How to Talk to Ghosts
The road narrows between two hedgerows and, as the cab slows, a red-brick manor house comes into view. I have arrived at Arthur Findlay College, the UK’s premier educational institution for psychic mediums, to attend the college’s annual Open Week. I am met at reception by Minister Steven Upton
Vorticism: The Fascist Art Movement?
As the title of its manifesto Blast! might suggest, Vorticism was a movement born out of opposition. Wyndham Lewis formed Vorticism at his workshop, the aptly named Rebel Art Centre, following a feud with Roger Fry and his Omega Workshop. Ezra Pound, who named and supported Vorticism, became involve
The Aesthetics of Nostalgia
A man in a voluminous fur coat riding a child’s scooter rolls towards the camera in slow motion. Behind him, a crowd of people decked out in hipster kitsch follow on bicycles, rollerblades, and rolling office chairs. This is the opening shot of the music video for ‘Thrift Shop’, Macklemore &am
E is for England
‘Englishness’ is a term that has grown as flat as our beer, and as meaningless as our national anthem.‘Englishness’ is something to be rolled out every four years for the World Cup in order to sell Mars Bars and Gillette Razors. It has been appropriated by the sort of people that think the p
Great British Walks: Didcot Power Station
If you have every travelled via the South-West Trains service from Oxford to Reading, you will, most likely, recall seeing the three cooling towers of Didcot power station rising out of the landscape, roughly fifteen minutes into the journey. Clumped together among a shoal of smaller administrative
Literary Graves
“You know what was written on Keats’ grave? ‘Here lies one whose fame was writ in water.’” Bob Dylan mulls this over. “Where’s he buried?” Dylan is with Allen Ginsberg, visiting Jack Kerouac’s grave in Massachusetts. Ginsberg asks what graves the singer has seen. A pause. “Victor
Renaissance Porn
In 1527 Pietro Aretino published I Modi, a collection of sixteen sexually explicit engravings originally by Marcantonio Raimondi. The Italian Renaissance had just created the world’s first hard-core porn magazine. The engravings in I Modi are remarkable on account of their sheer openness. The subj
Review: The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2015
For the next month, the top floors of The Photographers’ Gallery will be filled with an innovative series of photographs – pinned or projected onto walls, printed in books and pamphlets, animated in videos, illuminated in lightboxes and framed behind glass. The images engage with life in Soviet
“Bleached Beauty”: Shadeism in Indian Cinema
The Western perception of Indian Cinema generally amounts to one genre and one region: Bollywood, the colourful, all singing, all dancing export from Mumbai. But the first full-length Indian film in 1913 was not a Bollywood, but a Marathi production, and regional Marathi cinema has continued alongsi