All posts tagged: Barlow

Phyllida Barlow: Disruptor review – sexy latex and gobs of gum as a stately home gets trashed | Art

Phyllida Barlow: Disruptor review – sexy latex and gobs of gum as a stately home gets trashed | Art

Wolterton Hall is folded so deeply into the countryside of the Bure Valley that you can’t even see the grand Palladian mansion when you enter the gates to the estate. This was once one of the four power houses of Norfolk, built by Thomas Ripley for Horatio Walpole. Inside, Wolterton is dripping in 18th-century treasures, furniture, then-fashionable Belgian tapestries, fusty old portraits of important types – but now also, knobbly bodily things, strange almost familiar shapes stuck to walls and chucked down the stairs, as if someone– namely Phyllida Barlow – had come in and trashed the place. It’s a difficult thing to know what to do with these former country stately homes. Many have adopted a contemporary art programme as a way of challenging their history and bringing in new visitors. Simon Oldfield – Wolterton’s artistic director, brought in by the new owners, the Ellis family, two years ago – has done more than that. He has reinvented the space, making room for new ideas to take over. There’s no better artist for that …

John Perry Barlow, JFK Jr., and a Night of Grief I Can’t Forget

John Perry Barlow, JFK Jr., and a Night of Grief I Can’t Forget

Watching the wildly popular television series Love Story took me back to a strange week in my past. One day in April 1994, I was working in a studio apartment that I used as an office. I split the cost with Cynthia Horner, a psychiatrist who’d recently moved out to live with her boyfriend, the songwriter and cyberspace philosopher John Perry Barlow, who was a friend of mine. Late in the afternoon my wife called me with the shocking news that Cynthia, just shy of her 30th birthday, was dead. I called Barlow, who told me that Cymthia had passed away suddenly on a plane. Both of them had suffered from a bad flu the previous week, and the virus had been silently attacking her heart. I dropped everything and headed to Barlow’s place. For the next six hours, Barlow and I cried, drank, and head-banged in the wake of the inexplicable, along with another friend. That friend was no stranger to tragedy. He was John F. Kennedy Jr. Barlow, who died in 2018 at …