UNFINISHED BUSINESS focuses on an ordinary suburban office worker, fundamentally weak but always keeping his eyes fixed on some horizon where a heightened, romantic, better world must surely exist. Faced with the regular stuff of life - work, aspiration, marriage, age, divorce, bereavement - his ordinary plight is sharpened, becoming increasingly urgent. Having lived in a modern condition, confusing pleasure with happiness, wanting the dream to deliver, what do you do when you notice the shadows begin to lengthen on the lawn?
The best evocation I've read of London in the '80s' Neil Tennant 'I loved Souvenir . . . it rescued some things for me - a certain aesthetic, a philosophical engagement with time and poignant beauty and lived history that I have found myself looking for, and not finding, elsewhere in recent years . . . the book gave me new hope' John Burnside 'A suspended act of retrieval, a partisan recall; a sustained, subtle summary of our recent past, and an epitaph for a future we never had' Philip Hoare 'Michael Bracewell proves himself to be nothing less than the poet laureate of late capitalism' Jonathan Coe A vivid eulogy for London of the late 1970s and early 80s - the last years prior to the rise of the digital city. An elliptical, wildly atmospheric remembrance of the sites and soundtrack, at once aggressively modern and strangely elegiac, that accompanied the twilight of one era and the dawn of another. Haunted bedsits, post-punk entrepreneurs in the Soho Brasserie, occultists in Fitzrovia, Docklands before Canary Wharf, frozen suburbs in the winter of 1980...
Cultural critic and writer, Michael Bracewell has written widely and increasingly on modern and contemporary art and has been a regular contributor to Frieze magazines since its inception. He has written extensively for museums and galleries on artists including Gilbert & George, Richard Hamilton, Bridget Riley, Wolfgang Tillmans, Anish Kapoor, Keith Coventry, John Stezaker, Glenn Brown and Damien Hirst. This collection of Bracewell's writing on art explores connections between the visual arts, pop music, modern iconography and sub-cultures, while appraising the vision and ideas of individual artists and the relation of their work to its broader cultural context.
An electrifying, trenchant meditation on England's pop sensibility, England Is Mine shows the novelist and critic Michael Bracewell on blistering form as he hops from Oscar Wilde to Paul Weller, Goldie to Graham Greene, in a dizzyingly erudite cultural history. Bracewell's eye is unswervingly democratic, as, for example, W. H. Auden ('grandfather of the robot dandys') is to be found sitting next to David Bowie ('a sort of Mod from Mars'). He is also intensely funny: who was it that '[covered] the territory of Angela Carter's Company of Wolves in the guise of a pre-Raphaelite raised on Jackie'? Kate Bush, of course. Through impassioned argument and an insight both hilarious and surgical (note Oasis's veneration of the Beatles as 'an example of England's nostalgia for Englishness as a kind of heritage pop') England Is Mine offers a genuinely unique and, more importantly, cogent take on England's pop history.
The first in a series of small-format publications devoted to single bodies of work, Fire from the Sun highlights Michaël Borremans’s new work, which features toddlers engaged in playful but mysterious acts with sinister overtones and insinuations of violence. Known for his ability to recall classical painting, both through technical mastery and subject matter, Borremans’s depiction of the uncanny, the perhaps secret, the bizarre, often surprises, sometimes disturbs the viewer. In this series of work, children are presented alone or in groups against a studio-like backdrop that negates time and space, while underlining the theatrical atmosphere and artifice that exists throughout Borremans’s recent work. Reminiscent of cherubs in Renaissance paintings, the toddlers appear as allegories of the human condition, their archetypal innocence contrasted with their suggested deviousness. In his accompanying essay, critic and curator Michael Bracewell takes an in-depth look into specific paintings, tackling both the highly charged subject matter and the masterly command of the medium. He writes, “The art of Michaël Borremans seems always to have been predicated on a confluence of enigma, ambiguity, and painterly poetics—accosting beauty with strangeness; making historic Romanticism subjugate to mysterious controlling forces that are neither crudely malevolent nor necessarily benign.” Published on the occasion of Borremans’s eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner in Hong Kong, this publication is available in both English-only and bilingual English/traditional Chinese editions.
In answering the question posed by its title, and drawing on his twenty year relationship with the artists, Michael Bracewell is the first writer to engage directly with Gilbert & George to understand why they have devoted their lives exclusively and continuously - to the vision of art they conceived within months of first meeting. What emerges piece by piece is a portrait of Gilbert & George as two men who are infinitely more intense, strange, determined and alone than their longstanding public image suggests.
He's the only person to whom The Velvet Underground ever played as an audience of one, the first British writer to talk to Patti Smith after her seventeen-year hiatus from rock. One reviewer hailed his previous book England is Mine as "surely the strangest and most beautiful book on pop music ever written." Greil Marcus said that even the "merely superb" passages of that book read like "intellectual sunrises," calling the work "intoxicated and intoxicating." The author in question is Michael Bracewell, celebrated surveyor of the punk and rock scenes. Now, through funny, engaging, and occasionally devastating essays about his experience in the thick of the music scene of the 1990s, Bracewell tackles a decade where Greed became disguised as Attitude, where a "cozy, urban feelgood fable" replaced punk, and where the role of anxiety, so intrinsic to the culture and music of the 1980s, was swapped for a shallow "I feel your pain" sensibility. Read When Surface Was Depth and discover why Time Out has called Michael Bracewell, in a word, "terrific.
Made across a 32-year span, the works in Tabula Rasa unite the central themes in the art of John Stezaker, from capacities of collage to the current flow in an age of mass media. Silkscreens on canvas from the early 1990s with film still collages from the 1990s and 2009 are brought together for the first time. Tabula Rasa is an important overview of Stezaker's work centered around the notion of screens, voids and cut-outs. An essay by Michael Bracewell, The Space Between, looks at the connections between this selection of 13 works. Also included are a series of installation views from Stezaker's 2010 exhibition at The Approach, London.
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