Scotland
6th October 2020
John Latham's 'Niddrie Woman' : former shale bings, a massive piece of land art, a nature reserve, a monument to the achievements and sufferings of the people and the territory of the industrial revolution. A documentation by Murdo Macdonald.
18th July 2020
Powerful personality and polymath par excellence – Patrick Geddes has been plastered with so many labels that it sometimes seems that he’s all but disappeared from public perception. How should we rate Geddes and his work now? R J Morris puts the new critical work by Murdo MacDonald in context.
7th June 2020
Having quietly endured almost twenty years of managed decline, writes Hailey Maxwell, it is crucial that we consider the possibility that the Peoples’ Palace on Glasgow Green – a valuable civic asset and monument to Scottish history and working-class life may presently be at real risk of being neutralised, misappropriated and entirely co-opted into a neoliberal agenda. Spaces and places which were once public are being repurposed and reimagined not for the benefit of the citizen but for the property developer, the multi-national corporation and the tourist.
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.
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...
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.
4th December 2019
Colin Kidd muses on relations (if any) between the near unanimity of the literary world and the actually existing historical world in his review of Scott Hames’s new book The Literary Politics […]
Spitfire Britain and the Zombie Union by Scott Hames