DLR Poetry Now 2009

I loved every minute of this year’s DLR Poetry Now festival; the poets were terrific, the audiences were large and enthusiastic and frank, and our celebration of Seamus Heaney’s 70th Birthday was a joy to witness (I would say that, but lots of people who were there, including all our participating poets, have told me [...]

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Lived-in Lots: Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts

 
First Published in the Irish Times, Saturday, April 11, 2009
THERE’S A HENRY JAMES story which set Leanne Shapton’s heart thumping even before she’d read it, and when you look at the title – The Romance of Certain Old Clothes – it’s not hard to see why. James’s earliest ghost story was published in 1868, and when Shapton [...]

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Philippe de Montebello, Director, Metropolitan Museum of Art

An elegant voice sounds often in visitors’ ears as they wander through the many rooms of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, past its many treasures. That voice carries the visitor forward, expands on the wonders of the museum’s collection; a painting’s provenance, a sculpture’s setting, the relation of this tapestry to that torso, of this photograph to that print. And if it’s a voice which knows what it’s talking about, then well it should.

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Spencer Tunick, Artist

First Published: The Irish Times, June 12, 2008

IN CHILE, they have a saying. Two sayings, in fact. There’s “before Tunick” and “after Tunick”. There’s the era before Spencer Tunick came to Santiago and photographed some 4,000 volunteers lying naked and supine in a public park, and there’s the era afterwards. There’s the Chile which greeted [...]

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Ruth Root, Artist

First Published: The Irish TImes, March 11, 2008

The weekend gallery crawlers are all over New York’s Chelsea, spilling from one glass-fronted space to another, or moving between floors in the huge, anonymous-looking buildings that serve as repositories here for so many art spaces, a gallery on every floor, a gallery at every door. Clean, bright [...]

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Alfredo Jaar, Artist

First Published: The Irish Times, December 7, 2007
IN 1981, ALFREDO JAAR was a young artist preparing to leave his native Chile for the freer cultural climate of New York. His Chile was a country in the grip of a military dictatorship which seemed to have wrung art and artistic activity to death; a Chile of [...]

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Alen MacWeeney, Photographer

First Published: The Irish Times, November 24, 2007
IT WAS A VAST, junk-strewn field facing onto the Fever Hospital – piebald ponies and barrel-topped wagons, and everywhere, the charred and crumbling remains of small fires. Moon-faced children with filthy limbs and scraggy hair and games of chase and ring-a-rosy. It was a patchwork of scrap iron [...]

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Patti Smith

First Published: The Irish Times, May 20, 2006
Faces stare from the walls of Patti Smith’s Soho brownstone, all of them in stark, unblemished black and white. Most of the faces are so rawly iconic that to see them here like this, hanging as informally as family snapshots, is to feel a shock of recognition. There [...]

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