Australian artist Gordon Bennett (1955-2014) ends his polemic text ‘The Manifest Toe’ (which I am reading in the brilliant book on the artist Gordon Bennett: Be Polite published by Sternberg Press) by reflecting on the idea of the self as part of the artist’s investigation into his own Aboriginal heritage: The self remains relative, and […]
The powers of photography have in effect de-Platonized our understanding of reality, making it less and less plausible to reflect upon our experience according to the distinction between images and things, between copies and originals. It suited Plato’s derogatory attitude toward images to liken them to shadows—transitory, minimally informative, immaterial, impotent co-presences of the real […]
A few weeks ago my friend and OSU colleague Erica Levin told me about Juan Downey’s 1973 video installation Plato Now, which was re-staged in 2012 during the inaugural program at the Tanks in the Tate Modern. The Chilean artist had moved to New York in 1969 and first performed this work at Circuit: A […]
You may have noticed that the last few days’ posts have been focused on contemporary ‘conceptual’ dance. The reason for this is rather personal and somewhat perverse. On Thursday morning I bent down to pick up a pillow from the floor while making the bed and suddenly experienced a sharp pain to my lower back, […]
Today is Frederic Tuten’s 80th birthday and so I want to use this post to celebrate my friend and the brilliance of his fiction. Tuten’s work reflects the beauty of life and art, like sunlight on a rippling surface, with a humanism and pathos that we need in these dark times. Only Tuten could have […]
While I am not there to see them for myself, I am proud to report that George Segal’s sculpture Circus Acrobats (1988) have now been installed in the Ohio Union at Ohio State University. Thanks to this generous gift to the university from The George and Helen Segal Foundation, generations of OSU students can now […]
And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows? Yes, he said. And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them? Very true. And suppose further that the […]
The exhibition Donald Lokuta: Plato’s Cave-Segal’s Studio ended yesterday and so I wanted to use this post to give those of you who were not able to see it in person a glimpse of what it looked like. Below are the wonderful photographs of Melissa Tomich which she took during her and Donald’s visit for […]
In the calm after an exciting week of events at the Urban Arts Space as part of Donald Lokuta: Plato’s Cave-Segal’s Studio, you can reflect on the broader issues at stake in the exhibition by turning to page 242 of the September Issue of Artforum Magazine. There you will come across an ad for the […]