Posted inLifestyle

On art and honesty

“It doesn’t always have to mean something”, a friend barked back. We were watching The Favour, the Watch and the Very Big Fish. The circle was all a bit older, degreed drama folk. I, waitering by my gap year in an industrial backwater, just couldn’t get screwball comedy. But it was not to last long. […]

Posted inGeneralHealth

The cult of the toned female body

When Gilles Deleuze claimed that what Foucault had theorised as the panoptical, carceral society of disciplined, docile bodies — economically productive and politically impotent — had come to an end more or less with the Second World War, to be incrementally replaced by “societies of control”, he would probably not have been able to anticipate […]

Posted inGender violence

On not just walking past

It’s Sunday. I go to a mall to get some art supplies. It’s an ordinary mall, outdated even, with strange linoleum flooring and an assortment of second-hand stores and haberdasheries. It’s the type of mall your gran goes to for wool, or other assorted items needed when growing older. So imagine my surprise when I […]

Posted inGeneral

Critical psychology in Santiago, Chile

When it is your first time in Santiago, Chile, you may be forgiven for being somewhat taken aback by the friendliness and warmth of the people in this South American country. Few people here speak English, but it has happened several times that, when we stop to consult our map, someone comes up to us […]

Posted inGeneral

The art paradox

Theodor Adorno captured the paradoxical nature of art nicely when he remarked that it goes without saying that nothing about art goes without saying. What his observation does not make explicit (although it is implied) is that art’s paradoxical character lends itself to being elaborated upon by identifying several paradoxes at the heart of this […]

Posted inGeneral

For the love of church architecture

Visiting a city as old and history-rich as Prague is indescribably rewarding for an architecture lover because the history of western architecture from the early Middle Ages until the 20th century is graphically inscribed in its urban texture. Romanesque architecture stands side by side with Gothic, baroque and even — incongruously, when it comes to […]

Posted inGeneral

On the interpretation of a painting

I did not really want to write this piece, knowing full well that it would be greeted by howls of derision and by vituperative incomprehension in many quarters. But as events unfolded in the wake of the public display, at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, of the Brett Murray painting metaphorically titled The Spear, reaching […]

Posted inGeneral

When the defaced Spear is better than the original

So ja, I’ve given in. I’ve decided to talk about that painting. The one that’s transfixed the nation for more than a week now – even on Twitter, a platform known for nothing so much as institutionalised ADD. It is the PR gift that keeps on giving: apparently it’s reached 108 million people and delivered […]