Drouth Weekly
15th May 2020
Artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) was a man of many contradictions: a writer of words and a conceiver of objects, a collaborator and a fighter. Acutely conscious of the presence of history, he was witty and urbane, yet lived in rural isolation, making a barren Scots hillside into a garden and invoking his revolutionary heroes there. Greg Thomas examines his performative relations with the functionaries of the art world, and assesses the ethical worth and creative achievements Finlay worked into those bureaucratic processes apparently so devoid of artistic potential.
1st May 2020
Some apparent tendencies and possibilities in political thinking have already emerged in the pandemic situation –as seen by current commentators in blogs, opinion columns etc – can they be viewed a broader political and historical context yet?
24th April 2020
Perpetrating an aura of unreality may be useful, writes Owen Dudley Edwards, in conceiving of the bonds that have connected and codified these island nations... Jsfmboe, Fohmboe and Tdpumboe...
18th April 2020
In the teeth of the Coronavirus pandemic, politicians and pundits insist that ‘we’re all in it together’. Yet as deaths climb, it is all too clear that equality in infection does not translate to equality in recovery. In this clear-eyed report by Human Rights researcher and advocate Shannon Torrens, we look to Syria, where this dynamic is set to play out on a truly awful scale.
26th March 2020
If photography is the temporal art of the gaze, what is its condition at the edge, or the limit of space? What bonds, what risk of naming can secure it from being drawn off in the 'undertow'? Frances Scott walks the native territory.
21st March 2020
The tragic slowness of our reaction to the coronavirus and the putting of systematic safety measures in place has contrasted with the relatively swift and mature reaction of the French (and other nations) to this emergency. But is it a sign of a wider conservative and sclerotic inability to act that has taken hold of our society? How could we measure these things? Clarisse Godard Desmarest sets the ball rolling with a description of the terrible fires at both Notre Dame in Paris and Glasgow School of Art, and the reaction of the authorities in each case.
2nd March 2020
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.
20th February 2020
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.
Traveller crime – or a crime to Travellers? by Candace G. Thomas