I’ve never been much taken by the thought of ‘Art for Art’s sake’. However, I am interested in the way the visual arts can operate as a kind of social allegory: a way of thinking that dramatises, deliberately or otherwise, the tensions of contemporary life.
Bird on old dhow, Saadani, Tanzania, August 2007
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Krzyzstof Wodiczko’s Alien Staff »
June 24th, 1992 | Posted in: Art & its applications, Articles GeneralA practitioner of ‘interrogative design’, Krzyzstof Wodiczko produced a nomadic device for Barcelona and the 1992 Olympic Games. Published in the Guardian, 24 June 1992.
Brick Lane’s Day of Killing »
May 26th, 1992 | Posted in: Art & its applications, Articles General, LondonOn the Czech artist David Cerny and the ‘Day of Killing’ he introduced to East London’s Brick Lane as part of the art festival Edge 92. Published in the Guardian 26 May 1992.
The Poliscar – not a tank but a war machine for people-without-apartments »
January 12th, 1992 | Posted in: Art & its applications, Articles General, Articles in Books, War & peaceOn Krzysztof Wodiczko and a ‘public intervention device’ designed in 1991 to address the condition of the homeless in New York City. As published in Krzysztof Wodiczko: instruments, projeccions, vehicles, Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1992, pp. 259-285.
Why a pink tank made Prague see red »
July 25th, 1991 | Posted in: Art & its applications, Articles General, Czecho-Slovakia, War & peaceOne night in the summer of 1991, a young Czech artist named David Cerny went out onto the streets of Prague with some friends and painted a Soviet tank pink. The action caused a row that extended throughout Czechoslovakia, a country that had yet to divide into Slovakia and the Czech Republic. It had international ramifications too. Published in the Guardian 25 July 1991. A fuller version of the article appears in my book Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine (2000).