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Thanks to Andrew's parents adding us to their Netflix account we've been catching up on recent films released on the platform, notably Glass Onion (dir. Rian Johnson, 2022) and The Wonder (dir. Sebastián Lelio, 2022). The Knives Out films, as enjoyable as I find them, don't need any help from me. The Wonder , however, is a film I feel ought to research and write about, and it is that feeling moreso than the film itself that I'll share thoughts about for now. In 2016 while I was a fixed-term lecturer in film at Lancaster University I designed a project with which to apply for a Leverhulme early career fellowship in the hopes of getting myself a job remaining there and developing my career in a more solid direction. It was a study of contemporary transregional moving image production across Britain and Ireland. It would have been an expansion of my PhD research on these practices in Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 out to and across the other smal...

You know the hit is coming and there is nothing you can do to stop it. Your body braces automatically even though logic dictates it won’t make any difference. The torrent is coming at you hard and fast. You are vulnerable. Helpless. Perhaps your slight cower is an attempt at self-comfort and assurance. You did all you could. Broader events were beyond your control. It’s not your fault. You’re collateral damage, and it means nothing about you. It is natural to curl into yourself because who else can you rely on? A saviour, a hero, surely couldn’t make it in time.   Andromeda and the Sea Monster , Damien Hirst, 2011, image June 2017 Andromeda and the Sea Monster is a monumental sculpture in blue bronze depicting a young naked woman chained to a rock face, her head angled off to her right and her mouth open in a horrific silent scream, mirroring the wide, toothy mouths of hungry sea creatures frozen in time and space as they surge at her. You could only see the woman’s scream if ...

  Cronos Devouring his Children , Damien Hirst, 2011, image from Pinterest I remembered his eyes bulging as he tore his children apart. They were actually closed and his mouth gaped. You can almost hear the yells of him. Perhaps my memory of the bulging eyes and manic flesh eating came from an equally graphic painting rather than this sculpture. Knowing me, it was of a totally different character if so. Much of the confronting horror of Cronos Devouring his Children is obscured by coral, with enough of the scene visible that Cronos’s headless young son stretched between his hands and other children gripping his knees evoke the debauched fuller picture. There are other figures around the mounded base of the sculpture, and the guide text assures me that baby Zeus, who would go on to liberate his siblings from inside of his father and later destroy him in the Olympians’ war against the Titans, is present, but I can’t verify this for myself from the photos at my disposal. As happens...

A topic that is frequently on my mind because it figures behind the scenes in much of the artwork I analyse is art labour, particularly when that labour is invisible. For the past few months I've experienced first-hand what it is to make things for someone else's name as author or artist to be attached to it. These projects have all gone towards upcoming events celebrating the life and work of my dear friend Sally Madge . As I've written about before , this includes completing some of her in-progress work, and more recently, doing some mending and adapting to one of her performance props for another artist to use in tribute to her. Messy adaptation for a performance prop. It is not work I ever envisaged myself doing, least not because I do not think of myself as an artist, and, I find, neither do most other people. Sally and our friend Alastair MacLennan would have something to say about that, but there we are. Partly spurred on by learning languages in which you do not per...

Back in January, a friend drew my attention to a book series inviting proposals for monographs. Here is my informal pitch that was knocked back within an hour of emailing it to the series editors who said the topic was interesting but wasn't a fit for them. I welcome comments, suggestions and discussion because I'd really love a crack at this and I think there's something in it. Adaptation and Appropriation in Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable Paula Blair peablair@gmail.com Dear [...], I am writing to propose a volume for your Adaptation and Visual Culture Palgrave series. Provisionally titled Adaptation and Appropriation in Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable , the book would examine the intricacies of acts of adaptation and appropriation in Damien Hirst’s major exhibition in Venice, Italy, in 2017. ‘Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable’ exhibited hundreds of items across two major galleries, many of which were claimed to have ...

Part 1 Part 2   Part 3   Part 4 Part 5 Part 6   Part 7   Culture as Threat The type of punk memories re/enacted in Good Vibrations were recorded at the time by filmmaker John T. Davis in Shellshock Rock (1979). The documentary was famously banned at the now much more liberal Cork Film Festival for its ‘poor quality’, that is, its energetic lo-fi presentations of bands’ live performances – an aesthetic now long standard in music videos – and the anarchic punks’ unsavoury behaviour (including instances of mooning), which, again, are tame by today’s standards. Davis’s film indicates that Good Vibrations is an accurate portrayal of twenty-first-century nostalgia for punk and the hopeful message in official peacetime invoked by the notion of Northern Irish punk having more in common with hippy values than the anger and style of punk’s branches in Britain, Ireland and North America. Good Vibrations also had to become a saleable product, and so appeal to the nostalgia ...

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3   Part 4 Reframing Violence Just before the paramilitary ceasefires in Northern Ireland in 1994, David Miller pointed out that since the end of World War I in 1918, ‘[t]he guiding light of British policy […] has been to try and push Ireland to the margins of British politics. This was managed quite successfully until 1968, when the North exploded on to television screens around the world. Since then, British policy has been directed to containing the “troubles”’. 1 The constructed concept of the ‘Troubles’ – a term which connotes a containable and manageable group of homogenous events – was coined by the British press in the 1980s and spread into common parlance. All the while, that parallel containment of the conflict in politics and journalism, Miller continues, emphasized the ‘criminality’ of the Irish Republican Army which, as Miller points out, only served to raise the ‘news value’ of the political violence (pp. 2–3). What it also achieved, ...