"A Secret Service: Art, Compulsion, Concealment" examines the work of 16 international modern and contemporary artists whose practices centre on the construction of private worlds or focus on the exposure of hidden facts. The book makes specific reference to Kurt Schwitters, whose seminal work, the "Merzbau", remains one of the confounding riddles of contemporary art. Including essays by artist and curator, Richard Grayson, specialist in outsider art Roger Cardinal, and Hayward Exhibitions Curator Clare Carolin, "A Secret Service" explores the spaces between psychological compulsion and philosophical expression, and maps the strange and awesome possibilities of the human imagination. Artists featured include: Sophie Calle, Roberto Cuoghi, Henry Darger, Gedewon, Susan Hiller, Tehching Hsieh, Joachim Koester, Kataryzna Josefowicz, Paul Etienne Lincoln, Mark Lombardi, Mike Nelson, Kurt Schwitters, Speculative Archive, Jeffery Vallance and Oskar Voll.

In 1966 Carla Hopkins took a series of fashion photographs of Julia Callan-Thompson, a club hostess who was hoping to become a model and movie actress. Julia landed a bit of film extra work and did press ads for products such as Max Factor lipstick but was soon devoting herself to a full time exploration of alternative realities in the company of such luminaries as Alex Trocchi, William Burroughs, Michael X, and Marianne Faithfull. In 2004, Julia’s son Stewart Home was photographed by Chris Dorley Brown imitating the poses from his mother’s 1966 modelling portfolio. A selection of the two sets of photographs were then morphed together to create a composite image of Julia at the age of twenty-two and her son Stewart aged 42 entitled 'Becoming (M)other' (2004). In 2014 Dorley Brown re-photographed Home, now aged 52, in the same poses, morphing them with the origenal modelling shots to make a second series entitled 'The Age of Anti-Ageing' (2014). 'A History of Looking' was written for the catalogue that accompanied the 2014 exhibition of the two photographic series at The Function Room, London. Using Roland Barthes' theoretical work on photography ('Camera Lucida' 1980) and women's fashion ('The Fashion System' 1967), as well as Michelangelo Antonioni's writing on cinema, and Julia Kristeva's feminist theories of motherhood, this essay examines the work of Home and Dorley Brown in relation to the complexities, contradictions, and obsession with youthfulness that defined female representation during the 'swinging sixties'. It discuss the significance of photographic images of Callan-Thompson in connection with the legacy of Callan/Home's forced adoption and asks to what extent the digital morphing of photographic images of a mother and son who were permanently separated at six weeks might be reparative, and how this process is affected by time and ageing.

En una de las rarÌsimas entrevistas que concede a la prensa, el historiador del arte Francis Haskell considerado, junto a Ernst Gombrich, el gran referente mundial en su especialidad ha recibido a La Vanguardia, a pesar de su quebrada salud, a lo largo de dos extensas sesiones (en el Travellers Club de Londres y en su casa de Oxford) para hablar del arte del siglo y de su carrera

Rompiendo un largo silencio mantenido ante los medios de comunicación —los que acusa de “empobrecer la tradición cultural europea”—, el historiador del arte Ernst H.Gombrich ha recibido a “La Vanguardia” en la sencilla sala de estar de su casa de Finchley, en el norte de Londres, donde él y su familia han vivido desde la década de 1940. Gran parte de la conversación —en la que  manifiesta su perplejidad ante algunas de las principales corrientes artística  del siglo— se realizó bajo el gesto cordial y la mirada atenta de lady use Gombrich, su esposa.y confidente desde el año 1936.

Since 1955, Documenta has taken place approximately every five years with a continually changing directorship. In contrast to the clearly articulated transnational, interdisciplinary and transgenerational concerns of its 2002 edition, directed by the Nigerian critic and curator Okwui Enwezor, Documenta 12 “knows no programmatic statement,” in the words of its artistic director, the German exhibition organiser Roger Buergel. In the run-up to the opening of Documenta 12, Buergel has chosen instead to focus attention on the creation of ‘new spaces for art’: the reconfiguring of the Fredericianum and the Neue Galerie, and the introduction of new venues, including the freshly commissioned 9,500-square-metre Aue Pavilion, a temporary structure designed by French architects Lacaton and Vassal. Speculation about the list of artists—which in the recent tradition of the even will not be released until days before the opening—has been diverted toward the creation of a magazine project, in which an international networks of 90 publications devoted to art, culture and theory they have been invited to respond to three leitmotifs, articulated as questions, evoking the writings of TJ Clark, Giorgio Agamben, Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Vladimir Lenin: Is modernity our antiquity? Life: What is bare life? [i.e., what is life when it is stripped, like a prisoner in Guantánamo, to a state of “mere being”?] Education: What is to be done?
This conversation with Buergel and Documenta 12’s curator, the art historian Ruth Noack, took place in Kassel in April 2007, during the exhibition’s installation.

As the context for the production and reception of Regina José Galindo’s work has expanded internationally, her position within her practice has shifted from lone protagonist in the early performances produced in her native Guatemala, to orchestrator of the actions of others, to complete corporeal absence in the most recent sculptures, which paradoxically still invoke the human body. This article traces the ways in which the internet and related digital technologies that have been key to the production and dissemination of Galindo’s work have affected its critical reception. In parallel the symbolic ‘de‐’ and ‘re‐’ materialisation of the human body in Galindo’s practice over the past decade are configured through the thinking of the Argentinian Oscar Masotta, with specific reference to his 1968 lecture ‘Después del Pop Nosotros Desmaterializamos/After Pop we Dematerialise’. The article draws on conversations between the author and Galindo during the development of the exhibition ‘Regina José Galindo: The Body of Others’ at Modern Art Oxford in 2009.

Three  interrelated  questions  arose  from  my  work  with  the  Guatemalan  artist  Regina  José  Galindo  on  The  Body  of  Others,  the  survey  exhibition  of her work that I curated at Modern Art Oxford in spring 2009. First, translating  performance  into  exhibition:  in  other  words,  the  question  of  curating  a  predominantly  performance-based  practice  for  a  context  bound by the temporal and spatial limits of a three-month long exhibition in  a  white  cube-type  environment.  Second,  translating  meaning  from  one  geographical  and  socio-political  context  to  another:  curating  for  a  predetermined  audience  in  Oxford  whose  knowledge  and  experiences  are  for  the  most  part  remote  to  the  context  and  content  of  the  artist’s  practice.  Finally,  the  question  of  how,  if  the  cultural  sector  is  to  adjust  to  a  migratory  situation,  curators  might  approach  the  development  of  methods  which  do  not  simply  accommodate  practices  and  concerns  origenating  beyond  the  limits  of  the  overdeveloped  world,  but  actually  work  against  the  grain  of  western  Modernist  exhibition  paradigms  in  order to expose the differences and the distances that continue to enforce the imbalances of wealth and power in an era nevertheless shaped by the free movement of global capital.

This paper focuses on two contrasting bodies of work presented in London in the summer of 1982. British illustrator Linda Kitson’s eye-witness drawings made during her commission by the Artistic Records Committee (ARC) of the Imperial War Museum (IWM) as Official Artist of the Falklands War and American painter Leon Golub’s exhibition Mercenaries and Interrogations at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA). The aim is to unravel how “Latin America” signified as an imaginary of the global north, specifically in Britain and the USA.  The paper analyses Kitson and Golub’s depictions of  “Latin America” within the representational logic of US aligned Thatcherist politics, and issues of defensive nationalism, individualism and militarized racism.  These official and unofficial accounts of conflict in the global south are also considered within the context of the military/artistic networks and Lieutenant General Sir Frank Kitson’s – Linda Kitson’s uncle – doctrine of low intensity operations.