Stiell Behrens

ALFIE WILCOX meets the artist, free-thinker and probable lunatic, Stiell Behrens

Stiell Behrens

1.

Before, when I didn’t know what colour to put down, I put down black.  Black is a force: I depend on black to simplify the construction.  Now I’ve given up on blacks.”  Henri Matisse, ‘Black Is A Colour’ (1946) in Matisse on Art (London, Phaidon, 1973)

Baby, baby – don’t talk to me about black.  It’s too much.”  Stiell Behrens, in conversation, 2009.

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Cruzvillegas

Time to look carefully at Mexico’s most important artist, says S. L. CONWAY

Cruzvillegas Tate

Part of Autoconstruccion (2008) at Tate Modern

Pop for a moment into Room 11 at the moment in Tate Modern, and you face some of the most exciting Latin American art currently to be seen in London. Continue reading

Lissie Coleman

RHODRI DELANGES is delighted by a punctual arrival from one of our premier living poets

Only once a year, normally around late September/early October time, does Lissie Coleman send out of her extraordinary poems out into the world; always handwritten, always on the same pages from the same battered notebooks, it is as true a sign of autumn as the falling of the leaves or the sounds of conkers in the playground.

Mr Kurosawa

Hooray for the July Kurosawa retrospective at the NFT says MALAKI HARROD

It’s tremendous news that the British Film Institute is running such a comprehensive review of the influence of his films.  Not least the level of detail that the BFI is bringing to Kurosawa’s work will explode an enormous amount of confused and ill-thought out criticism that this director has received. Continue reading

Parker Banning

SAM JANSEN gets drunk with New York artist Parker Banning

Untitled Circles 8

“In Iowa, in Nebraska, in New Mexico, New Zealand … and I was locked in a cupboard in Haiti”.  Over the course of his thirty-five year career, Parker Banning, the controversial photographer, has been arrested or imprisoned in seven US states and four European countries, he has been through innumerable court cases, scores of aggressive editorials, and has (that he knows of) eleven children (“in nine states!”).

He is, by his own admission, an alcoholic (“unrecovered and unreconstructed”) and an habitual slapper of women (including his second, third and fourth wives) and – by the views of the academy – one of the most important photographers of the post-war era.

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