Look at me / (don’t look at me) / Look at me / (don’t look at me) / Look at me don’t look at me look at me look at me don’t look at me don’t / look / (Look) / (Don’t look) / I can’t stand it if you don’t look / Look / Look / Please / Stop.
In this passage from Kate Zambreno’s 2011 novel Green Girl, a dynamic usually obscured from the project of female authorship is exposed. Zambreno’s…

Irony (mostly)
Once I went to a nightclub with some friends. I bought a ticket in advance because I still carry this…

Framing Son of Saul
All art since the Shoah has been ethically contested, and art taking the Holocaust as its object occupies uniquely unstable…

Black Bodies Matter
The privileging of ‘hard news’ – national and global politics, business and financial markets – has mired journalism in the…

Head Over Heels: the Playful Astronaut
At Lunchtime GMT, 15 January this year, I watched Tim Peake’s spacewalk. Like many live transmissions, the first venture into…

‘Touch My Soul’: Shia LaBeouf and the Art of Connecting
“Real artists rarely wear bags on their heads.” So wrote Jonathan Jones, the Guardian’s art critic, of Shia LaBeouf’s first performance…

Country Shade and Lemonade: The Beach Boys and the Fête Galante
Country shade and lemonade Guess I’m slowing down It’s a turned back world With a local girl In a smaller…

‘The One with the Boobies’ – Sexism, Phonaesthetics and the Language of Anatomy
For a show that ended 12 years ago people really do talk about Friends constantly, don’t they? At the moment…

“Would you have married her?”: on ‘Divers’ and ’45 Years’
And it pains me to say, I was wrong. Love is not a symptom of time time is just a…

Size Matters
In July of this year Marvel Studios released the superhero-heist caper Antman. In the film, a penniless thief played by comedy-millionaire Paul…

“What is a lasagne?”: Nostalgia, Pastiche and Working Class Experience
When Shelagh Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey premiered in 1957, it was remarkable for its abrupt rejection of the…

Floating Signifiers: Thoughts on the Figure
Last year I was walking along a beach towards a Martello tower, when I saw a figure perched on its…

Accidents of History
The link, in its own abrupt, taciturn way, perhaps brings the Academy into dialogue with this group of buildings. Might…

All the Lonely People: On Urban Invisibility
‘Somehow, you just vanish.’ These are the words of Kristin Scott Thomas, who said in an interview with The Telegraph…

The Lie of Beauty: Hanya Yanagihara’s ‘A Little Life’
The artist David Wojnarowicz recalls, in a 1989 essay he wrote after his HIV diagnosis, a time he spent ‘standing…

Black Mountain College: Searching the Self
John Rice sits alone in a modest bedroom at Robert E Lee Hall, a three-story YMCA assembly building in the…

‘Café Chocolate’: Teletubbies’ Sublime Horizons
I often tell people that Teletubbies gave me a sense of the sublime. For those of you who by some…