It has become an academic Psychoanalysis 101 cliché to invoke, as the exhibition text does, ‘ideas of surrealism, desire and the fetished or abject body’, but it’s hard to think of better words to describe the tasteful perversion on show here.
Suh invite us to rethink the relationship between structure and agency, and in a novel way that neither romanticises the disadvantaged position of the subjects of capitalism nor absolutises the structure that these same subjects have constituted.
Today, neo-Nazis’s use of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture seems to be ignorant of the fact that the sculpture they are appropriating depicted the very ethnicities they hate. As most ancient sculpture was painted, those ethnicities were once plain to see.
For me, poetry and art are anti-material functions, and it's their ephemerality that is relevant: they should be recyclable and renewable and impermanent. Anti-structures.
The Packing Room Prize never veers at all. The winning portrait usually depicts a person famous in the media, and it is always either the most strictly realist portrait in that range, or very occasionally a comic, but highly worked, caricature. Nothing varying from the job of accurate representation has ever made the cut.
a sensation of whirling and loss of balance, associated particularly with looking down from a great height, or caused by the hard life experienced by precarious asylum seekers; giddiness.
In all of this worry about authenticity, authority and authorial/appropriated identities, there is one identity that regularly gets forgotten: that of the reader
Are these judges…genuinely concerned about cultural appropriation? Or are they actually concerned about the accusations of cultural appropriation that are likely to result (via social media) if they award and publish a story that turns out to be written by someone who doesn’t identify clearly and directly with their subject matter?
