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Robert Assaye
Robert Assaye is a writer and critic living in London.

Articles Available Online


Issy Wood, When You I Feel

Art Review

December 2017

Robert Assaye

Art Review

December 2017

At the centre of Issy Wood’s solo exhibition at Carlos/Ishikawa is a room-within-a room. The division of the gallery into two viewing spaces –...

Art

April 2017

'Learning from Athens'

Robert Assaye

Art

April 2017

The history of Documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition founded in the German city of Kassel in 1955, is...

From the start he was thrown in at the deep-end when the head keeper just handed him a pail of steaks and hustled him through the gates of the enclosure The thinking was that, since he was Jewish and not Christian, the lions would not have a taste for him Roth was dubious, but complied   The way to be was fearless but non-confrontational ‘Show them who is boss’ was the mantra Keepers before him had felt the temptation to become pally with the lions, to try and become friends with them They had paid the price So: ‘Show them who is boss’ They had filed into the lecture theatre to have a seminar right at the beginning of their terms at the zoo At the front a bushy-faced keeper had given them a brief talk on precisely this subject The talk was entitled ‘Show them who is Boss’ They had shown clips from Grizzly Man, mainly the sequences from just before Treadwell’s death The elderly keeper had stood guffawing at the back He was an ex-Kossack He was a traditionalist when it came to death The lions sat in the cages Roth had been told that the more intelligent the lion the more impossible he could be The more mangy, the more bedraggled and lazy-eyed and ghetto-looking the lion, the less you should worry Those lions weren’t intelligent enough to be mean Roth put his shoulders back every day and strode, like Clinton, into the enclosure The point was about body language They had to know that he wasn’t a man to mess with He looked out into the audience sometimes to see the anxious crowds, anxious for him Inside his head, he snorted at them Inside his head, he tossed his head What he had come to realize was that the lions were less interested in him than each other This realization came as a relief If he ever got knocked about it was usually an accident The day-to-day challenge was not to tame them; the day-to-day challenge was to get them at

Contributor

August 2014

Robert Assaye

Contributor

August 2014

Robert Assaye is a writer and critic living in London.

New Communities

Art

January 2017

Robert Assaye

Art

January 2017

DeviantArt is the world’s ‘largest online community of artists and art-lovers’ and its thirteenth largest social network. Its forty million members contribute to a...
The Land Art of Julie Brook

Art

Issue No. 4

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 of inhospitable locations, creating sculptures...

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feature

July 2011

Herat

Sam Duerden

feature

July 2011

At Kabul airport, a man I mistook for a foreigner.   A security guard, red-haired with blue eyes and...

poetry

December 2016

Of all those pasts

Will Harris

poetry

December 2016

  In Derrida’s Memoires: For Paul de Man he quotes from ‘Mnemosyne’, a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin which he...

poetry

September 2011

The Moon over Timna

Rikudah Potash

TR. Michael Casper

poetry

September 2011

In a copper house Lived the new moon, The new moon Of Timna. In a copper coat With a...

 

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