Adrian Searle at Document 13: Mysteries in the mountain of mud

The above photo is of Geoffrey Farmer’s Leaves of Grass at Documenta 13. It is created from pictures cut from five decades of Life magazine. Photograph: Ralph Orlowski/Reuters

‘Tacita Dean has brought the mountains of Afghanistan to Kassel, filling a former banking hall with enormous, beautiful blackboard drawings. Some are near-empty, just turbid blackness; others are filled with moiling rapids and rushing rivers. There are sunlit mountaintops, dusty avalanches, chalky wipe-outs. The six panels are a sort of storyboard, an evocation of an elsewhere. Dean’s drawings are, I think, about time: geological time, the flash of a life, a passing thought.’

You can read Adrian’s complete article, here.

^‘Make art so bad they turn away from it, turn back to life,” wrote the US artist Paul Thek in one of his notebooks. There’s a lesson there, but it’s a strategy that could easily backfire.

Adrian Searle on Glasgow Festival of Visual Art: The new Scottish colourists

Read Adrian Searle’s review of Damien Hirst retrospective: 

One wants to write a straightforward review of Hirst’s work, but it is almost impossible. What would it be like, I wonder, for someone with no knowledge of his art, let alone his global reputation, to come along and review this show? What would they see? So much has already been said about Hirst, including a great deal by me. How can we see it fresh?

Answers on the back of a spotty postcard or below this post.