Strangely Neglected
- David Free
Blokes: The Bad Boys of British Literature
By David Castronovo
Continuum, 2009.
David Castronovo’s Blokes is a study of four more-or-less blokey post-war British (indeed English) writers: the poet Philip Larkin, the novelist Kingsley Amis, the playwright John Osborne, and the critic Kenneth Tynan. Castronovo is an American academic, and in some ways his American-ness – or at least his non-Britishness – shows. Read more
High Vis - on Anthony Lister, Ben Frost & Franck Gohier
- Nick Terrell
Anthony Lister - Macmillan Mini-Art Series No. 13
Ken McGregor and Jenny Zimmer
Macmillan. $Au 35.00.
Ben Frost – Lost in the Supermarket
Boutwell Draper Gallery
Franck Gohier – Produkt
Ray Hughes Gallery
Ladies and gentlemen, Anthony Lister: “Mankind is a product of its own reflection being fed to the masses through television. All of my life I have been educated by Americans on television in Australia. The cinema has replaced the church as a common ground where we can gather as humans and listen to stories and compare our simple lives and beliefs with those that are more worthy of fame than ourselves.” Read more
Good Soldiers, Bad War - on David Finkel in Iraq
- Nick Terrell
The Good Soldiers by David Finkel
Scribe. 287 pages. $Au 35.00.
In the final sequence of HBO’s Iraq War mini-series, Generation Kill, the troops from Bravo 21 gather around a laptop. Their deployment has come to an end and the mood is celebratory. One of their number has just finished editing together a retrospective package from the footage he’d shot on his handi-cam during the battalion’s time in theatre. Not everyone in the squad is keen, but the majority assemble excitedly. To the accompaniment of Johnny Cash’s octogenarian end-time rumble, the grainy cut and paste of troops skylarking, bonding, waiting, shooting and smiling begins to play. Read more
Michael Borremans - A Victim of His Situation
- Elizabeth Prater
Belgian Artist Michaël Borremans insists that his figurative works and portraits do not depict individuals. He aspires to the archetypal, the generic and the anonymous. Identity is a retrograde myth, social function and structural determination are the defining human conditions. So it goes. But Borremans’ figures invite a kind of sympathetic response which undermines his arguments against the dignity of the individual. Read more