While viewers typically encounter artworks in their entirety from a “safe” distance (as determined by museum or gallery convention), the book format allows for an immediate engagement, and invites the reader to contemplate individual threads of paper, to trace incidental signs and symbols, to decipher remnants of type, or to consider the compositional quality […]
Minus Plato has a mission for you, if you choose to accept it. As you may have noticed, the last few posts have been getting closer and closer to discussing the book Medea by the Soundwalk Collective. I had seen the book many years ago in the Wexner Center Store and on discovering that the […]
A while ago, when researching the use of Latin by contemporary artists, I came across three works that used the dummy Latin, design proxy text known as Lorem ipsum. It is a repeating section of Latin that was been taken from Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum. It begins: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur […]
Paris-based Vier5 are one of the four design studios participating with documenta 14 (the four others are Ludovic Balland, Laurenz Brunner & Julia Born, and Mevis & van Deursen). Their work could be found across Athens, from the iconic floor-text marble slabs to the Map Booklet insert. My first encounter with their distinctive font was on […]
Spinal Discipline is the name of Irena Haiduk’s performance at documenta 14 in which thirteen members of the “Army of Beautiful Women” walk while balancing the surrogate Proust book Seductive Exacting Realism on their heads. This use of a book as a tool for correct posture and grace is accompanied by other seemingly superficial features […]
If you open the book, which you saw in yesterday’s post (and you can see here if you missed it) balancing on people’s head in Athens (in a photograph and as a performance), as part of a darkened installation in Kassel (along with its 12 sisters), and which I held in my hand in the […]
Homer’s Margites, which is deplorably lost, bore, says Aristotle, the same analogy to comedy, as his Odyssey and Iliad to tragedy. The gods had taught him neither to dig nor to plough, nor any other skill; he failed in every craft – Aristotle, Nic. Eth. vi. 7, 1141:
After the horrific actions at the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virgina yesterday and the president’s complicit equivocal response, today I turn to William Pope. L for words, images and objects of wisdom and resistance. I hope to write another time about his amazing Whispering Campaign, spread across Athens and Kassel (below is a shaky […]
