Nobson Newtown – In Parenthesis

The great exhibition of Paul Noble’s work opened at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen at the weekend – [Link] An endlessly growing cosmopolis 14 June – 21 September 2014 This summer Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen will exhibit Paul Noble’s Nobson Newtown, an ever-growing cosmopolis on which the artist has worked for eighteen years. The vast drawings…

Hockney’s Yorkshire in San Francisco

David Hockney’s “A Bigger Exhibition” is showing at the de Young Museum in San Francisco – [Link] Yorkshire becomes Hockney’s California art world On show is a lot of work from the last decade, especially since Hockney’s move to the house he had bought his mother in the seaside town of Bridlington in Yorkshire. There…

heritage futures – a design paradigm

Last May I delivered the Reinwardt Memorial Lecture at Amsterdam School of the Arts – [Link] This week it was published as an illustrated booklet – Let me tell you about Hadrian’s Wall: Heritage, Performance, Design The 2012 Reinwardt Lecture. Amsterdam School of Arts, 2013 Background: phases in the growth of the heritage industry this…

The Field Marshal, the artist, and an old edition of Walter Scott

Matters of the presence of the past — haunting presences. A couple of editions of Walter Scott’s poetry have arrived from my favorite bookseller – Barter Books of Alnwick, Northumberland UK. The first is an 1866 edition of Scott’s poem, Marmion, about the days before the disaster of Flodden Field in 1513. It is illustrated…

this happened here – presence and authenticity in an archaeological sensibility

Gary (Devore) has brought my attention to a remarkable new publication from the Panstwowe Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau [Link] “The Auschwitz Album” or “Lili Jacob Album” comprises about 200 photographs taken by the German SS and depicting the arrival of a transport of Hungarian Jews at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp in 1944. This new collection takes 31…

landscape aesthetics – tactics (continued)

From a conversation in the Dun Cow, Durham (with Bianca Carpeneti and Chris Witmore). Topic – archaeology, ruins and the picturesque landscape. The allure, the ideology, the challenge to avoid cliché. How do we deal with archaeological landscapes today? Should I just give up photography? As a tainted medium? This is too simple a response…