Shower Of Kunst

Critical Online Journal

REVIEW: Housing a Pig

Housing a Pig is the third and final episode in a series of shows curated by Paul McAree, part of a broader project called FLOOD. Its been located around the corner from The Lab and Oonagh Young Gallery in Dublin 1.   The title’s suggestion of actively ‘putting up’ a biblically unclean animal is at once catching and surprising, but primarily a practical concern in more rural parts of this island. Up in the Big Smoke this proposal is meaningful of something certainly allegorical. Traditionally,… Read More »

Ultra-Left Destruction

The position I outline here is my own position only. It is based on my experience as a left-wing activist at national and international level over 50 years. It is my personal response to current disunity on the left.   Competitive recruitment between the Socialist Party (SP) and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) has destroyed the United Left Alliance (ULA) and is now narrowing the Campaign against Household and Water Taxes (CAHWT) to such an extent as to make it ineffective. The number of people… Read More »

Write Makes Right

Write Makes Right A conversation between Darren Caffrey and Jim Ricks Autumn – Winter 2012   DC: So how do you want to start?   JR: The point is just to write truthfully in correspondence about what we see as the shortcomings, pitfalls, success stories, etc. taking place in Irish arts writing.   I think the attached graph that James Merrigan of Billion Art Journal and Fugitive Papers produced a little over a year ago is an interesting starting point. I immediately countered his graph… Read More »

REVIEW: TULCA 2012

  The 2012 Tulca: Season of Visual Art was the tenth anniversary of Galway’s 2 week, multi-location event. Always in mid November, it utilises existing arts infrastructure and activates a variety of disused ‘slack spaces’ or rather vacant buildings and shops. This year was no different as the exhibitions bring “together 41 artists over 10 locations.”   I had lived in the west of Ireland for about 6 years and know the festival somewhat intimately. I exhibited in 2006, the year Cliodhna Shaffrey and Sarah… Read More »

The future

Futures 2012 is joyously mixed in its form and yet it is this distraction which when presented to us is hoped will overcome the obvious weaknesses of art without proper framing or even depth. On one wall sits the result of a routine investigation into the world outside of a window, Ed Miliano “began making a visual diary, painting one picture every day”, and to that end, judging by the quantity, he has succeeded. It is identified that the pictures when viewed together ‘create a collective… Read More »

The 7th Berlin Biennale

Biennale press pass, welcome packet, newspaper-cum-event guide complete with custom fonts and logo.     Initially, I had intended to write a review of the Biennale.  Although I did I find it difficult to consider the various permutations of this festival in a positive light, it was ultimately the decentralized and event-based character of it that led to my decision not to.  Perhaps, I should have committed to living in Berlin for 6 weeks.  I suppose the political trajectory, or rather intent, of head curator Artur… Read More »

Images: Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art

 Sacrilege by Jeremy Deller, Glasgow Green  Sacrilege by Jeremy Deller, Glasgow Green  Jeremy Deller  Spanner (Stretcher/Loiterer) by Nairy Baghramian, The Mitchell Library  Detail from Art Lending Library by Walker & Bromwich, The Mitchell Library  Art Lending Library by Walker & Bromwich, The Mitchell Library Installation view of What is there to do here, what is there to see? by Rob Kennedy, CCA  Installation view of What is there to do here, what is there to see? by Rob Kennedy, CCA    Detail from What is there to do here, what is… Read More »

Santa Rita, I Hate Every Inch of You

Santa Rita, I Hate Every Inch of You February 6, 2012 by Jeb Purucker   Reblogged from Viewpoint Magazine Twenty-four hours into my incarceration in Santa Rita Jail, I found myself in yet another tactical conversation, dissecting the numerous failures that had led to the kettling and mass arrests of about 400 Occupy Oakland demonstrators. This is one of the few upsides of a mass arrest. After getting the rowdy activists off the streets, the police find themselves hosting a three-day strategy conference inside the… Read More »

Her art on my sleeve

What appeared to be a slew of papier mache chicken legs beckoned cheekily from the display window at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery. They were advertising The Human Race, Sonia Shiel’s first solo exhibition at the venue. It was hard to tell if the sight was something farcical or bizarrely fanciful. Regardless, it certainly begged for further investigation. As Shiel’s known for an aesthetic that can at times seem unfathomably loose and slapdash – think surrealist artist/director Michel Gondry’s cardboard news studio in Science of Sleep –… Read More »

REVIEW: Il Mistero delle Cattedrali

Wow-ta-fuck. Pictures were largely unobtainable and descriptions fall short; the works of Anselm Kiefer, on show at the newest of London’s Whitechapel ventures, appear as nothing less than awesome. In the end, it might come down to a simple fact of alchemy, a beauty that transports material into another dimension of realism, a feeling of creation. Oxidisation of copper and the impregnation of lead amounts to a captivation of the surface and the spirit, each work as a complete thing. Yes, there is a uniformity,… Read More »

#DubCon11 Best Review Award

Dublin Contemporary 2011 was a big ask. We are, in this country, often adrift of the curve, somewhere between a second thought and a small wish. In this respect, the whole conception from beginning to end was a true achievement in its ambition and also in its disregard for the rules of play. Let us not consider the politics surrounding the event as anything more than reality, no doubt one from which a lot will be learnt, and taken by those who must. What is… Read More »

REVIEW: 228 Lashes

“The important thing is no longer the storage but the display.”         – Paul Virilio Padraig Robinson’s 228 Lashes is a sparsely populated show in Galway’s 126 gallery. The fully lit neutrality of the white rectangle space draws the viewer in to scrutinise the pieces that comprise an installation ruled by a minimalist inclination. The paucity of works highlights the artist’s three choices: An illuminated retail style sign with a cryptic logo, the lowering of a single gallery light fixture to around… Read More »

REVIEW: Art in the Streets

This far reaching 5 month exhibition at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA has been billed as “the first major U.S. museum exhibition on the history of graffiti and street art”. Interesting. It is a broad concept housed in a 40,000 square foot former police car warehouse renovated by famed California architect Frank Gehry. Installation view of Street Market. Courtesy Arrested Motion. The full list of artists range from former graffiti artists that have successfully crossed over to the commercial gallery scene (like Banksy and Barry… Read More »

REVIEW: Hammer and Feather – Experiments in Space

The title of the exhibition curated by Mary Conlon refers to an experiment conducted on the moon in 1971 to demonstrate Galileo’s counter intuitive assertion that without air resistance all objects fall at the same speed. But the words hammer and feather also suggests sets of oppositions beyond light and heavy, such as light and dark, natural and manufactured or organic and mineral, which might also be invalidated by physical laws, gravitational or otherwise. Variations around titles and artworks is a recurring theme of the… Read More »

DECOMMISSIONED

‘An art and music festival that will leave you questioning your next destination‘ The undisguised commercialism of the slogan heralding the website of Terminal Convention – an event compounding art fair, farmer market, music festival, art exhibition and symposium – announces an open if somewhat facetious approach to the relationship between artistic ambitions and mercantile activities, a perspective re-asserted in the opening paragraph of the symposium presentation‘art is now a commodity like any other’. This positioning toward the market is developed in essays published in… Read More »

REVIEW: Staged and Screened

  Upon entering the ‘shoebox’ (and I don’t mean that in a bad way) of 126, one is confronted with the formal language of minimalism that is both the continental zeitgeist and the prevailing aesthetic of the gallery’s current team of Board Members. The young spectacled volunteer gallerists sit around a designer desk at the entrance to the hyper hip, über clean space. The whole thing is palatably not your old Galway (in despite of the Celtic crap affixed to the building’s exterior) and something… Read More »

REVIEW: The Woods

The Woods is set in the off-site Limerick City Gallery of Istabraq Hall. The show features work from The National Collection of Contemporary Drawing. In conjunction with the exhibition, Curator Mary Conlon, has asked three artists from the Creative Limerick scheme to also participate. The press release explains: “A year after the launch of the initiative, Creative Limerick also promotes the creative potential in the city, having developed an exemplary model in negotiating the use of slack spaces for use in artistic and cultural activities…. Read More »