Non Specific Threat: Constructions of Maculinity in Willie Doherty's Vid...

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YSI/Corridor8 residency day 8: sculpture install at Abbey Grange Academy

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On Tuesday 2 July 2019 I was at Abbey Grange Church of England Academy  for a sculpture install and workshops as part of the Yorkshire Sculpture International engagement programme. Engagement artist Zara Worth  has been working with Year 9 pupils (ages 13-14) to explore their relationships with social media and screen-based handheld devices in sculptural form. The result was exhibited in the school for a day in dialogue with Eduardo Paolozzi's AG5 (1958) from the Leeds Art Gallery collection. Nigel Walsh, curator of modern and contemporary art at Leeds Art Gallery, spent the day with these works and introduced Paolozzi's to various year groups throughout the day. We learned from Nigel that Paolozzi was a Scottish artist of Italian parentage whose work excelled in post-Second World War London. Nigel explained that the sculpture began as a portrait, and it does maintain a bust-like physique. The original was made by gauging into clay and plaster and s...
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You owe me twenty quid: Tyres in Spaced

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15 May 2020 Last week Becca Harrison tweeted about re-watching the turn-of-the-millennium Channel 4 sitcom, Spaced , and some of its most quotable lines (concerning jaffa cakes in coat pockets) and imitable actions (mimed shoot out). Being an Ulsterperson, my fondness for the show often homes in on Tyres played by Belfast-born, Holywood-bred actor Michael Smiley (if you're a Ben Wheatley fan, you ought to recognise him). This train of thought, not for the first time, got me thinking about the significance of Tyres. When Spaced first aired in September 1999, Northern Ireland was a year-and-a-half into its fragile official peacetime following (and not quite yet distinct from) the prior thirty years of conflict. I was in my mid-teens and it was only when I reached my early and mid-twenties that I fully understood the characters in the show, especially the oddities of being a grown-up but feeling not as mature as your age suggested, of feeling the ageing process but still being...
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Unbelievable part 29: The Minotaur

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TW: sexual violence, rape The Minotaur (Damien Hirst, 2012, image from art.net) This depiction of the half-man, half-bull of Greek myth raping an Athenian virgin presents the violent threat of unfettered male sexuality. Greek and Roman myths abound with brutal stories of the sexual assault of women by men and gods alike. Classical art often aestheticized such scenes, sanitising any explicit reference to intercourse. In myth, such assaults were partly rationalised by claiming that the god Eros was capable of overpowering male bodies and wills at any moment. This pre-Freudian distinction between the conscious and unconscious suggests the Minotaur – which has remained a symbol of sexual violence and male lust, most prominently in the work of Picasso – might here be read as a horrific embodiment of the sleep of reason.  ( Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable guide p. 33) The sleep of reason. From whose perspective? In my experience rapists take what they feel they deserve. W...
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