YALE UNION

A Talk
Thursday, March 24, 7pm

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.”[1] 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.

A well-known case is Fax-Bak, a service Russell provided as a member of BANK, an artist group active in London between 1991 and 2003. BANK consisted of Simon Bedwell, Milly Thompson, and John Russell. Here is the Fax-Bak Press release from 1998:

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. He is also good at twitter.