Dear Diosa and Magistra,

We have been thinking about our conversations today and wanted to write to you both directly (well, as directly as a blog post written by a one-person-collective to the sometime personas of an artist and a classicist can be!). As this phase of Minus Plato (“Minus Plato Return, Reform, Refresh”) comes to a close and the first draft of No Philosopher Kings creeps towards completion, speaking with you both during this process, both together as part of our Inner Time of Lawlessness group and separately in the Wexner Center and the Classics Department, culminated in two vital issues and lessons stemming from our conversations today:

We need to keep in mind what this project actually does and for whom, especially when faced with the way the art world and its institutions privilege certain artists and exclude others, specifically based on cliques and prestige (e.g. certain MFA programs). Listen to, acknowledge and support the voices of the excluded.
We must be aware of the different manifestations of our claiming a collective voice, a ‘we’, particularly when the academic discipline of Classics lays down the law as to its own authorizing voice especially about claims they cannot prove. Be willing to admit the limits of what we can know.

Since it was you who made us dwell on these issues and lessons (among others), most acutely at this present juncture, but also over the course of earlier phases of the development of No Philosopher King, we want to take the opportunity to invite you to join us and to add your voices to our book project. While our Chapter 10 is devoted to the different types of collaborations we embarked on throughout the “Minus Plato Today” phase, to end this second phase (“Minus Plato Return, Reform, Refresh”) we want to extend it further with a direct invitation to you both to work with us. Here is what we propose:

We will send you the draft of the book on Saturday (at the same time as we send it to our editor, Holly Crawford, at AC Institute, and sair goetz, who is working with us on the selection of images).
When you have time, please read over the draft, intervening in the narrative at any moments that you want. (We don’t expect you to do the work of editing or changing the narrative – just annotate it, probe it, question it, as you have done us over the past year). Perhaps you can meet with each other to share notes and ideas?
Send us your annotated versions of the text, ideally by the middle of June.

So you can get a sense of the state of the project today, below is where each of the final group of posts (November 2-23) fits into the overall structure of the book, some of which we have written earlier this week, some we have written tonight (aware of this transitional moment in our project and the possibility of our collaboration).

We hope you will join us on this journey. Even if you cannot, we want to acknowledge how important our continued conversations are and how you both make ‘us’ who we are.

Best wishes,

Minus Plato

Ch. 1: Prologue

1.1: Who are ‘we’?

1.2: Scope and Nature of the Project

Between Thanksgiving 2016 (November 25) to Thanksgiving 2017 (November 23) we embarked on a project called “Minus Plato Today” in which we wrote every single day (aside from two 8-day breaks – December 17-24, 2016 and June 14-21, 2017). This book takes these daily posts and organizes them into eleven thematic chapters, keeping the date of the original post in brackets at the end of each rewritten section. For example, our final post of the project, that contained all of the posts we’d written, has transformed into the appendix of the present book (November 23).

We outlined the process of writing the book in the penultimate post, which works as a succinct overview of the whole project. As we wrote back then:

Today, the day before Thanksgiving, I am writing this, the penultimate post of the year-long project ‘Minus Plato Today’, a project started the day after Thanksgiving last year. (In fact, this really is the last post, as tomorrow’s will just comprise the links to every single post from the project). I remember, sometime in November, after the election of Twump, Nero, Jabba the Trump (take your pick), President Obama told us that we could mourn until Thanksgiving, but after that, we had to get back to work.

We used this spirited call to action as a way to revitalize the blog Minus Plato, which, over the months before, had become somewhat stagnant, with only a post or two a month and sometimes months without posts. The project made sense to us since it used the platform of Minus Plato to not only continue (at some pace!) our work on the dynamic between Classics and Contemporary Art, but also the daily act of writing and posting, offered us a legitimate mechanism whereby we could resist the idiot president’s regime, with a regular ‘Fuck Trump’, embedded within our ostensible content. Looking back over the year, there have been times when we wrote in direct response to some terrifying and brute action on his part and that of his administration, but, thankfully, there were days when we were able to forget about him completely, and focus on what we love about being a classicist engaged with contemporary creativity. We would presume that this alternating between reactive outrage and necessary regrouping has been the experience of many of you over the past 12 months and, as this phase of project came to an end, we were wary of the space that would be left in our lives and work, and so we used this penultimate post to record some tentative thoughts on where to go from here. In short, we asked, what will Minus Plato be after ‘Minus Plato Today’?

Over the year we realized that our most timely and vital work was to develop a range of collaborations, wherein working with others made us reconsider the very title of the blog Minus Plato. With such a horrific example of domineering, ignorant, patriarchal authority and mansplaining in the White House, I started to realize that a necessary means to resist, especially as someone so privileged (aside from wealth, you name it, I have it: white male heterosexual British tenured university professor), was to deconstruct the individual narcissism attached to the genius myth, operative within the academic discipline of Classics (which could be dubbed, the Plato complex). The gradual realization, on a day to day basis, was that I had to not only displace Plato and other models of individual authority from my daily teaching and work as a Classicist, but also that the most responsible and effective way of doing this was to displace myself in the process. This is one rationale for the ‘I’ of Richard Fletcher, Associate Professor in the Department of Classics at The Ohio State University, becoming the ‘we’ you are now reading (with all the nuances of this collective subject we previous intimated in our rather poetic prologue above- i.e. (i) the pompous royal we; (ii) the Writing-I then joined by the Writing-I now; (iii) the common ground between the author and reader and (iv) the emerging collective of artists and classicists initiated by this very project).

During a phase of returning, reforming and refreshing our daily work from the previous year, in January 2018 we moved to a weekly posting schedule (every Monday) transitioning from “Minus Plato Today” to “Minus Plato Return, Reform, Refresh”. We used this time freed up by not posting every day to reorder and rewrite the year of posts into the thematic chapters of the book you are now holding. While there is precedent for the blog to book model, we wanted to work towards a new model of authorship whereby the writing of the blog is expanded by a collaborative process that will result in a book. These included a series of six interactive lectures delivered at the Columbus College of Art and Design (CCAD) on the invitation of curator Jo-ey Tang (Our Book To Come: This Week, Last Year), as well as a weekly discussion group on the topic of “Time” at the Grass Skirt Tiki Room in downtown Columbus. As we came to the end of this phase of the project, made more direct attempts to turn the project into a collaboration. We invited sair goetz to work with us as image editor for the book and in the final week of writing the first draft, we invited an artist and a classicist, under the pseudonyms Diosa and Magistra respectively, to act as our interlocutors throughout the book. Forming different features of Diotima, in Plato’s Symposium, as both prophetess in communing with the divine and as the teacher of Socrates on matters of desire, Diosa and Magistra intervene in the narrative that follows, ostensibly turning a day-by-day account of one person’s mad-cap project of documenting the interplay of art and life under Trump into a guide for all of us to use to resist. (November 22).

1.3:Guides and Handbooks

Ch. 2: Mourning Diary

2.1: First Days

2.2: The Everyday

Allan Kaprow says that the line between the Happening and daily life should be kept as fluid as possible. Aristotle compared the process of understanding) to the freezing of a liquid (e.g. as words form into a sentence). (November 3).

2.3: Anniversaries/Celebrations/Obituaries

2.4: Events

Melissa [Vogley Woods] was also there as we resisted the Republican Tax Bill in the House that was set to cut tuition waivers for graduate students, meaning that they would be taxed on money they never see, leading to an untenable 300% increase in their taxes, this and other attacks on higher education mean that now more than ever we need to pay attention to the facades of power and their brute patriarchal undermining of diverse and deep education. (November 19).

Ch. 3: On Classicism’s Ruins

3.1: Classicism, Classicists and The Classical

It seems intuitive to explain classicism with reference to ancient Greek sculpture. Brooke Holmes in the introduction to Liquid Antiquity, the exhibition-as-book (edited with Karen Marta and published by the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art), writes: ‘It is true that the texts of the classical canon have long been privileged sites for the communication of classical values and ideals. Indeed, the revival of the language of the “classical” first occurs with reference to ancient texts in the Renaissance. Yet classicism’s charge is arguably at its strongest in its most iconic representations: rows of marble columns, muscular male nudes, artfully draped female bodies, all white, white, white.’ It is also equally intuitive to investigate the presence of classicism in contemporary art almost exclusively through the appropriation and transformation of sculpture. Liquid Antiquity is divided into the topics of “Body”, “Time”, and “Institution”, although before even reaching the topic of the “Body”, the use of images in the book establishes an emphasis on the remake of Greek sculpture, through the works of Jeff Koons, Ashley Bickerton, Kiki Smith and Urs Fischer. The same goes for the project Modern Classicisms at King’s College London, where the body and sculpture are the focus for conferences, exhibitions and a book. Yet amid this focus on classical sculpture as the most visible and obvious meeting-point of the ancient and modern, what does it mean for the image itself, either in the physical book or exhibition or its dissemination online? Writing on the work of Sara VanDerBeek, such as her Roman Women series, Ina Blom notes how: Even classical sculpture – the Greek and Roman busts that were among the first love objects of photographers – is given a new life as screen effects. Where would sculptor-photographers like Barry X Ball fit into this equation? If we can allow ourselves to expand our classicism beyond the sculptural, we might be able to demarcate a less limiting perspective on the scope of the interface (an appropriate word in this context) between our discipline and contemporary creative practice. (November 6).

[…]

Consider Juliana Huxtable. When in her work Life: a novel (with Hannah Black), she expresses a desire to drill Platonism into ruins, do we get a case of ‘artists today putting classicists in their place’, to quote from our manifesto? Sure, you may respond that one passing reference to Platonism doesn’t transform an artist, or anyone else, into a fully-fledged classicist. You need years of arduous training in ancient Greek and Latin for that! At the same time, by expanding the term classicist beyond the professionally and institutionally configured role is an antidote to the way that contemporary artists who engage with Greco-Roman antiquity and its legacies are often instrumentalized by the discipline. (November 4).

3.2: Support Networks: Columns and References

But for all the way the name survives as a support, like so many columns, are there not also names that become ruins? This happens all the time in the cut-throat world of contemporary art. One month your name is all over Artforum, next month you’re forgotten. Take the case of Chu Yun. If you search his name in the Artforum archive, the results show no record of the artist after December 2009. Had the artist abandoned the art world? If so, what happened to his name and the work attached too it? We once wrote about his work Constellations many years ago, only to forget his name and only remember the work. Could this be a strategy of withdrawal that enacts a critique on the name-dropping prestige of the art world? (“Do you know the artist Chu Yun?”, “Who?”, “You know, the Chinese artist who did that Constellation piece in the mid-2000s”, “Ah, yes, of course, I wonder whatever happened to him?”.) This brings us to the apotheosis of mythical figures, the way their naming becomes part of their presence as constellations, and not as people with stories (do your remember what happened to Callisto? It is a tale of sexual violence that would fit right in during these days under Trump). (November 21).

3.3: Failed Analogies: Ruins and Fascism

Ch. 4: Moving White Bodies

4.1: After Dead White Men

4:2: Inner Body Parts

4:3: Let’s Dance

4.4: Sculpted Body Media

Ch. 5: Media/Medea/Medya

5.1: Books Image Objects

5.2: Soundwalks in Cyberspace

…channeling Nina Simone’s birdsongs (thanks to you, Magistra) (November 18).

[…]

…the canon of Net.Art with Vuk Ćosić’s Documenta Done (November 13).

5.3: How Not To Be Found

Ch. 6: Myths and Other Peccadilloes

6.1 Myopic Men

On the same day [as the Women’s March], we found ourselves listening to Paul Chan reading ‘What is a Myth?’ by Karen Armstrong on My Own Private Alexandria, where we heard: “Today the word ‘myth‘ is often used to describe something that is simply not true. A politician accused of a peccadillo will say that it is a ‘myth‘, that it never happened.” Reflecting on myth, the Women’s march and our misogynist sexual predator president, the following image came to us: the patriarchy is a Cyclops confronted by a feminist movement lead by Echo and the Sirens. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s installation called That which identifies them, like the eye of the cyclops, 2016, installed at the New Museum as part of the exhibition Song, Strategy, Sign reimagined the 1969 novel by Monique Wittig called Les Guérillères about a future female utopia, restaged in present-day Puerto Rico. In Wittig’s original text the reference to the cyclops that became Santiago Muñoz’s title shows how in patriarchal societies women’s names are limited to a single forename. Yet, this very specific reference to the cyclops also cued into other Classical myths in the passage that followed as Wittig was participating in her own reimagining, this time of Classical mythology of the Echo and the Sirens. Both myths, with their attention to voice, seemed to go against the limiting feature of the single name, as demarcated by the cyclops eye. At the same time, Wittig makes the O of the siren song, evoking ‘the vulval ring’, transformed the cyclops’ eye into a feminist symbol, appearing on the very first page of the novel. The path that led us to the Wittig, also took directed us to another artist, sair goetz, whose work (e.g. Me and My Army or Hold Yr Tongue) embodies a timely riposte to the forms and functions of the litany of patriarchal atrocities. Partially hidden on her website, goetz has a project called said, which they describe as

the words of others

in my mouth

in your ears

During our reading of Wittig’s novel, we found ourselves listening to goetz reading Judith Butler and before we knew what we were doing, we were reading Les Guérillères along with her reading of Gender Trouble. We would wait to catch up with her phrasing, pausing when they paused and tripping over words as they tripped over words. The only moment that we broke from this shadow-reading was at the moment in Wittig text when the names of women are listed. Then, we would space them out like punctuation. A name for a comma, a name for a semi-colon; a name for a full stop. Then it happened, listening through the dissonance of our own reading, we heard the name “Wittig” in Butler’s text and goetz’s voice. Somehow the path through the patriarchal eye of the Cyclops to Beatriz Santiago Muñoz to Monique Wittig, with her Sirens and Echo, ended in Judith Butler, with the name “Wittig”, echoing in our ears in sair goetz’s voice. (November 15).

6.2: Heroines

How might George Steiner’s book Antigones have changed if, on November 17, 1978 he had read Hans Haacke’s anti-Apartheid intervention (“A Breed Apart”) in the Oxford Mail as well as a review of Christoph Nel’s production of Sophocles’ Antigone in Frankfurt upon Main taking place at the time of the trial against the terrorist Red Army Faction and with the words of Ulrike Meinhof included in the program notes? (November 17).

6.4: Working Together: Sirens

Ch. 7: Where Went Ohio

7.1: Active Teaching: Classes Projects Performances Exhibitions

Our next session [of Myth Mother Invention] was devoted to the topic of the infant. We mused on Echo is Golden, our intervention at Mattin’s Social Dissonance at documenta 14 in Kassel, by mapping Simonides’ Danae fragment about the infant Perseus onto the role of the Athenian performers, and how the same fragment is referenced in a short book by Jacques Rancière called Short Voyages to the Land of the People to show how the maternal voice calmed the violence of the natural world as well as her child. We were reminded of a brief scene in the 2016 short film by filmmaker Abbe Leigh Fletcher (yes, it is our sister), made with the artist Jessica Akerman called My mild mannered mother-in-law from Mildmay. The main focus of the film is a conversation with Akerman’s mother-in-law about growing up and raising her children in Dalston in the 1950s, the same area of London where her daughter-in-law (Akerman) and son are living in the present day. While the filmmaker and artists mothers ask questions and offer responses, the main discourse of the film is that of the reminiscences of the mother-in-law. The film, while edited in 2013, was filmed over a period between 2011-2012 in which both Fletcher and Akerman had very young children, who had yet to start speaking. The scene that we are reminded is a shot of the mother-in-law and the two infants. As Lois (our niece) smiles and laughs, we hear both her mother (behind the camera) and the mother-in-law (in front of the camera) verbally react by laughing as well, at which moment the audio cuts back to the latter’s continuing narration.This moment in the film made us think that the non-verbal communication of the infant had a power beyond both the voice of the mother and the threatening natural world in Simonides’ poem. At the same time, it is the mother’s voice that has the uncanny power to initiate the infant’s pre-lingual power – to quell the surging cry and tease out a trickle of laughter. (November 2).

A week later, as we discussed the topic of childhood, it dawned on the Classicists present in the group that there were, to our knowledge, no Greek or Roman myths that portrayed a girl as an infant or a child. Sure, there were girls on the cusp of womanhood, married or violated by male or divine aggressors (e.g. Persephone), and, yes, there were tales of heroic male infants (e.g. Hermes and Hercules), but the infant girl was non existent. Moving into childhood, the problem continues. Even Iphigenia is a teenager, with her death on behalf of her father, some form of perverse death-marriage, in which she must assure her grieving mother, this is for the best. The absence of the girl as infant and child in Classical mythology brought us to Sharon Lockhart’s Maja and Elodie, 2002. Lockhart’s photographic diptych shows a young girl and a young woman sitting on a small Persian carpet with a partially finished jigsaw puzzle between them. In one image the young woman’s hand extends towards one of the pieces of the puzzle, while in the other, the only difference is that she lifts her hand ever so slightly off the carpet. The first photograph is in fact a sculpture by the hyperrealist sculptor Duane Hanson, made in 1978 as the realization that the girl is not real, compounds the difference between the two female figures, in the form of the subtle movement of the young woman is contrasted with the girl’s ever-static posture. (November 9).

In our final session on the empty nest we turned from the Roman poet Statius’ Achilleid and the hero’s all-knowing goddess-mother, Thetis to the narration of the film Hemlock Forest by Moyra Davey and her son, Barney, accompanied by a few photographs of the works of the exhibition at the Angela Meleca Gallery, Repeat Pressure Until. (November 16).

7.2: Other Visits

In preparation for a talk by Douglas Crimp, we were rereading On the Museum’s Ruins. Published in 1993, the book gathers together essays that Crimp had previously published (especially in October) in the 1980s, alongside a selection of Louise Lawler’s photographs. As Crimp critiques the role of the museum in neoconservative power games that align the ‘new’ with an apolitical ‘spirit’ in painting and sculpture. For example, discussing the display of a Bell 47 D-1 helicopter for its design as a “ubiquitous contemporary artifact”, Crimp notes the irony of how it is displayed as purely aesthetic object, without any reference to the then current US warmongering:

ubiquitous indeed, since it is and has been the most essential instrument of counter-insurgency warfare…right now in use in El Salvador, Honduras (which means, of course, against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua), and Guatemala.

We need to remember Crimp’s chilling conclusions more than ever, as we experienced during the so-called “Freedom Week”, in which members of an OSU student group arm of the conservative group Young America’s Foundation, chose to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall and spread of the neoconservative “freedom” of the Reagan administration by plastering hateful posters (stating “Leftist Ideas: “progress” that always leads to death”) across office bulletin boards (targeting “No Hate Space” posters) and joyously documenting it on their Facebook page.We find in the work of Crimp (and in Lawler) timely tools whereby we can point to cracks in the triumphalist discourse of a ‘new’ conservatism, as well as its creaky appropriation of a racist and sexist antiquity, and build a truly new museum (university and world) firmly on top of its deluded and hateful ruins. (November 7).

7.3: Too Close to Home

Ch. 8: Escape to Athens

8.1: Preparations

8.2: On Site

8.3: Aftermath

Ch. 9: On the World

9.1: World Orders

[Part of a contrast between ancient Roman imperialism and the violence against Native American first nations] While there is no plaque or memorial on the site in Rome to commemorate or explain this practice of capital punishment as reenacting Tarpeia’s punishment, the analogy with Candice Hopkins’ account of Sam Durant’s Scaffold is still relevant. When we include stories of gratuitous sexual violence in our Latin textbooks and explain them away by pointing to the foundational stories of Rome and female heroic actions on behalf of the state, what does it mean for those same students not to be confronted with the way the story and site at which this happened is also the basis for a systematic enactment of state execution, which also repeats gendered violence? When we have a President who bypasses sentencing procedures by demanding the death-penalty (for the NYC truck attacker), we have a responsibility to understand that ancient Greece and Rome are part of what Hannah Black described, in response to the Dana Schutz Emmett Till controversy at the Whitney Biennial as the “barbaric realities of racial and gendered violence on which our lives are founded.” (November 5).

[…]

Looking beyond Rome, Greenlandic artist Pia Arke’s two photographs De tre Gratier (The Three Graces) (1993), which we saw in an issue of the Afterall journal dedicated to the topic of “Ethno-Aesthetics” (a term coined by Arke in her manifesto of the same name in 1995) shifts the perspective of the three clothed figures, with their ‘native’ props, by turning their backs to the camera and the viewer’s gaze and towards the (photographed) landscape. This subtly enacts a parallel demystification of the mythical Graces (think Rubens’ fleshy figures) in terms of what Stefan Jonsson in the essay “On Pia Arke” describes as their turning from their roles as ‘exhibited natives’ to ‘subjects scrutinising the representation’. At the same time, the Thule that captivated ancient authors, from a passing reference in Virgil’s Georgics to Antonius Diogenes’ novelistic The Wonders Beyond Thule, is contained within four photographs of the four sides of a modest house in Imaginary Homelands or Ultima Thule or Dundas ‘The Old Thule’, (1992/2003). In clothing and turning her Graces and documenting and delimiting her Thule, Arke is offering a perspective on the Western culture that both encompasses and undercuts the privileged position of Classical myth and history within it. Hey Diosa and Magistra, could we also take Arke’s lead and become an alternative three Graces? (November 8).

9.2: Elsewhere

…Kamasi Washington’s Epic of Gilgamesh (November14).

9.3: Indigeneity

Ch. 10: Serial Collaborations

10.1: Dialogue and Community

10.2: Teaching Moments

10.3: Working Together

Working with Dani (Leventhal) Restack on the connections between writing and drawing (Rough Draft), the role of re-imagining Plato’s myths for experimental pedagogy and institutions (Myths of the Academy) and how new relationships emerge from group discussion of myths and witnessing the phases of motherhood (Myth Mother Invention). In all of these projects, Dani has been inspirational in the way she allows us to see how an attention to love transforms time and space in thought and feeling. Specifically, by reforming the words of “The Birth of Love” in Plato’s Symposium, Dani always makes us turn towards Love in forgetting to think and learning to feel. (November 20).

[…]

In a series of three posts we had a dialogue with Classicist Jessica Hughes about her participation at the Modern Classicisms conference at King’s College London. She sent us her paper and we used it as a basis to ask a series of questions:

How do we Classicists revitalize and legitimize our discipline by recycling the need for antiquity at moments of historical and contemporary crisis?
Are we complicit with a kind of cultural version of crisis capitalism in which we generate new markets for our work by showing how it is needed to ground us in times of upheaval?
What does the internet and ‘being online’ means for Classics?
What can the internet do for and with our discipline?
How it does it forge new communities and expand our collaborations and audiences beyond the priviledged few?
How can it stimulate and inform our scholarship, rather than merely be a means of convenient dispersion for it?