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Rye Dag Holmboe
Rye Dag Holmboe is a writer and PhD candidate in History of Art at University College, London. He has recently co-authored and co-edited the book JocJonJosch: Hand in Foot, published by the Sion Art Museum, Switzerland (2013). He has recently edited Jolene, an artist's book which brings together the works of the poet Rachael Allen and the photographer Guy Gormley, which will be published later this year. His writings have appeared in The White Review, Art Licks and in academic journals.

Articles Available Online


Art and its Functions: Recent Work by Luke Hart

Art

June 2016

Rye Dag Holmboe

Art

June 2016

Luke Hart’s Wall, recently on display at London’s William Benington Gallery, is a single, large-scale sculpture composed of a series of steel tubes held...

Art

February 2015

Filthy Lucre

Rye Dag Holmboe

Art

February 2015

White silhouettes sway against softly gradated backgrounds: blues, purples, yellows and pinks. The painted palm trees are tacky and...

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching A lot Ariana Grande is dressed in hot pink—tight cropped vest and high waisted trousers She is on her knees, leaning backwards, in a tiny room with white walls and a little curtain Maybe it’s a doll’s house, maybe it’s a closet, maybe it’s a cage Her trademark oversized ponytail, which seems to have been designed for the purpose of making her appear even smaller than she already is (in the world of Ariana worship, smallness is akin to godliness), splits at the top knot and falls in two directions Half over her breast, half drawing a line south With the index finger of her right hand she flicks a miniature chandelier that is dangling from the ceiling, making it swing lightly back and forth GIFs are the internet’s present to erotics The best ones, like this one, exist in a seamless loop, enabling the viewer to remain suspended indefinitely in a moment of aesthetic bliss Flick, flick, goes Ariana, for a sweet eternity   I’m aware that this is a dirty crush (One shared by a lot of the world, admittedly, but since when did populism ever make anything cleaner) My Ariana-lust is treated by certain friends with the sort of stretched tolerance usually reserved for the bad politics of elderly relatives Which is another way of saying I just about get away with coveting a mirage of hyper-femme youth, sex, and tininess, because in the political and pansexual new dawn of queerness, at age 32 I seem to have become the equivalent of Stonehenge: a heritage lesbian artefact to be handled with curiosity and compassion I could try to intellectualise my love of the flicking GIF, by claiming it in the lineage of queering I could even try explaining the chandelier in relation to Roland Barthes’s ‘punctum’, which has always seemed to me an unfortunately dry metaphor for the clitoris, anyway: that small locus of power, the magnetic point of attention around which photographs, like certain bodies, are organised But fuck

Contributor

August 2014

Rye Dag Holmboe

Contributor

August 2014

Rye Dag Holmboe is a writer and PhD candidate in History of Art at University College, London. He has...

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October 2012

Pressed Up Against the Immediate

Rye Dag Holmboe

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October 2012

The author Philip Pullman recently criticised the overuse of the present tense in contemporary literature, a criticism he stretched...

Existere: Documenting Performance Art

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September 2012

David Gothard

Jo Melvin

John James

Rye Dag Holmboe

feature

September 2012

The following conversation was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in May 2012. The event took place almost a year after a...
Gabriel Orozco: Cosmic Matter and Other Leftovers

Art

March 2011

Rye Dag Holmboe

Art

March 2011

‘To live,’ writes Walter Benjamin, ‘means to leave traces’. As one might expect, Benjamin’s observation is not without a certain melancholy. Traces are lost...

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Interview

Issue No. 1

Interview with Tim Walker

Karl Smith

Interview

Issue No. 1

‘I’m not so motivated by fashion and brands,’ explains Tim Walker – one of the world’s leading fashion photographers....

Art

May 2011

Twelve Installations

Lawrence Lek

Art

May 2011

These installations express the transience of our sensory world, the impermanence of form, and the artificiality of our environment....

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Issue No. 9

Leaving Theories Behind

Enrique Vila-Matas

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Issue No. 9

I. I went to Lyon because an organisation called Villa Fondebrider invited me to give a talk on the relationship...

 

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