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 […]
In a letter to Atticus (Att. 4. 8. 2), Cicero expresses his delight at the installation of some new bookshelves in an oddly convoluted and high-flown fashion: postea uero, quam Tyrannio mihi libros disposuit, mens addita uidetur meis aedibus. qua quidem in re mirifica opera Dionysi et Menophili tui fuit. nihil uenustius quam illa tua […]
There is an anecdote about the tragic poet Phrynichus, wherein the playwright was made a general by the Athenians based on the choreography of a dance routine in one of his plays. Here is the story as preserved in Aelian’s Various Histories (3.8): The Athenians made Phrynichus general, not out of favor, nor for nobleness […]
To consider whether tragedy is fully developed by now in all its various species or not, and to criticize it both in itself and in relation to the stage, that is another question. At any rate it originated in improvisation—both tragedy itself and comedy. The one came from the prelude to the dithyramb and the […]
Dear All, It is hard to believe we were all together less than two weeks ago! I miss you all, our conversations, debates and exchanges, as well as the beautiful light, the heat and buzz of the city. When we were together, everything felt more immediate, more alive, more real somehow. Of course, it must […]
On discovering, almost too late, that Jacques Rancière will be speaking at Ohio State today, I reread the first published version of his essay “The Emancipated Spectator”. Rancière delivered the lecture, in English, on August 20th, 2004 at SommerAkademie in Frankfurt and it would later be published in Artforum in 2007 and then in the […]
Over the past few days, several things have occurred that have set me to worrying (somewhat more than usual) about the future of the university. I am not only thinking about some immediate and disturbing developments at my own specific institution (Ohio State University), but also about the very survival of the university as an […]