Books: Housmans Bookshop

Housmans is London’s premier radical bookshop
Housmans, Peace House, 5 Caledonian Road, Kings Cross, London N1 9DX

A not-for-profit bookshop, specialising in books, zines, and periodicals of radical interest and progressive politics who stock the largest range of radical newsletters, newspapers and art magazines of any shop in Britain.
In the basment, a vast, diverse, and ever-changing selection of second-hand books.

art

Main

Back

From the Archive

Dance: Xavier Le Roy, Nudity Has Been Around From Prehistoric Times

7 December 2015

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Artists Culture No Comments

Xavier Le Roy and Eszter Salamon, Gisxelle, 2001

For Le Roy, nakedness is not a shock tactic but a quest for the sculptural and the sublime. “Nudity has been around from prehistoric times,” says John Kaldor. From 35,000-year-old figurines of Venus to the pursuit of male bodily perfection in Greek and Roman marble statues, Temporary Title is following a long artistic tradition. “Everybody is the same but is different,” says Le Roy, “The skin is great at showing that.”

For two decades, Le Roy has been tearing contemporary dance away from its conventional home in the theatre and placing it firmly into the art museum (appearing everywhere from London’s Tate Modern to the Museum of Modern Art in New York). His work is an “exhibition”, a moving landscape if you will, a space where visitors can stroll in and out as they see fit, spending 10 minutes or six hours consuming the art.

Xavier Le Roy holds a doctorate in molecular biology from the University of Montpellier, France, and has worked as a dancer and choreographer since 1991. He has performed with diverse companies and choreographers and produces his work since 1994.

His most famous composition to date, Self Unfinished (1988), sees Le Roy use an elasticated black jumper and trousers to divulge, and then cover up, parts of his body, before peeling off his clothes altogether. In the process he becomes barely human. He is a robot, a raw plucked chicken carcass, a series of shapes and curves, his anatomy a ball of clay to mould.

When he performs Self Unfinished around the world, he is still struck by the “density of concentration” between himself and viewers, so thick it’s “like you can almost touch it”, he murmurs, rubbing his fingers together. Le Roy’s art is in his audience’s hands too (hence the open rehearsals and feedback sessions). He recalls one onlooker who was asked a question in a practice run of Temporary Title. Faced with the nakedness, he answered honestly, later telling the artist he could no longer “dress up” his answer.

But if being nude is being vulnerable, so, ironically, is putting back on clothes. Temporary Title’s performers work in shifts, dressing and undressing in front of the watchful eyes of the crowd. In the process they become “coloured in”, observes Christopher Quyen. Clothes act as identity: a conscious, carefully chosen image.

Read Full Article

Bojan Šarčević, At Present, 2011

1 March 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Main No Comments

Bojan Šarčević, She, 2010, Onyx, 184 x 124 x 40 cm and installation view of the exhibition At Present, 2011

‘Space is the remains, or corpse, of time; it has dimensions’, wrote Robert Smithson in 1969, a definition highly appropriate to the 76 small collages, arranged together in small groups, that made up this show by Bosnian artist Bojan Sarcevic. Each collage starts with a small black-and-white photograph of a 1950s Modernist interior (or occasionally exterior) of the type found in architectural journals of the time. But their calm, orderly surfaces are disrupted by a tumultuous play of geometric shapes that redistribute details of shade and form as if infected by an anti-Modernist poltergeist. A sweeping staircase dissolves into a froth of tumbling circles; an empty auditorium is invaded by a flock of swooping triangles; the whole façade of a country house spins in a kaleidoscope of interlocking hexagons until barely discernible. Sarcevic’s trick is simple – he has cut the shapes out of the photographs, rotated them or swapped them around and inserted them seamlessly back in. But even when you are aware of this painstaking and repetitious process the results are baffling, various and extremely seductive.

The collages’ vague sense of time and place is located somewhat more precisely by their title, 1954 (all works 2004), which refers to the 1954 edition of the German architectural journal Baumeister, from which the pictures are taken. Germany in 1954, after two lost decades and the horrors of war, was tentatively starting to rebuild its traumatized national morale (helped in no small measure by the country’s unexpected World Cup victory that same year.) And, despite the absence of the country’s greatest modern architects, Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, architecture flourished in the steady rebuilding of cities reduced to rubble by Allied bombing, and was characterized by a cautiously optimistic Modernism. This was the year that Mies began his monumental Seagram building in New York, but the pictures Sarcevic collects here are more modest examples of a socially oriented Modernism, felt at the time to be not only an expression of, but also a form of active participation in, the creation of Germany’s new democracy. There is, however, not a single person to be found here, in these static, polished rooms. Like Smithson’s corpse, the spaces are frozen memorials to a past time, fixed in a pristine state of endless anticipation. Who knows if they were ever inhabited, and what they look like now? In Sarcevic’s hands it is as if the wear and tear of human use have been replaced by the unruly spirit of a fermented formalism that rearranges particles at whim.

There is a strong relation to Russian Construct-ivism here. Some of the collages look as if space itself has been fanned out into a hanging Rodchenko spatial construction, while a group of three terribly fragile sculptures on the gallery floor, tiny spiralling structures of sandblasted glass plates held together with tape, could be miniature versions of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919). They also seem to point towards an integration of art into the everyday, as propounded by the Constructivists in Aleksander Rodchenko’s slogan: ‘Work in the midst of everything and with everybody.’

Read Full Article

Alexandra Mir

20 November 2011

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Main No Comments

Alexandra Mir, Triumph, Detail, 2009

‘Triumph’ at the Shirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt is Aleksandra Mir’s first solo show in Germany. Inspired by a friend who had been a famous athlete in his youth and kept mementos of his achievements, Mir placed an ad in the local newspaper in Palermo, Italy, where she lives, asking for old sports trophies. Within a few months, Mir collected 2,529 trophies and had them cleaned and archived. In the exhibition, the trophies are displayed individually and in groups on plinths and the floor, or piled on top of each other like detritus. Mir explores the power of the trophy, both a coveted symbol of accomplishment and a garish, mass-produced item of little value.

Each trophy has a story, and many of the trophies Mir collected, old and unwanted, reflect a common theme of looking back on lost youth and vitality, and holding on. As the cheap metal tarnishes and the memories of victory fade, the time comes when the trophies are taken out to the trash, or in this case, sold to Mir for €5 each.

Aleksandra Mir recently gained international attention with her ‘Plane Landing,’ a life-sized inflatable jet that was installed last year in Zürich as well as various sites around Paris. She is a participant in this year’s 53rd Venice Biennale. ‘Triumph’ runs May 14-July 26, 2009 at Shirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt.

Read Full Article

Exhibition: Image Counter Image

17 September 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Culture Exhibitions Main No Comments

Radenko Milak, What Else Did You See? I Couldn’t See Everything! (No. 5), 2010–2012 and Installation view of the Exhibition

Image Counter Image, 10 June – 16 September, 2012
Hause der Kunst,Prinzregentenstraße 1, Munich

The exhibition Image Counter Image at Hause der Kunst, presents artistic positions that focus on the critical analysis of violent conflicts in the media, beginning with the First Gulf War of 1990-1991 to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, and ending with the events of the Arab Spring of 2011.

Media coverage has changed significantly in the last two decades. While the media image of the First Gulf War was based on a memorandum that advised units of the United States military to channel information flow to serve the military operation’s political objectives, the images of the attacks on the New York World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, were transmitted on all possible channels. They showed a worldwide audience its own, and global, vulnerability. Through the Internet and, more recently, via Web 2.0’s social media, communication channels have been expanded to include opportunities for direct peer-to-peer exchange. Because of their decentralized structures, these channels are difficult to control and are used as an alternative source of reporting on political events.

The question remains who, in this changing media landscape, tries to secure control of both the production and interpretation of the content, and what purpose it serves.

Read Full Article

Artist: Pilvi Takala

24 May 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Artists Main No Comments

Pilvi Takala, Welcome to Deloitte, Letter and Key Card, The Trainee, 2008

Takala typically trespasses in smaller microcosms, using herself or hired actors and a hidden camera to document a single, subtle act of transgression of established social conduct. In doing so, she unsettles the unspoken rules of these ambiguous societies. Takala, with her unassuming but stubborn demeanour, has just the right tenor of awkward tension and implicit danger. When watching her videos, it’s easy to forget that she is not breaking any specific rules. Like artists such as Sophie Calle, Adrian Piper or Andrea Fraser before her, she tests the boundaries of how threatening or non-threatening a young female artist violating social codes can be.

For Bag Lady (2006), Takala spent several days browsing in a Berlin shopping mall while carrying a clear plastic bag filled with wads of euro notes. While this obvious display of wealth should have made her the ‘perfect customer’, instead she only aroused suspicion from security guards and disdain from shopkeepers. Others urged her to accept a more discreet bag for her money.

Takala also brushed up against the unwritten laws of capitalism in The Trainee (2008), for which she procured a job as a trainee in the marketing department at Deloitte in Helsinki. In her documentation of this month-long performance, Takala sits motionless, like a modern-day Bartleby, at an empty desk. When co-workers attempt to make polite conversation, she replies that she’s ‘doing a bit of brain-work’ or ‘working on my thesis’. But a string of increasingly urgent inter-office emails she obtained shows what they really thought of the new trainee with ‘very short hair’: ‘Obviously she has some sort of mental problem.’ We see how disarmed her colleagues are by her refusal to conform to the rules of the corporate workplace. But we also see how difficult it is for them to break out of their own habits to openly confront her. One video documents an entire day Takala spent going up and down in the office lift. ‘You’re thinking again?’, asks a bemused businessman after his second encounter with the artist. ‘It helps me to see things from a different perspective,’ she explains.

In all these interventions, Takala’s attempt to ‘see things from a different perspective’ emerges as a metaphor for art making, and the suspicion and trepidation with which it’s often regarded in the culture at large. The loneliness that Takala herself likely experiences as an itinerant artist is captured most poignantly inWallflower (2006), which she filmed in a traditional Finnish dancing club. Though the clubs are mostly popular with elderly couples, Takala arrived, unaccompanied, in a rippling floor-length ballroom gown. She sits alone all night until, finally, an old man asks her to dance, and leads her gracefully across the otherwise empty dance floor. Takala’s performance demonstrates how even the most modest or minor infraction can begin to make small, visible cracks in the ice of the social order.

Read Full Article