Gabriel Coxhead
“Intellectual Barbarians: The Kibbo Kift Kindred”
by Gabriel Coxhead
The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift serves as one of the more fascinating minor episodes in 20th-century British history. Part of the interwar ferment of experimental lifestyles and youth movements, the Kindred was founded in 1920 as a camping and woodcraft organization, whose members—male and female, young and old—loosely styled themselves as a romantic cross between Native American shamans and back-to-nature medievalists (the name Kibbo Kift, meaning “proof of strength,” comes from an archaic English dialect). .. Read more
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In Ryan Gander’s installation Fieldwork (2015), viewers sat in a chair facing a square window in an interior gallery wall, through which a procession of objects on minimalist white plinths could be seen scrolling endlessly past by way of an automated conveyor system. The full cycle, lasting about half an hour, consisted of 32 displays of both found and fabricated objects... Read more
Virtually all of Larry Johnson’s works are photographs. And while that might be well known in the U.S., where he’s relatively established, it probably came as something of a revelation for audiences in London, where his work is seen more often in reproduction than in the flesh... Read more
Questions concerning eccentricity swirled about in Matt Stokes’s fascinating installation at Matt’s Gallery, Madman in a Lifeboat (2015), the central work in which was a video projection. .. Read more
