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Helen Charman
Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history of motherhood — is forthcoming from Allen Lane in 2024. She teaches in the English Studies department at Durham University.

Articles Available Online


Attachment Barbies: On Watching Grey’s Anatomy

Essay

March 2023

Helen Charman

Essay

March 2023

In August 2022, ABC announced that Ellen Pompeo, currently the highest-paid actress on American network television, was leaving Grey’s Anatomy, the show on which...

Book Review

May 2021

HOLDING THE ROOM: ON HOLLY PESTER’S ‘COMIC TIMING’

Helen Charman

Book Review

May 2021

The last poem in Holly Pester’s first collection COMIC TIMING (Granta, 2021) is called ‘Villette’; it shares its title...

During the 1990s, Cady Noland earned a reputation for making sculptural assemblages that toy with iconic symbols of Americana Her CV lists numerous prestigious exhibitions – the 1991 Whitney Biennial and documenta IX among them – but in 2001, Noland withdrew from public life Although she rarely shows new work, her name often appears in the context of auction houses She has made headlines for her work’s record-setting prices, but more often, she has hit the news owing to litigation Indeed, Noland’s numerous attempts to prevent the sale of her works, arguing they are too damaged, has been interpreted by some as an attempt to destroy her own market The fact that the artist’s first exhibition in nearly a decade is appearing outside America at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt is the latest chapter in a career that seems to rebuke the art world’s conventions at every step   With the entirety of MMK’s main building devoted to the show, Noland’s retrospective has the feel of a triumphant return The vast majority of sculptures on view were made between 1987 and 1994, at the height of her career During that time, she stuck to a narrow set of sculptural strategies, using pipes, brackets, or metal baskets as structures on which to arrange collections of disparate American objects In Deep Social Space (1989), for example, the aftermath of a barbeque is arranged around metallic scaffolding: beer cans, an American flag, upturned grills, a large container emblazoned with ‘Marlboro’   In one of her few published texts, Towards a Metalanguage of Evil (1987), Noland elucidates her cataloguing of American material culture She argues that society functions as a machine-like game, or ‘hero system’, with the figure of the psychopath as the player par excellence Noland analyses various pieces of popular-culture, from Hitchcock films to self-help books, to argue that America’s obsession with individualist success is transforming its citizens into dangerously manipulative subjects devoid of empathy For her, everyone from the ambitious artist to market research groups fall under this umbrella   Over the years, Noland has developed a formalist language that exposes America’s societal

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history...

Essay

May 2020

Where do I put myself, if public life’s destroyed? On reading Denise Riley

Helen Charman

Essay

May 2020

How do you read someone who doesn’t always want to be read? This is a question I used to...

Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’

Book Review

October 2018

Helen Charman

Book Review

October 2018

Reading Sally Rooney’s second novel Normal People is a compulsive experience. After the navy blue Faber & Faber proofs were sent out in early...
Rendering intimacy impossible, deploy lifeboats (mark yourself safe) Not listening as such, more waiting to speak, above all mark yourself, it’s so important to be safe Carry on, they demand, we’re not reeling / we are reeling Is this the place for a fountain reference? Probably ‘What first attracted you to your wife, sir?’ ‘Her delicacy / her ankles / her hatred of the Tories’                  Alive twice over but that’s a whole life gone too                you know I’m sorry, he holds his hands up, I’m                sorry, he backs away: my conscience couldn’t                keep company with your body I say, your body?                it just made me think: it’s only a nine month stay   The next time you lay a hand on me, I’ll make a perfect gleaming dive into the Thames Aren’t you glad / to be here? I am
Electioneering

Prize Entry

November 2017

Helen Charman


READ NEXT

Interview

October 2014

Interview with Otobong Nkanga

Louisa Elderton

Interview

October 2014

Some things are meant to be lost. You can’t collect emotions. As the artist Otobong Nkanga tells me this,...

poetry

February 2016

Maurice Echegaray

Lina Wolff

TR. Frank Perry

poetry

February 2016

It was when we were living near the southbound exit. Maurice Echegaray had his company office on our staircase...

Art

Issue No. 4

The Land Art of Julie Brook

Robert Assaye

Art

Issue No. 4

Julie Brook works with the land. Over the past twenty years she has lived and worked in a succession...

 

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