Pearls that were his Eyes: Molly Nesbit, Gabriel Orozco and Democritus

It is a Sunday like any other…

and to paraphrase John Cage quoted in Molly Nesbit’s essay ‘The Tempest’ on Grabriel Orozco, from her recent book Midnight: The Tempest Essays (p. 158)…

Sunday is a day, as much for art as it is for life, for people to keep on washing dishes, to keep on brushing their teeth, to keep on getting sleepy…

for Molly Nesbit to keep on writing art history and for Gabriel Orozco to keep on making it…

But somewhere, in another book of Sundays, we find Borges reminding us that once in an ancient garden, Democritus the atomist, tried to wrench out his eyeballs so as not to be distracted by the outside world (p. 167)…

How is that for ‘going Greek’?!

[My thanks to Bill Horrigan for sending Nesbit’s book my way, via David Velasco and Bruce Hainley’s Artforum piece “Into the Storm”, so that I could read ‘The Tempest’ on this Sunday of ‘Minus Plato Today’ and work towards a Minus Plato book to come for some future Sundays]

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