Unreal

Serpentine Gallery North, London

From the Barbara Kruger at the Serpentine we walked to the newer Serpentine Gallery North to see Refik Anadol’s Echoes of the Earth, an immersive AI animation based on visual data of coral reefs and rainforests. See more below:

One room featured beanbag chairs in which you could lie and gaze at psychedelic projections on the ceiling. Looks a bit like a Victorian opium den (click any image to see them all larger).

Camden Art Centre

Camden Art Centre, London

Several weeks ago, we did a crawl of London galleries, starting at the Camden Art Centre and the Bloomberg New Contemporaries, a student show that contained surprisingly mature work. Once again, I was struck by gallery spaces and the installation below (‘Twinkling finale’: 4.3.2‽_-⨅⨼, 2022 by Zayd Menk). Click either image below to see them larger.

Sugimoto Theatre

Hayward Gallery, London

One more little joke before we leave Sugimoto and the Hayward. When you left the exhibit, you could go up the stairs to the cafeteria where a small theatre had been set up, screening a short video about his work on the Enoura Observatory in Japan. There was no one there when I entered, nor when I left. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to make my own homage to his theatre pictures by brightening the screen and adding a small glow and darkening the side windows.

Turner Contemporary

Billed as the largest art space outside London, The Turner Contemporary (named for JMW Turner, the English landscape painter) was somewhat disappointing from the point of view of how much art there was to see. Here I’ve shown images that are mostly more about the space and the light than the exhibits. Click any image to see them all enlarged.

Converso

Verso Books, Brooklyn, New York

My high school classmate, Richard Lachmann, at Verso Books on Feb 12th, expounding on his new book, First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship, a sweeping analysis of imperialism and hegemony in the capitalist age and the inexorable decline of American hegemony as our oligarchs extract what they can. I love the infinite regress of the screen behind them showing itself. Is this a metaphor for something?