A Talk

John Russell is an artist who writes. He has a good eye for the absurd damage that academics and galleries do to the English language. Often, he works the tools of the publicist. Outraged, philosophical, mock-didactic, and with disarming glints of lucidity, his works can take the form of PRESS RELEASES, GALLERY ANNOUNCEMENTS, and delirious promotional images. Here Russell jams up the distinctions between art criticism and artwork, words and things, attempts at articulation and traps of self-validation—or as Foucault puts it, “…the oldest oppositions of our alphabetic civilization: to show and to name; to shape and to say; to reproduce and to articulate; to imitate and to signify.” In Russell’s works, the voice does not hover in feigned clarity and grace, as it does with so many philosophers, ad men, and conceptualists. Instead the voice is meaty. It has a corpus.

John Russell lives in the UK where he is a director of research for art at University of Reading. He is the editor of Frozen Tears.