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Philippa Snow
Philippa Snow is a critic and essayist. Her work has appeared in publications including ArtforumThe Los Angeles Review of BooksArtReviewFriezeVogueThe NationThe New Statesman, and The New Republic. Her first book, Which As You Know Means Violence, is out now with Repeater, and she is currently working on an essay collection about famous women.  

Articles Available Online


You Don’t Think God Is Sexy?

Film Review

January 2023

Philippa Snow

Film Review

January 2023

On the most literal level, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s elliptical, spiritual-cum-sensual movie Teorema (1968) is about an entire family being driven to distraction by their...

Essay

Issue No. 31

It's Terrible The Things I Have To Do To Be Me

Philippa Snow

Essay

Issue No. 31

Here was a woman who had modelled her life so closely on Marilyn Monroe’s that doing so eventually helped...

Luke Hart will meet me at Gate 7 I get the text on the DLR, heading east past Canary Wharf through the dusty warmth of a London summer The train approaches Silvertown, a tapestry of brownfield plots, derelict factories, foul-smelling chemical plants, low-rise terraces, gated estates, arterial roads, dead ends, trash heaps, show homes, cracked concrete and prolific weeds We arrive at Pontoon Dock, where I am the only person who disembarks This, in my experience, is typical of the area: you often feel as if you’ve entered an evacuated part of town     I’ve come to Silvertown to visit the artist Luke Hart, who is constructing a new temporary outdoor sculpture on the quayside of Victoria Dock Hart and I were both students at the Royal College of Art ­– same year; different courses – although we never actually met For his degree show in 2013 Hart showed ‘Fractal Weave Structure I’, a tall, three-legged sculpture built from segments of steel tube, each tube connected to the other by a tangled joint made from polyurethane   Proving Ground: Trailer from Luke Hart on Vimeo   In terms of its size and the arachnid connotations of its articulated legs, the piece bore a loose resemblance to ‘Maman’, the 30-foot-tall spider by Louise Bourgeois first shown in Tate Modern in 2000 Bourgeois described the bronze, marble and welded-steel sculpture as ‘an ode to my mother’, who died when Bourgeois was 21, but the title of the work – a cosy French nickname similar to ‘mummy’, ‘mama’ or ‘mum’ – is very nearly a homonym of ‘mammon’: a word translating variously as ‘riches’, ‘greed’ or ‘material wealth’ Whether or not you find this double entendre significant will depend upon how cynical you are about the effects of corporate sponsorship on artistic production – ‘Maman’ was funded by Unilever   The resemblance of one large and more or less spidery sculpture to another is, on one level, a mere coincidence But the comparison of Hart to Bourgeois’ work, ‘Fractal Weave’ to ‘Maman’, reveals how the relationship

Contributor

November 2018

Philippa Snow

Contributor

November 2018

Philippa Snow is a critic and essayist. Her work has appeared in publications including Artforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtReview, Frieze, Vogue, The...

Essay

January 2021

An Uneasy Girl

Philippa Snow

Essay

January 2021

Even before Lucie arrives holding a shotgun, we know that the perfect family in this huge suburban house are...

Brilliant Muscles

Essay

December 2019

Philippa Snow

Essay

December 2019

‘Lindsay Lohan’s new film,’ I told almost everyone I spoke to for about two months earlier this year, ‘is about werewolf detectives.’ Nobody seemed...
Evita Vasiljeva, POSTCRETE

Art Review

February 2019

Philippa Snow

Art Review

February 2019

Lower.Green is situated in the unlikely surroundings of a near-dead mall in Norwich. It is not just any mall, but Anglia Square Shopping Centre:...
Gabriele Beveridge, Live Dead World

Art Review

November 2018

Philippa Snow

Art Review

November 2018

Several months ago, I went to a salon so small and so identikit that I do not recall the name, and against every sane...

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Interview

September 2015

Interview with Allison Katz

Frances Loeffler

Interview

September 2015

With the desire to get to know an artist’s work comes the impulse to stick one’s nose in. The...

feature

April 2012

Oradour-sur-Glane: Reflections on the Culture of Memorial in Europe

Will Stone

feature

April 2012

Que nos caravanes s’avancent Vers ce lieu marqué par le sang Une plaie au coeur de la France Y...

Feature

November 2017

Small White Monkeys

Sophie Collins

Feature

November 2017

Small white monkeys stretch around in the dirt beneath a tree but do not get dirty. They pick themselves...

 

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