a visit to a studio – cultural entanglements

This evening Molly and I visited the studio of Ghiora Aharoni. I had been here in November, as part of the class on antiquarians and design – [Link] Then it was a visit through Peter’s iPad camera – on Skype. This evening the occasion was a reception to celebrate Ruby Namdar’s novel, ten years in…

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…

third (creative) spaces

I have always been fascinated by places like railway stations, hotel rooms, bars and cafés, airport lounges, onboard a long-haul flight, looking out of the window. Some of them anyway. Neither here nor there. Interstitial. Liminal. Transitional. Conduit. They can offer permission to step to the side, think, imagine, to interrogate complacency. They are the…

genuine simulation

A couple of weeks ago I took a fabulous drive on a rough Montana ranch road in a 1927 Vauxhall with Miles Collier and Murray Smith. The car was the genuine article, but could the drive, in this between-the-wars archetypically English car, be said to be authentic, in the far reaches of Montana and so far from…

matters of authenticity and simulation

Is Disneyland authentic? This is a question I have pondered for a number of years, since I visited what was Eurodisney in 1992 (and explored in my book with Mike Pearson – Theatre/Archaeology – [Link]). It is too easy to say that Disney is superficial, or fantasy, or ideology. Here are a couple of cases…