintings are fluffy and cute, when it seems so much clearer that there is something sinister that is revealed to a lay consumer of art when the poodle forms starts becoming something else.

    Most of my writing came down to decoding the “something else” part of that. And after quite a few drafts and a few chats with the artist, the press release was published online when they announced the solo show for Perrotin’s Seoul gallery.

  • while reading for Emily Apter’s workshop

    while reading for Emily Apter’s workshop

    This Thursday (25th of April, 2019), the great Emily Apter holds a workshop at the Freie Universität. While I have listened to her great keynotes at least twice (once at a conference in Delhi and once in Berlin’s HKW), every time I have listened to her, a deeper reservoir of knowledge opens itself up for reading/research. For this workshop, I just realised that one of her big topics of the workshop itself is the work of artist/researcher Lawrence Abu Hamdan. And his work on speech and accents is quite fascinating both from the perspective of someone who feigns accents all the time and as someone who is interested in the politics of the whole thing on the other. Here’s an audio “documentary”:

    On the other hand, the very fabulous Ben Mauk has written on the same exhibition/documentary – which makes for a very insightful secondary reading.