London, Kensington Gardens, August, Sunday, blue skies, warmish. Just off the entrance to The Serpentine Gallery stands a temporary pavilion in hospital white. I approach the small building just as one of the last English heartbeats is recorded for posterity; that is, copied to a fat hard drive to be added to yet another fat hard drive then shipped to the uninhabited Japanese island of Teshima and digitally secured at the Benesse Art Site Naoshima…until Doomsday. This is the premise of the expanding and ongoing work of Christian Boltanski, Les Archives du Coeur, registering a rambling sample of the world’s ... More » »
I spent a week in London in August, and each day attempted to focus on a substantial outing, an interesting exhibition. My first jaunt was to cross Kensington Gardens to The Serpentine Gallery where the German artist Wolfgang Tillmans put on something of a retrospective, an expansive display of his alchemical results with photography. The 2000 Turner Prize winner, born in 1968, today a bona fide blue chip in the art world, offers a cornucopia of stolen, manipulated and performative photographic works in his first full-on exhibition in London in seven years. Each piece conspires to reveal the over-reproduced world ... More » »