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Orlando Reade

Orlando Reade is writing a Ph.D. on English poetry and cosmology in the seventeenth century. His interview with Lynette Yiadom-Boakye can be read in The White Review No. 13.



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Wildness of the Day

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December 2016

Orlando Reade

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December 2016

One day in late 2011, waiting outside Green Park station, my gaze was drawn to an unexpected sight. Earlier that year a canopy of...

Interview

Issue No. 13

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Orlando Reade

Interview

Issue No. 13

Modern philosophy is threatened by love, whose objects are never only objects. Philosophers have discovered in love a lived...

Luke Hart’s Wall, recently on display at London’s William Benington Gallery, is a single, large-scale sculpture composed of a series of steel tubes held together by orange polyurethane joints The tubes at the base of the sculpture are welded together into an elongated S-shape, such that the work curves diagonally across the gallery floor, forcing the viewer to walk around it The welded base also provides the stability necessary for the rest of the sculpture to remain flexible The polyurethane joints make the work to some degree elastic, determining and limiting its movements   Wall, then, is not a wall in the conventional sense of the term The work’s lattice or weave-like structure articulates empty space It is a wall which, like a net, is mostly made up of holes And while the sculpture divides the gallery, setting a porous boundary between the spectator and the world, there is little difference between what is found on one side of the wall and what is found on the other There are further elements of the sculpture that add to its ambiguous status The polyurethane joints, for instance, work to hold the structure together, but there is also a tactile, almost fetishistic quality to the orange rubber, which looks like a tangle of muscle sinew This inscribes the sculpture in a bodily register and lends the work an anthropomorphic quality Like all elastic structures, moreover, Wall quickly settles into a particular position, while also remaining in a state of potential motion The way in which the sculpture pulls itself downwards dramatises its susceptibility to the laws of gravity Entropy might be too strong a word for this movement, but there is an unexpected sense of precarity and instability to the work, a sense that it might teeter over under its own dead weight   In a recent conversation, Hart explained that for him one of the most important aspects of Wall is its functionality At first the word seemed a misnomer It is true that, like a wall, the sculpture gets in the way, filling much of the gallery space, but otherwise its resemblance to

Contributor

August 2014

Orlando Reade

Contributor

August 2014

Orlando Reade is writing a Ph.D. on English poetry and cosmology in the seventeenth century. His interview with Lynette...

Life outside the Manet Paradise Resort : On the paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

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November 2012

Orlando Reade

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November 2012

*   A person is represented, sitting in what appears to be the banal and conventional pose of a high street studio portrait photographer:...

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fiction

Issue No. 8

The Lady of the House

Claire-Louise Bennett

fiction

Issue No. 8

Wow it’s so still. Isn’t it eerie. Oh yes. So calm. Everything’s still. That’s right. Look at the rowers...

fiction

July 2014

Zone

Mathias Enard

TR. Charlotte Mandell

fiction

July 2014

I remember the day Andrija the invincible collapsed for the first time, the warrior of warriors whom we’d never...

Art

November 2014

Conversations About a Play

Louise Stern

Art

November 2014

Editor’s note: The images in the slideshow document a conversation on paper between the writer and artist Louise Stern...

 

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