JAMIE BRITTON recommends that we all buy at least two copies of a remarkable book of poems
Counterfactual correction
MICHAEL LANDY'S razor-sharp exhibition Welcome to Essex exposes the reactionary stereotypes associated with the county since the advent of Thatcherism, says Michal Boncza
SHATTERING STEREOTYPES: (L to R) Wall panel; Cut-out Essex Man (after Collet); Dagenham Idol, 2,250BC
The bard joins the Carnival Against Fascism, which summer fun sends him down Memory Lane
FIONA O’CONNOR is bowled over by a stunning Welsh language drama
MARIA DUARTE and MICHAL BONCZA review Virginia Woolf’s Night & Day, Familiar Touch, Nino, and Toy Story 5
MATTHEW HAWKINS explores the initiatives proposed by HEALING ARTS SCOTLAND
ALEX HALL welcomes an analysis of how modern capitalism is deeply intertwined with emotions, and their manipulation
Welcome to Essex
Firstsite Gallery, Colchester
ALTHOUGH associated with the emergence of the Young British Artists in the 1990s, best-known by the work of Tracy Emin or Damien Hirst, Michael Landy has always, much like Rachel Whiteread, ploughed a lonely furrow.
Perhaps of all his contemporaries he is the closest to a definition of a modern political artist who explores social issues, consumerism and the commodification of human beings in a world dictated to by capitalist corporations and their interests.
In Closing Down Sale (1992) Landy chillingly foresaw, 30 years ahead of his time, the haplessness of declining high streets while in Scrapheap Services (1995) he went a step further by drawing attention to the waste of human capital in a cost-cutting drive to maximise profit. That sounds all too familiar, with zero-hours contracts the new norm.
Similar stories
SIMON PARSONS applauds an artist who rescues and rehumanises stories of women, the victims of violence, from a feminist perspective
The creative imagination is a weapon against barbarism, writes KENNY COYLE, who is a keynote speaker at the Manifesto Press conference, Art in the Age of Degenerative Capitalism, tomorrow at the Marx Memorial Library & Workers School in London
ANDY HEDGECOCK relishes an exuberant blend of emotion and analysis that captures the politics and contrarian nature of the French composer
BLANE SAVAGE recommends the display of nine previously unseen works by the Glaswegian artist, novelist and playwright