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Philippa Snow
Philippa Snow is a critic and essayist. Her work has appeared in publications including ArtforumThe Los Angeles Review of BooksArtReviewFriezeVogueThe NationThe New Statesman, and The New Republic. Her first book, Which As You Know Means Violence, is out now with Repeater, and she is currently working on an essay collection about famous women.  

Articles Available Online


You Don’t Think God Is Sexy?

Film Review

January 2023

Philippa Snow

Film Review

January 2023

On the most literal level, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s elliptical, spiritual-cum-sensual movie Teorema (1968) is about an entire family being driven to distraction by their...

Essay

Issue No. 31

It's Terrible The Things I Have To Do To Be Me

Philippa Snow

Essay

Issue No. 31

Here was a woman who had modelled her life so closely on Marilyn Monroe’s that doing so eventually helped...

The ‘beautiful disorder’ of the Forbidden City and the Yuanmingyuan (Garden of Perfection and Light) was first noted by the Jesuit painter Jean Denis Attiret in his 1749 account of Chinese architecture Confessing that ‘since my residence in China, my eyes and taste are grown a little Chinese’, the missionary admired the pleasure gardens’ ability to provoke violently opposing sensations in the viewer: the calm of beauty and the energy of chaos It was an observation that would influence the design of ornamental English gardens such as that which now hosts an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art at CASS Sculpture Foundation, in leafy Sussex   Landscape aesthetics seem like an oddly anachronistic starting point for a survey of emerging art from China: deploying an Old World commentary on the Oriental garden that salutes its follies and theatrical framings of nature, Attiret’s report positioned the garden as microcosm for the society on which he was, obliquely, reporting More pertinent, perhaps, is the relationship between the garden and expressions of heroic nationalism implied by his appraisal of the Emperor’s palace and pleasure gardens To make outdoor public sculpture is to monumentalise, or to comment on monumentalism We associate the form with memorials to war, heroic individuals, or national leadership   Much of the work on show at CASS addresses this tendency Song Ta, an artist from the factory city of Guangzhou in southern China, has transported a vast bust of Mao to the English woodlands It shows a boyish leader with windswept hair and pouting lips, a version of a sculpture which is widely found in China but looks strange to those of us familiar only with Mao’s later portraits (such as that appropriated for Warhol’s screenprinted Mao, 1972) Ta has painted the surrounding trees stone grey to match the colour of his Mao, creating an antic photo opportunity for onlookers Likewise, sisters Cao Fei (interviewed in the June 2016 online issue of The White Review) and Cao Dan reflect upon the history of monumental sculpture in two video works about their father, the social realist sculptor Cao Chong’en His bronze statues of

Contributor

November 2018

Philippa Snow

Contributor

November 2018

Philippa Snow is a critic and essayist. Her work has appeared in publications including Artforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtReview, Frieze, Vogue, The...

Essay

January 2021

An Uneasy Girl

Philippa Snow

Essay

January 2021

Even before Lucie arrives holding a shotgun, we know that the perfect family in this huge suburban house are...

Brilliant Muscles

Essay

December 2019

Philippa Snow

Essay

December 2019

‘Lindsay Lohan’s new film,’ I told almost everyone I spoke to for about two months earlier this year, ‘is about werewolf detectives.’ Nobody seemed...
Evita Vasiljeva, POSTCRETE

Art Review

February 2019

Philippa Snow

Art Review

February 2019

Lower.Green is situated in the unlikely surroundings of a near-dead mall in Norwich. It is not just any mall, but Anglia Square Shopping Centre:...
Gabriele Beveridge, Live Dead World

Art Review

November 2018

Philippa Snow

Art Review

November 2018

Several months ago, I went to a salon so small and so identikit that I do not recall the name, and against every sane...

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Prize Entry

April 2015

Smote, or ...

Eley Williams

Prize Entry

April 2015

To kiss you should not involve such fear of imprecision. I shouldn’t mind about the gallery attendant. He is...

fiction

Issue No. 9

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author James Murphy's Notes on Nicola Morelli Berengo

Francesco Pacifico

TR. Livia Franchini

fiction

Issue No. 9

Biography | Cattolicissimo trio composed of mother father beloved son. God, why doesn’t the English language have an equivalent...

poetry

September 2011

First Blimp

Joshua Trotter

poetry

September 2011

Removing colour from my thoughts, I formed a winter ball. I threw it. The dead were uncounted. There was...

 

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