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Articles by Ed Luker
The Political Economy of the Restaurant
English food does not have a good reputation. In 1806, Grimod de La Reynière, a pioneering French food critic, wrote that “[England’s] cooking is limited to boiled chickens.” More than two hundred years later, stereotypes about the country’s food have hardly improved. Looking at the staple icons of English cuisine today — fish and chips, the Sunday roast, the full English breakfast — one might agree with Grimod’s point.
The Political Economy of the Restaurant
English food does not have a good reputation. In 1806, Grimod de La Reynière, a pioneering French food critic, wrote that "[England's] cooking is limited to boiled chickens." More than two hundred years later, stereotypes about the country's food have hardly improved. Looking at the staple icons of English cuisine today — fish and chips, the Sunday roast, the full English breakfast — one might agree with Grimod's point.
The Internet Is Driving Boomers to the Right
In the digital world, attention is king, and because clicks feed revenue, our social feeds are now full of AI-generated ragebait and misinformation. But according to a recent report in the Financial Times, we are now past peak social media. Unless you’re over the age of sixty-five. Infinite scrolling was invented by Aza Raskin, former head of user design at the internet browser Mozilla. It refers to how social media platforms are designed such that content is continuously refreshed.
Hari Kunzru’s ‘Blue Ruin’ Looks Back in Anger
During the turbulence of the COVID-19 pandemic and its cycles of isolating lockdowns, many artists and writers had to draw creative inspiration from their own memories. Hari Kunzru’s seventh novel, Blue Ruin (2024) – the third in a tricolore after White Tears (2017) and Red Pill (2019) – might be seen as one such example.
The Atrocity Is Present: Jonathan Glazer's "The Zone of Interest"
Watching The Zone of Interest (2023) is an act of endurance. The latest film by British director Jonathan Glazer depicts the lives of the commanding officer at Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their children, with most of the action set within and around their idyllic home. Viewers must face the intolerable sight of the house existing right alongside the concentration camp, with the camp’s roofs hovering above the adjoining perimeter fence.
Issue 95 - TANKtv
« Back to back issues TANK MAGAZINE | Issue 95 | BUY THIS ISSUE | EATING YOUR WORDS: a letter from the editor-in-chief, MANIFESTO: how does the stylist create meaning?, PALE FIRE: photography by Henry Gorse, styling by Lewis Munro, STROKE OF THE CANE: photography by Adam Goodison, set design by Imogen Frost, THE TALENT: London-based designers creating stories in clothes, FRANCESCA HAYWARD: photography by Ulrike Rindermann, make-up by Kay Montano using CHANEL Beauty, APARTMENT, INTERIOR, DAY:...
The Faces in the Back
The Faces in the Back Crowds of contorted nearly-human figures exist somewhere between connection and isolation; rats are chased by Lilliputian hoards round the feet of Oliver Twist in the American Midwest, a parrot sits atop a cat's head in a brown flood, and femme eskimo gangs hunt with captive male bait. Nicole Eisenman’s disorienting, vulgar scenes are heightened by contrasts between sharp yellows and blues, and murky browns and greens. Nicole Eisenman, Fishing, 2000.
Of Mycelia and Men
In Gods' Facsimiles, an exhibition drawing on the myth of Daphne being turned into a laurel tree, Nour Mobarak has formed a group of new sculptures from mycelia. But as the artist explains, it is about more than the use of an unusual material. The fungal networks have their own intelligence, each type operating in distinct and unpredictable ways. The artist has gone through a series of experiments and processes, learning how to work with her unruly collaborators.
Psychic Frictions: On Donald Moss’s “Psychoanalysis in a Plague Year” and Sharon Kivland’s “Abécédaire”
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Today's Gift, Tomorrow's Commodity
Today’s Gift is Tomorrow’s Commodity . . . is the most recent exhibition by long-term collaborators Ali Eisa and Sebastian Lloyd Rees. The two artists, who met while studying at Goldsmiths, work together as Lloyd Corporation. Drawing on their long standing interests in waste, the use of found objects, and acts of repurposing, TGITC invites viewers to contemplate objects presented ‘in storage’. All images © Lloyd Corporation 2022, courtesy the artist and Carlos/Ishikawa, London.
Fictitious Capital
Viewers of prestige television feed on intensity. With a variety of venture capital-backed streaming platforms vying for domination, the serialised urgency of shows like Euphoria and Succession is good hook and bait. But as with all addictions, there’s a lot of disappointment Harper Stern (Myha’la Herrold) in season two of Industry.
Ed Luker, Author at Live Wire
'Fuccboi' is a novel about the lengths we go to avoid thinking about our own suffering – and the harm we do to others along the way.
Philippa Snow Offers a Fresh Take on Violence in Art and Culture
The second chapter of As You Know contains a long discussion of Marina Abramović and gender. “Is it possible to earn one’s own seat at the big boy’s table, as a woman, not by laughing at your degradation, but adopting all that gung-ho, big-boy violence for oneself?” Snow asks. The question here is whether there is something distinct about being a woman artist interested in violence which Abramović’s work gives us an insight into.
The Death of the Auteur: Unpacking Werner Herzog and Michael Mann's Debut Novels
This year, Werner Herzog and Michael Mann published the results of their respective ventures into prose writing. One can only assume lockdown boredom and the limits COVID-19 placed on filmmaking precipitated their literary endeavours. Both directors chose to lay bare their career-long glorification of the masculine ideal. However, the real story here is that mastery of the camera does not necessarily translate into skilled prose.
The World of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Lapvona Is One of Meaningless Cruelty
This is Moshfegh’s fourth novel and her second work of historical fiction after the novella McGlue (2014), loosely about nineteenth century pirates. History — evoked by Moshfegh with little concern for fidelity — allows her to avoid the constraints of realism. The past, the saying goes, is another country and Moshfegh uses this new locale to indulge in the language and logic of fairy tales, as one bad turn requires another.
Vibe Check: Why Are Artists Becoming Trend Forecasters?
Illustration by Ben Mendelewicz for Elephant The emergence of the word ‘vibe’ seemed to dominate 2021. The nebulous term can seemingly be used to describe anything from the mood of a party to a subculture, a TV channel to a whole city. It can describe a person, a food, a website, or even the entire world. In an end-of-2021 essay in the New Yorker titled The Year in Vibes, Kyle Chayka likened its sudden burst of popularity to “the Strasbourg dancing plague of 1518”.
Kanye West is Warhol and We Are the Romans
American Rap is dynastic: a pantheon of stars each amassing their millions before passing opportunities onto the next contender.
Lonely Planets for a Lonely Planet
During the first lockdown of 2020, I exclusively read diaries and biography. Unable to concentrate on anything with a plot, the descriptions of the lives of others gave my imagination the freedom to move through an expanse that my body lacked. Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature, Robin Kelley’s biography of Thelonious Monk, and Billy Whitelaw’s autobiography were particular stand outs in my attempts to read myself into another space. Now, I traipse across Bermondsey. The sun is shining.
3:AM in Lockdown 54: Ed Luker -
The Man Who Shook Hands with Everyone; A Myth From the Future By Ed Luker. The year is 2183. A child sits reading from their pad, breathing through an oxygen mask. Through the window is a barren planet. The child raises its eyes from the pad and turns to its carer: ‘What’s handshaking mum?’ The mother responds, irritably: ‘It’s an old human custom where people said hello by holding each other’s hands and shaking them.’ ‘Why don’t people do that anymore?’ the child inquires.
Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry
The Utopian Secret It’s tempting to simply identify secrecy with privacy, in distinction from publicness. But the secret can also be usefully thought of as an unstable hybrid of the public and the private. Poems and artworks, publicly displayed, may be harbouring the secret in plain sight. The secret can belong solely, entirely, and definitively to the individual, or something secretive may ground a shared identity. The secret can even constitute a kind of public.
Exit Strategies: Danny Hayward’s Pragmatic Sanction
'What if our possibility is grounded in the uncoordinated?', asks Pragmatic Sanction, Danny Hayward's ambitious long poem. Among other things it undertakes a scarifying assault on the kind of 'thinking' constituted and compelled by the Government's 'points based' Work Capability Assessment system.
TANK MAGAZINE
TANK MAGAZINE | The Summer Reader 2023 | Issue 95 | BUY THIS ISSUE EATING YOUR WORDS: a letter from the editor-in-chief MANIFESTO: how does the stylist create meaning?
TANK MAGAZINE
Issue 16 | Issue 95 | BUY THIS ISSUE fronting EATING YOUR WORDS: a letter from the editor-in-chief CHANEL BEAUTY: photography by Ulrike Rindermann, make-up by Kay Montano using CHANEL Beauty APARTMENT, INTERIOR, DAY: photography by Josh David Payne, styling by Megan Mandeville MANIFESTO: Caroline Issa is fashion director at TANK, Sohrab Golsorkhi-Ainslie is creative director PALE FIRE: photography by Henry Gorse, styling by Lewis Munro STROKE OF THE CANE: photography by Adam Goodison, set...
TANK MAGAZINE
TANK MAGAZINE | The Summer Reader 2023 | Issue 95 | BUY THIS ISSUE EATING YOUR WORDS: a letter from the editor-in-chief MANIFESTO: how does the stylist create meaning?
TANK MAGAZINE
YOU'VE HIT THE WALL. YOU'VE READ YOUR LAST COMPLIMENTARY ARTICLE. More text here More text here Subscribe Later, I promise!
TANK MAGAZINE
TANK MAGAZINE | The Summer Reader 2023 | Issue 95 | BUY THIS ISSUE EATING YOUR WORDS: a letter from the editor-in-chief MANIFESTO: how does the stylist create meaning?
TANK MAGAZINE
YOU'VE HIT THE WALL. YOU'VE READ YOUR LAST COMPLIMENTARY ARTICLE. More text here More text here Subscribe Later, I promise!
TANK MAGAZINE
YOU'VE HIT THE WALL. YOU'VE READ YOUR LAST COMPLIMENTARY ARTICLE. More text here More text here Subscribe Later, I promise!
TANK MAGAZINE
YOU'VE HIT THE WALL. YOU'VE READ YOUR LAST COMPLIMENTARY ARTICLE. More text here More text here Subscribe Later, I promise!
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