In Surrealism’s first decade ‘transgression’ was the watchword: Breton advocated it, and Bataille both practised and theorised it. There was a residual bourgeois order with more or less clear lines...

When do we dig up the dead, and how? Can they be robbed? What if their deadness is final, and that’s all we need to know, or can know?

Jan Lievens was not one for wild expression or extreme physiognomy; his tronies summon a striking human presence. He could render human heads as unforgettable apparitions.

Maldoror honoured independence struggles in Africa and other parts of the world throughout her life. But she wouldn’t set aside her values as a filmmaker in the name of a cause: ways of seeing had to...

Surrey comes from a different time. It is, to appropriate Surreyspeak, forever a wholly unconvincing approximation of yore (1450-1600). It comes from a different place, too: so lavishly heathered, gorsed,...

We think we remember works of art rather well; and probably assume that the greater the work of art, and the more powerfully it strikes us, the more accurate our mental image of it must be. But memory...

One way of refusing to see the difference between making a movie and talking about one is to remember that films often talk, literally and obliquely, about film. 

‘The artist,’ Jacques Lacan wrote, ‘always precedes [the analyst].’ Great works of art had already illuminated even the most deeply hidden features of the phenomena he sought to describe.

The idea of a church as a place for the dead as much as for the living has now largely disappeared, but it was central to religious thought and practice in the Renaissance and later. The living prayed...

Inuit art as we know it – though often assumed to be an ancient cultural tradition – is a product of the 20th century. Its imagery, however, is a complex fusion of old and new, of the pre-colonial...

Rodrigo Moreno’s​ The Delinquents has been described as a heist movie and a comedy. These labels are appropriate only if every bank robbery is a heist, and if we call films comedies when we can’t...

Marxism is about leisure, not labour. The only good reason for being a socialist, apart from annoying people you don’t like, is that you don’t like to work.

I am reminded of the first maps I saw as a child, hanging on the walls of British classrooms. Of course, the colour that occurred most often on those maps was red, not white, a difference in surface but...

‘Replay’ is Kruger’s term for her reworkings of the early iconic screen prints, transferred from their original formats to free-standing LED video screens. This is the Kruger blueprint: levity shot...

The film keeps threatening to come apart, almost unable to juggle its sorrowful realism with its wild farce. It doesn’t come apart, though, and the survived threat is part of the unshakeable discomfort...

Acid house wasn’t a genre of dance music so much as a new way of experiencing it: audiences dressed down, parties ran all night and – so dancers reported – social divisions disintegrated, helped...

Simmonds’s books and newspaper strips have been a compass for generations of British women, as sure a gauge of who and where they are as Marks and Spencer knickers.

The urge to register one’s presence, even if only with a pseudonym, is a powerful factor in the history of graffiti. It is found when some forbidden or previously inaccessible territory is being explored.