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Amber Husain

Amber Husain is a writer, academic and publisher. She is currently a managing editor and research fellow at Afterall, Central Saint Martins. Her essays and criticism appear or are forthcoming in 3AM, The Believer, London Review of Books, LA Review of Books, Radical Philosophy and elsewhere. She is the author of Replace Me, to be published by Peninsula Press in November 2021.



Articles Available Online


Slouching Towards Death

Book Review

July 2021

Amber Husain

Book Review

July 2021

In January, a preview excerpt in The New Yorker of Rachel Kushner’s essay collection The Hard Crowd (2021) warned us that this might turn...

Book Review

August 2020

Natasha Stagg’s ‘Sleeveless’

Amber Husain

Book Review

August 2020

‘The thong is centimetres closer to areas of arousal,’ writes Natasha Stagg in Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York,...

Lines of varying thickness rotate on black On the screen beside, tilted away from the first, is a slide show, a still image from the moving one every ten seconds This is not a video work; generated in real time, the digital image doesn’t run on a loop It could go on forever   http://vimeocom/32451215# P-1271 series, 2006-2007 Manfred Mohr’s solo exhibition at Carroll/Fletcher, his first in London, is presented as a concise survey of fifty years of practice Logics run off each other; visualisations generated by an algorithm determine the maximum limits of a printed panel on the opposite wall; signs from an alphabet are drafted onto each other and scaled up, made manifest in lacquered steel, and fixed to the wall   Mohr was living and working in Paris in the 1960s, where he started making generative drawings at The Meteorological Institute (he has lived in New York since 1981) At the time only scientists and mathematicians had access to new computer technologies At issue now is the ubiquity of computer technology There’s been a lot of discussion around the New Aesthetic over the past year or so; the technological mistake evidences our new way of seeing No longer hidden away in research institutions, the computer is now embedded in our working lives, our means of communication and making In the 1960s computer technology belonged to military research; its use signaled the corruption of art   Mohr’s website details various ‘work phases’ Some are paradigms of post-war art: action painting, use of black and white, geometric experiments, hard edge painting, colour Others seem betray a commitment to science and mathematics: systematisation of picture content, sequential computer drawings, fixed structures, 4-D hypercube, graph theory, dissection of cube, quasi-organic growth programs on the cube, 6-D hypercube It occurs to me that the language of art is just as peculiar as that of science It’s clear these terms stand in for large bodies of work, work as in labour, learning, but also working out, working through It is only when I meet Mohr that I realise this is a peculiar language all of his own     http://youtube/j4M28FEJFF8

Contributor

November 2018

Amber Husain

Contributor

November 2018

Amber Husain is a writer, academic and publisher. She is currently a managing editor and research fellow at Afterall,...

On Having No Skin: Nan Goldin’s Sirens

Art Review

January 2020

Amber Husain

Art Review

January 2020

The feeling of drug-induced euphoria could be strips of gauze between beautiful fingers. Or a silver slinky sent down a torso by its own...
In Defence of Dead Women

Essay

November 2018

Amber Husain

Essay

November 2018

The memorial for the artist was as inconclusive as her work, or anybody’s life. Organised haphazardly on Facebook by one of her old friends,...

READ NEXT

poetry

February 2012

Giant Impact Hypothesis

James Midgley

poetry

February 2012

I bought a satellite’s eye from the market. To look through it involved the whole god-orbit, a cotton-wooled Faberge...

poetry

February 2013

Redacted, Redacted

Les Kay

poetry

February 2013

Here the censorship, which you’ve taught yourself, is self-inflicted (low sugar, low fat); it begins with the swinging shadow...

fiction

April 2013

The Taxidermist

Olivia Heal

fiction

April 2013

I did not want to walk. The day was dull. But imperative or impulsion pushed me out, onto the...

 

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