The Fillip Review

Against Stasis / Patrik Andersson

The Absent Enthusiast / Jesse Birch and Nicholas Brown

Jeremy Deller’s Advanced Capitalism Pt. 2 (1999) echoes in the hallway outside of the Art Gallery of York University — the sound recording of a scalper selling his wares providing an apt introduction to the exhibition. Positioned at the galley’s entrance, the work reminds us that even though we are visiting a government-funded institution, the market’s influence presides.

There is a Horizon / Colleen Brown

The earlier restraint of conceptual art was a resistance to an idea’s confinement within a particular, a desire to cleave the idea from the world. In contrast, Geoffrey Farmer’s practice laces the idea through an overwhelming mass of distant, worldly particulars. The undefined collection of particulars becomes the rough edge of the unbounded idea.

Having Hired a Design Team, the Bad Slept Well / Liz Bruchet

Moving away from the notion that Latin American art is best produced and understood as a gritty, explicit political statement, Carlos Amorales’ installation, The Bad Sleep Well cuts apart pseudo-gothic imagery only to wrap it back up in handsome graphic design. The resulting work provokes pleasure full of caveats.

Impossibility of an Island / Clint Burnham

Thematically, the Erik van Lieshout videos again and again stage confrontations that segue into friendship, or family relationships that break down into animosity; so, again, we have to admit that, yes, our relations with others are seldom monolithic.

Taking Down the Names of the Anonymous Movement / Michael Eddy

The flank of the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt am Main, Germany was recently host to an anonymously curated group show featuring “eleven (significant but anonymous) international artists.” Although we are told the question is bad for us, we still ask: who?

From (Starry Eyed) Vision to Nail / Christian L. Frock

It is regularly suggested that the curator has superceded that of the artist in contemporary practice and morphed into the “super-artist,” a term Daniel Buren used as a critique of Harald Szeemann, the original prototypical in

Body Doubles / Nate Lippens

The current resurgence of artistic interest in buildings seems to often preclude the bodies and people that inhabit them. Schweder’s built environments are more like body art, with structures mimicking buildings and playing stand-ins for people.

Invasion of the Cybernetic Hand and Other Predicaments / Sara Mameni

Kristin Lucas’ sculptural and video works at the Or Gallery occupy an alternative time-line from our own. Lurking behind their mundane settings of picnics and thrift store shopping are the destructive forces of gamma rays and electromagnetic fields. Occupying these meta-spaces are the particular dilemmas of human subjects.

Marked as Withdrawn / Cheryl Meszaros

Jean-Luc Nancy has turned his formidable gaze toward the arts many times throughout his life. In each of these encounters, he offers the arts as access—access to sense. This review follows one line of thought through two of his books and a recent installation by Vancouver artist Ruth Beer.

Appealing Biography / Joseph Mosconi

For those who are wary of the appeal to biographical detail, Aurie Ramirez’s recent show of watercolours at the Jack Hanley Gallery in Los Angeles raises questions about the status of the artist’s narrative biography and her relation to the contested field of outsider art.

If You Build It, They Will Come / Aaron Peck

If Did Somebody Say Participate? gathers together a series of different approaches under the rubric of “spatial practice,” it does so without considering how that terminology creates another aesthetic category. To neglect the context of each practice runs the risk of being naïve about the relationship between representation and politics.

Welcome to the Wild East / Kathleen Ritter

The flank of the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt am Main, Germany was recently host to an anonymously curated group show featuring “eleven (significant but anonymous) international artists.” Although we are told the question is bad for us, we still ask: who?

Hand in (Invisible) Hand: An Editorial / Jordan Strom

Over time, the fragments of this period would be dredged-up from media memories. The bits would be tagged, numbered, and safely stored for deferred reconsideration in the hangars of people’s minds.

The Day After: An Interview with Slavoj Zizek / Robert Eikmeyer and Slavoj Žižek

A discussion with Slavoj Zizek of the dictatorship of the proletariat, bio-politics, Hollywood, the future of democracy, globalisation as fate, communist and capitalist ideology today, and, of course, Karl Marx and the revolution.