For our Myth Mother Invention meeting today, between last week’s ‘Conception’ and next week’s ‘Birth’ we’re focusing on ‘In Utero’. Of course, when we use this technical Latin term for pregnancy, many of us, of a certain age, cannot but think of the Nirvana album and its cover with the transparent anatomical manikin of a […]
Today in my class I, Tiresias: Ovid’s Mythical Women and Contemporary Feminist Art, we are reading books 5 and 6 of the Roman poet’s epic Metamorphoses. Midway through book 5, we encounter the song of the Muses (which includes, among others, the tale of Proserpina/Persephone’s abduction by Pluto/Hades) which is part of a contest with […]
Yesterday I received the news that Minus Plato was not selected to go forward to the panel stage of the Art Writers Grant Program under the blog category. While I am disappointed, I also want use the moment of hearing this news amid this year of daily posting (“Minus Plato Today”) to embrace a role […]
Some days its is harder to write than others…this is one of those days…I cannot finish my sentences and I realize that is because it is the full stop that unmakes the sentence…so today, I choose the ellipsis…I know I am not speaking well…nor am I “well-speaking”…but I cannot care today…I reach for the book […]
Perhaps, curious reader, you may be eager to know what was then said and done? Click on the images below to hear and see for yourself. – Apuleius Metamorphoses (adapted) Originally – an appropriate beginning, since the Greek word arche, from which the notion is derived means “beginning” – an archive is a place of […]
Virtue? A fig! ‘Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus – Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello My son Eneko is turning 8 on Tuesday and we’re having his birthday party today. As we set up the giant piñata in the shape of the number 8 and hope for the sun to shine on our […]
Last night I attended the talk at the Columbus College of Art and Design (CCAD) by philosophy and art-writer Boris Groys. He spoke about his recent project, an exhibition in Berlin called Art Without Death: Russian Cosmism, and he grounded the thought and art of this obscure Russian avant-garde movement in a reexamination of Kazmir Malevich’s […]
After our introductory meeting last week, this morning my OSU colleague and friend, artist Dani Restack (Leventhal) and I will be meeting with a group of current and ex-OSU MFA students and Classics Grad students to talk about myth and motherhood. This informal discussion series, which we have called Myth Mother Invention will explore the […]
When Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno made Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait, filmed at a La Liga match on April 23, 2005, they were not to know what would happen in the 2006 World Cup final. In Gordon and Parreno’s film, the pre-headbutt Zidane was like Achilles in Homer’s Iliad – the focal point, the […]
I have spent today dipping into Philippe-Alain Michaud’s Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion and I have been startled by the way in which an attention to dance and movement transforms all that I thought I knew about this giant of art history, specifically in how it unites Warburg’s well-known revitalization of Greco-Roman antiquity […]