opposition from architecturally conservative locals – came 1–3 Willow Road, where he lived to the end of his life. The house, which, as Harwood and Powers observe, is a ‘reinterpretation of the Georgian terraced house, taking advantage of the spanning capacity of reinforced concrete’ (pp.34–35), was an extraordinary architectural addition to Hampstead.
Goldfinger’s career took off after the Second World War. As well as working for various private clients, among them the developer Arnold Lee, for whom he designed Alexander Fleming House (1960–66), a large office complex at the Elephant and Castle interchange, south London, and the Hille furniture factory, Watford (1962). He also worked for the LCC and GLC, beginning with primary schools in Hammersmith (1951) and Putney (1952), followed by a secondary one in Hackney (1967). It was in the late 1960s and early 1970s that Balfron Tower and its taller sibling Trellick Tower (Fig.5), the two concrete housing schemes in London for which Goldfinger is perhaps best known, were built. These two strikingly sculptural blocks with separate service towers – linked every third floor to the main blocks and topped by boiler houses – are the focal points of their respective estates. Their unusual profiles set them apart from the most of other tall blocks. It is not surprising, therefore, that Goldfinger’s reputation is based largely on his public housing, ‘for nowhere are to be found such distinctive and well-planned tower blocks where every space is conceived with imagination and foresight’ (p.127).
According to the figures given in the book, the tenure in Trellick Tower remains eighty per cent social renters and eighteen per cent leaseholders. By contrast, the developers of Balfron Tower did not sell a single flat and were forced to turn it into a rental property, which is what it remains. There is no doubt what situation Goldfinger, who was known for having Marxist sympathies, would have preferred. Harwood and Powers are restrained in their commentary on Balfron Tower, but the cover of the book offers perhaps the harshest criticism of the devastating effects of deliberate gentrification: it shows the pre-refurbishment building, in all its imperfect glory.
1 Quoted in ‘C20 Society’s fears are confirmed as the Balfron Tower’s new look is unveiled’, C20 Society e-newsletter (March 2019), available at c20society.org.uk/news/c20-societys-fears-areconfirmed-as-the-balfron-towers-new-look-isunveiled, accessed 28th July 2025.
Mary Kelly’s Concentric Pedagogy: Selected Writings
Edited by Juli Carson. 336 pp. incl. 100 col. ills. (Bloomsbury, London, 2024), £24.99. ISBN 978–1–350–35243–8.
by elisabetta garletti
‘Are you taking the “phallocentric” crit or the “concentric” crit?’ (p.1). This wry question circulated among students at the California Institute of the Arts, Santa Clarita (CalArts), in the 1980s. It referred to the distinct approaches to critiques (crits) taken by two of their lecturers: Michael Asher (1943–2012) led sessions that placed the artist at the centre of an intense interrogation process; those led by Mary Kelly (b.1941) radically reconfigured this dynamic. In Kelly’s crits, students sat in a circle with the artist positioned among them as a silent observer. Her method assumed the work of art as a visual proposition requiring no further verbal elaboration from its maker. Drawing on semiotics, psychoanalysis and such feminist practices as consciousnessraising, Kelly’s approach shifted authority away from the artist, emphasising the viewer’s phenomenological experience and collective decoding to resist interpretive projection.
Kelly’s concentric pedagogy is the subject of the book under review, edited by Juli Carson and published as part of Bloomsbury’s New Encounters: Arts, Culture, Concepts series, edited by Griselda Pollock. The series foregrounds an understanding of ‘research as encounter’ (p.xvi; emphasis in original) to critically reflect on the growing interconnectedness of disciplinary discourses in the post-1968 cultural landscape. Kelly’s career as an artist, theorist and educator – shaped by the political activism of the period as well as her involvement in the women’s liberation movement – is a testament to the era’s transdisciplinary and revolutionary ethos. Carson’s documentation of Kelly’s practice-based pedagogy is both overdue and timely, as practice-based programmes and research-led artistic methods are gaining increasing momentum.1
The volume assembles essays, dialogues and previously unpublished archival material, including course schedules, handwritten notes, classroom photographs, posters and symposia readers. These document Kelly’s approach, which she developed between 1980 and 2017 at such institutions as CalArts, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Independent Study Program (ISP) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Among the book’s strengths are its
dialogic components, such as conversations between Kelly, her students and colleagues. They vividly capture the dynamic, nonprescriptive, collective spirit of Kelly’s teaching, illustrating the enduring influence of her methods on a transgenerational network of artists and educators, who continue to build on her pedagogical framework.
Carson adopts a deliberately restrained editorial stance, aligning with the open-endedness of Kelly’s methods. Her introduction concisely outlines three foundational concepts of Kelly’s teaching: the method, the project and the field. These also lend the book its tripartite structure. Beyond this scaffolding, Carson prioritises the reader’s direct engagement with Kelly’s writings, archival materials and testimonies, immersing them in the immediacy of her teaching style. This mirrors the phenomenological emphasis of Kelly’s crits, in which meaning emerged through dialogue and interaction with the primary source rather than through prescriptive models of interpretation. These sections offer readers a vivid sense of the collaborative, fluid thinking Kelly fostered in her classroom.
However, Carson’s approach has limitations in places. Some of the material lacks sufficient contextualisation, hindering the reader’s appreciation of its full significance. This issue is particularly evident in the chapter titled ‘Formations in the studio’, which features illustrations of MFA thesis projects by Kelly’s students. These include stills from moving image works, performances and installations, such as the two-channel projection Here and elsewhere (2002) by Kerry Tribe (b.1973), and an installation by Every Ocean Hughes (formerly known as Emily Roysdon; b.1977) that combines issues of the feminist genderqueer journal LTTR with her photographic project Strategic Form (2001–06). Although the author’s decision to prioritise the immediacy of the reader’s encounter with the works of art aligns with Kelly’s pedagogical
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ethos, it fails to convey the complexity of these projects. This raises broader questions about how to frame project-based practices in print, given that their potency tends to be rooted in live exhibition contexts.
The book’s structure progresses from specific pedagogical techniques to broader political and discursive frameworks. The first section, ‘The Method’, examines Kelly’s practice of ‘ethical observation’ during group crits. These begin by examining the audience’s somatic and perceptual responses to the work’s smallest visual element, which are then considered in relation to disciplinary and institutional settings, before concluding with situational agreements on meaning. This emphasis on contingency and perceptual immediacy challenges contemporary interpretive tendencies, whereby overpowering curatorial ideas often prevent unmediated encounters with works of art.
The second section, ‘The Project’, further explores the relationship between artistic practice and politics. Drawing on Sigmund Freud’s notion of the ‘primal scene’, Kelly frames the project as an artist’s longterm engagement with the consequences of a formative political and personal event. This concept locates the artist as a witness of their own sociopolitical reality while providing a framework for understanding transgenerational political history. By acknowledging how contemporary politics inherits the aspirations and failures of previous generations, Kelly’s approach challenges dominant progressive models that historicise political movements through narratives of generational antagonism.
This is further emphasised in the final section of the volume, ‘The Method and Project in the Field’, which examines ‘On the passage of a few people through a rather brief period of time’, an online conversation hosted by Kelly at Tate Modern, London, in 2015. Featuring contributions from a network of students and collaborators, this polyphonic collection of responses reflects on the legacy of 1968, a pivotal historical moment that gave rise to transformative social movements and played a formative role in shaping Kelly’s pedagogical approach. The testimonies are candid and capture the political utopianism of an era in which art and theory met and drove social change. Amid predominantly positive recollections and responses to the period, Michelle Dizon’s contribution stands out as a particularly thoughtful reflection on the shortcomings of legacy as a potentially colonial concept, advocating
for a decolonial feminist relationship to political and theoretical traditions – one that emphasises the ‘plural, heterogenous and often irreconcilable legacies that we inhabit’ (p.256).
Carson’s volume succeeds in capturing the enduring relevance of Kelly’s pedagogy while situating it attentively within its historical context. Despite occasional editorial gaps, the book offers an immersive encounter with Kelly’s approach, inviting readers to engage with her revolutionary teaching methods, while also revealing their potential to reshape publishing conventions. Rather than presenting the material in a dogmatic or prescriptive manner, the book instead encourages a more open-ended, exploratory mode of engagement with the written and visual records left by Kelly.
Kelly’s writings remain relevant today, particularly in their examination of the relationship between art, theory and grassroots politics. Furthermore, as academia becomes more corporatised and knowledge production accelerates to meet the demands of capitalism, this volume serves as a reminder that, when slowed down to allow for deep engagement and self-reflection, pedagogy can be a space where theory, artistic practice and lived experience converge to drive societal change.
1 In a series of talks the visual culture scholar Irit Rogoff has spoken of a ‘research turn’ in contemporary art and curating, for example, ‘Irit Rogoff: becoming research’, De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam (22nd February 2019), available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3AcgQoGaSU, accessed 22nd July 2025; ‘Keynote: Irit Rogoff (architectures of education)’, Nottingham Contemporary (10th December 2019), available at www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/record/ keynote-irit-rogoff, accessed 22nd July 2025; and ‘Irit Rogoff: becoming research’, Association for Art History 48th Annual Conference (6th April 2022).
Short reviews
L’Arsenal au fil des siècles: De l’hôtel du grand maître de l’Artillerie à la bibliothèque de l’Arsenal Edited by Oliver Bosc and Sophie Guérinot. 256 pp. incl. 253 col. ills. (Bibliothèque nationale de France and Le Passage, Paris, 2024), €49. ISBN 978–2–84742–522–2.
by karl-georg pfändtner
This book is the first study of the history of the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris. It traces the building’s transformation over five centuries, from a royal artillery factory to a department
of the Bibliothèque nationale de France that houses over one million items including 150,000 works predating 1880, when legal deposit was introduced. Twenty-two authors have contributed to the essays. The first is by Sophie Guérinot, who begins in 1547, when Henri II appropriated two granges in the east of Paris to stock gunpowder. She provides an overview of the Arsenal’s early functions, highlighting its role in military production, including the casting of monumental bronze equestrian statues of Louis XIV (1699) and Louis XV (1758). Marianne CojannotLe Blanc and Étienne Faisant discuss the ‘golden age’ of the Arsenal, when, under François I (1494–1547), the officer in charge of the Arsenal became the grand maître de l’artillerie, responsible for the artillery in the whole kingdom. Under Maximilien de Béthune, baron de Rosny, later the duc de Sully (1560–1641), the site was expanded with grand galleries and lavish interiors, reflecting royal power. Artistic contributions from renowned painters and sculptors further enriched the building, notably the apartments of the maréchale de La Meilleraye, Marie de Cossé-Brissac, decorated by Charles Poerson, a student of Simon Vouet, in the 1640s.
Jérémy Chaponneau and Claire Lesage examine the Arsenal’s evolution into a library, initiated by Marc Antoine René de Voyer d’Argenson, marquis de Paulmy (1722–87). A passionate bibliophile, he amassed a vast collection. By 1784, his library was the second largest in Paris. After being denied the post of royal librarian – despite having offered his library to the king in exchange for the post – he sold his collection to the comte d’Artois, the king’s brother, thus securing its preservation. His acquisitions included medieval illuminated manuscripts and rare printed works, some of which remain highlights of the Arsenal’s collection. During the French Revolution, the state confiscated the library, which the comte d’Artois had returned to the Arsenal in 1789. Aware that the books would have to be sold below their value at that time, the Commission des monuments did not sell the collection. Later, the library flourished under the direction of Charles Nodier (1780–1844), whose literary salon attracted figures such as Victor Hugo, Eugène Delacroix and Franz Liszt, making it a cultural hub of Romanticism.
Subsequent chapters explore the library’s architectural transformations and the changes to its functions from the late nineteenth century to the present, including modern renovations and its integration into the Bibliothèque nationale de France