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Jonathan Gibbs

Jonathan Gibbs was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize 2013. He has since published a novel, Randall or the Painted Grape (Galley Beggar Press).



Articles Available Online


Jessie Greengrass’s ‘Sight’

Book Review

February 2018

Jonathan Gibbs

Book Review

February 2018

Jessie Greengrass’s debut story collection caught my eye with its delightfully extravagant title, An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to...

feature

May 2016

Cinema on the Page

Jonathan Gibbs

feature

May 2016

Film is a bully. It wants to make its viewers feel, and it has the tools to do so....

The history of Documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition founded in the German city of Kassel in 1955, is the story of the post-war avant-garde Born out of the rubble of Nazism — Kassel was a manufacturing centre specialising in the production of tanks, and was heavily bombed during the Second World War — the state-funded exhibition sought to reframe attitudes to culture skewed by the Third Reich’s denunciation of entartete kunst, its attacks on free expression, and its recapitulation of art as propaganda Unsurprisingly given the circumstances of its birth, Documenta has historically been defined by its profound suspicion of the systems of money and power that serve to instrumentalise art It enshrines a vision of culture as a means of resisting the kind of group think — characterised by the passive acceptance of images and information — that precipitated Europe’s descent into chaos, and which now threatens to do so again   Those points of resistance have shifted over the decades In the wake of Fascism, the free expression of Henry Moore and the playfulness of Alexander Calder’s mobiles thrilled audiences in 1955; in the coming editions, as Germany struggled to deal with the legacy of its actions during the war, visitors flocked to see Pop Art’s promotion of American freedom When the mood shifted against capitalism and consumerism, so Harald Szeemann’s 1972 Documenta — one of the most important exhibitions in contemporary art history — focused on performances and ideas, meaning works of art that can’t be sold (although the market, ever ingenious, soon found a way)  In 2002, Okwui Enwezor’s celebrated eleventh edition put forward a global vision of art that challenged the priority of North America and Europe and set the agenda for a decade in which institutions focused on acquiring Latin American, African and Asian art in order to balance out their collections (for one example, visit the recently rehung Tate Modern) So it goes on: Documenta is both survey and manifesto, redrawing the parameters of contemporary art at five-year intervals according to the socio-political circumstances in which it is staged   Which brings us to 2017,

Contributor

August 2014

Jonathan Gibbs

Contributor

August 2014

Jonathan Gibbs was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize 2013. He has since published a novel, Randall or...

The Story I'm Thinking Of

fiction

April 2013

Jonathan Gibbs

fiction

April 2013

There were seven of us sat around the table. Seven grown adults, sat around the table. It was late. We had eaten, and we had...

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poetry

January 2015

dear angélica

Angélica Freitas

TR. Hilary Kaplan

poetry

January 2015

dear angélica   dear angélica I can’t make it I got stuck in the elevator between the ninth and...

feature

July 2013

The New Writing

César Aira

TR. Rahul Bery

feature

July 2013

The way I see it, the avant-garde emerged at a point when the professionalisation of artists had consumed itself...

Interview

March 2017

Interview with Ondjaki

Stephen Henighan

Interview

March 2017

Ondjaki is the most prominent African writer of Portuguese from the generations born after Portugal’s five former colonies on...

 

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