Pea Arts About

I've had heaps on lately and haven't been blogging but I couldn't let this week pass without marking Array Collective's historic win of the 2021 Turner Prize. Although Willie Doherty has been nominated twice before and 2014 winner Duncan Campbell had studied and worked in Belfast, this is the first time the UK art prize - which began in 1984 - has been awarded to artists from Northern Ireland. And what a win it is. While important, this is so much more than acknowledging the work of individuals and even collectives, as is the emphasis of this year's exhibition. For us nordies it's recognition, it's not being so much a place apart, it's being seen and heard at last, it's no longer being the little backwater to be pitied, written off and ignored. The vibrant subculture out of which Array emerged and have taken by the horns has been around for a while. Through their concentrated efforts they're charging ahead, showing how it's done and what can...

Quite some time ago when I told my friend Sandra Johnston about my Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable project and interest in work attributed to Damien Hirst, she recommended I read Gene Ray's 2005 book Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory , particularly the essay about Hirst's more morbid works involving live, dying and dead flies and so on. I was in the full throes of the research in late 2019 / early 2020 and writing my draft work up in these blog posts on a weekly basis with the aim of compiling enough to form the basis of a book manuscript to structure and edit. Then came the enormity of the cumulating pandemic in March last year.  There was a week that month when Newcastle University - my partner's employer - went from announcing 'business as usual' on the Sunday to giving staff less than two days' notice to clear out of their offices by the close of business on the Friday. The library invited its members to ransack its shelves with ...

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 ...