Essays
4th April 2025
A meditation on time in architecture by philosopher and architect Mark Rego. In this piece Rego examines the apparently paradoxical union in an art museum of a painter who rejected time, and an architect 'whose works are perhaps some of the most embodied in temporality.' Alvaro Siza's Museu de Arte Contemporanea in Chaves, Portugal to house the works of Nadir Afonso.
4th April 2025
Owen Dudley Edwards rewrites the understanding of genre and sees satire as a form of literary criticism. His knowledge of mid-twentieth century literature is both encyclopaedic and peculiar. Wodehouse, for example, is always an anomaly, but using his works as a handrail to guide us round the voids created by a current day fascist is weirdly novel.
12th January 2025
It sometimes seems that never enough has been made of Scotland's presence - the Scottish Pavilion - at the Venice Biennale. The 2023 architecture exhibition (- hopefully not the last Scottish one ever, as 2024 was cancelled) was an exploration of the connection between architecture and language on a traumatised land. A Fragile Correspondence was curated by Architecture Fringe, -ism Magazine and /other, and is now showing at the V&A in Dundee. Johnny Rodger reviews.
21st December 2024
As an historian of American politics, who followed John F Kennedy round the USA on his election campaign in the 60s, is there a writer with a longer view of the Presidency than Irishman Owen Dudley Edwards? - It takes a bit of wit too, to be wider than the current President-Elect. Here is the perennial Edwards, as always, delivering more - as Marx said of Lincoln - than he promised.
13th December 2024
Scottish artist Maud Sulter (1960-2008) worked in multi-media as a photographer, filmmaker, poet, playwright and visual artist. Born of Scottish and Ghanaian parentage, she was raised in the Gorbals in Glasgow by her Scottish mother, and much of her work - including that now on show at the Tramway - is an exploration of of her sexuality, gender and identity as a black woman. Federica Giardino reviews the show and ponders on the cultural richness and the 'poignant questions' her work highlights.
13th December 2024
Conceptual and provocative, but always with social conscience, the massive influence of Cedric Price as an architect and visionary of the new from his heydey in the 60s and 70s is seen not only in the host of unfinished and unbuilt ideas he left behind, but also in the massive pieces of fun civic kit others built under that influence, including the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the London Eye. Bruce Peter reviews an exhibition where you can catch up with the ideas and personality of the great maverick Price, and declares it '...elegantly curated by Ana Bonet Miro, Martin Brown and Maria Martinez Sanchez with design by Luca Brunelli.'
8th November 2024
An essay from 'Concrete Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Cumbernauld Town Centre' - a limited edition art book that documents and explores Cumbernauld Town Centre and its imminent demolition through the eyes of its residents, past and present. During their 18-month-long research project, the award-winning artists of Recollective - Alison Irvine, Chris Leslie and Mitch Miller - gained exclusive behind-the-scenes access to Cumbernauld New Town’s iconic Town Centre.
29th October 2024
Dutch artist Jonas Staal's new book on the pending Climate Catastrophe continues his concerns about propaganda - the good and the bad of it; reveals who are the culprits planning to exploit and profit from it and what the rest of us can do about it. Johnny Rodger reviews and puts it in the context of Staal's broad politically-committed artistic oeuvre.
STREET CLUTTER by Maria Burke