Any visitor to documenta 14, in either Athens, Kassel or both, who saw the work of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña would immediately think of the color red. Red is also the color faced by the reader of her recent book About to Happen, published by siglio press. Yet just over half-way through the book, the […]
Ahead of his talk today at the Wexner Center for the Arts, I have been reading James Voorhies’ book Beyond Objecthood: The Exhibition as a Critical Form since 1968. As part of his fourth chapter on ‘The Industrial Art Complex’, Voorhies discusses how cancellation of Manifesta 6 in 2006 in the Cypriot capital of Nicosia […]
Today is the last day of documenta 14 and rather than retracing my steps over what happened between Athens and Kassel since April, instead I want to look to the future, specifically to an ongoing project that I first encountered in the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA) and then again in an exhibition organized […]
Tomorrow is the last day of documenta 14, the exhibition that split itself between Athens and Kassel. To mark the closure of this unique experiment, e-flux has published a joint statement by many of the artists who participated. What struck me about this statement was the way in which the living artists emphasized the significance […]
Dear Joyce, I know it has been a long time (some three years) and I hope this finds you well, if indeed it finds you. Even though I know that you engage with antiquity in your work, from The Epitaph Project to the Iliad piece you once showed me in your apartment, I realize that […]
I didn’t go to Venice this year and so I missed Mark Bradford’s Tomorrow is Another Day at the US Pavilion. This means that these reflections are limited to the accounts of those people who I have spoken to who did see Bradford’s work in the flesh, as well as images and written accounts online […]
Mr. Bradford’s exhibition is not as explicitly political but shaped as a loose journey of self-discovery that can be read in mythological or biographical terms or, often, both at once. The mythological references first appear in a poem by Mr. Bradford hanging on the pavilion’s facade, written in the voice of Hephaestus, the Greek god of […]
On my return from Kassel and Athens, from documenta 14 and Liquid Antiquity, I not only found myself in the middle of my life (on turning 38 while away), but also back in the middle of the Wexner Store, holding in my hands a new book of an artist I had never heard of. This […]
He was praying like that and holding on to the altar When the Sibyl started to speak: “Blood relation Of gods, Trojan, son of Anchises, It is easy to descend into Avernus. Death’s dark door stands open day and night. But to retrace your steps and get back to upper air, That is the task, […]
