TheDrouth

2nd March 2020

A Contest of Will : Who wrote Shakespeare? Queen Victoria, Aurelia’s Aunt, Mr Welbecker or Malvolio?
by Owen Dudley Edwards

Taking inspiration from James Shapiro’s Contested Will Owen Dudley Edwards takes a wry look at the absurdist snobbery and the sheer daftness of the ‘who really wrote Shakespeare?’ tradition.
27th February 2020

Parallel State: Lines of sight beyond the territory
by Simon Poulter

Until one month ago, British people were among the few lucky individuals on this planet that could count themselves to not only one, but even two citizenships. Facing a deterioration of the positive powers that are granted to UK-citizens, it begs the question of who has really benefitted from taking away these ‘bonus rights’. Would it be possible to reinstate this safety-net by connecting mobile and transitory points of resistance to connect to a new form of citizen-power? Meet the emerging Parallel State. Simon Poulter gives a recap of the day on which the ambitions of the Parallel State were drawn out and reviews the territory it was inescapably born into.
20th February 2020

Aesthetics, Technological Politics and the Video Age
by Ravi Sundaram

In an age of surveillance capitalism is it no longer viable to put hope in the creative possibilities Walter Benjamin believed were opened to humanity through technological advances in media? –Or can a new poetics of infrastructure disrupt the sinister operations of corporate power? Ravi Sundaram surveys the will in the media.
14th February 2020

1917 AND ALL THAT
by Owen Dudley Edwards

Hailed as a significant technical achievement, Owen Dudley Edwards sees the film 1917 as a great humanising agent.
6th February 2020

Beethoven 250
by Iain Matheson

It’s a quarter millennium this year since the birth of THE Romantic hero, the Thunderer himself, Beethoven, who claimed to have taken ‘fate by the throat’ and would never ‘let it bend me completely to its will’. Iain Matheson picks his way through Beethoven’s will and his work.
31st January 2020

Does the estate have its own will? Dwelling upon the last will.
by Agnieszka Kilian

In a world proliferating in riches and injustice there seems, for the moment anyhow, little relief in the notion of generations. For Nietzsche the contract was a ‘memory of the will’, but there are other modes of control of future distribution of goods. The question here, for Agnieszka Kilian, with the last will, is who or what bequeaths, and what actually is the bequest?
31st January 2020

Jonas Staal’s Propaganda Art in the 21st Century
by Hailey Maxwell

Where would propaganda stand in the ‘early days of a better nation’ while the world is contemporaneously beset by the War on Terror, Fake News and other effects of the will of Trump and of Bannon and their likes on the contemporary political landscape? Hailey Maxwell looks through Jonas Staal’s work to open up some horizons.
28th January 2020

Jolanta Dolewska

Jolanta Dolewska lives and works in Glasgow and works predominantly with photography. Her artistic practice is driven by concerns about the power struggle of human beings in relation to their physical and political existence...
19th December 2019

Back to the Individual Experience: Rethinking Chinese Art, Overturning EuroCentrism by Carol Yinghua Lu

A pivotal figure in the intellectual and critical examination of Chinese Art, Carol Yinghua Lu writes about her research which reveals the complex sources, influences traditions and narratives which look […]