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A while ago, when researching the use of Latin by contemporary artists, I came across three works that used the dummy Latin, design proxy text known as Lorem ipsum. It is a repeating section of Latin that was been taken from Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum. It begins: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur […]
Paris-based Vier5 are one of the four design studios participating with documenta 14 (the four others are Ludovic Balland, Laurenz Brunner & Julia Born, and Mevis & van Deursen). Their work could be found across Athens, from the iconic floor-text marble slabs to the Map Booklet insert. My first encounter with their distinctive font was on […]
Minus Plato invites you to: Perictione & Sons a minus plato office hours exhibition August 24th to December 9th Thursday 12pm to 2pm or by appointment 328 University Hall A growing installation of books and display of altered books (by OSU BFA and MFA Students), accompanied by a series of displaced meetings, conversations and readings […]
Spinal Discipline is the name of Irena Haiduk’s performance at documenta 14 in which thirteen members of the “Army of Beautiful Women” walk while balancing the surrogate Proust book Seductive Exacting Realism on their heads. This use of a book as a tool for correct posture and grace is accompanied by other seemingly superficial features […]
If you open the book, which you saw in yesterday’s post (and you can see here if you missed it) balancing on people’s head in Athens (in a photograph and as a performance), as part of a darkened installation in Kassel (along with its 12 sisters), and which I held in my hand in the […]
Homer’s Margites, which is deplorably lost, bore, says Aristotle, the same analogy to comedy, as his Odyssey and Iliad to tragedy. The gods had taught him neither to dig nor to plough, nor any other skill; he failed in every craft – Aristotle, Nic. Eth. vi. 7, 1141:
After the horrific actions at the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virgina yesterday and the president’s complicit equivocal response, today I turn to William Pope. L for words, images and objects of wisdom and resistance. I hope to write another time about his amazing Whispering Campaign, spread across Athens and Kassel (below is a shaky […]
Victor Klemperer published his LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen (The Language of the Third Reich: A Philologist’s Notebook) in 1947, but he had been taking notes on how Nazi propaganda was changing the German language for at least ten years before then, documenting its daily shifts, like an undercover reporter building his […]
I just returned to Ohio after spending the last two and half months in Europe. While I felt that I was being rather restrained, I still managed to bring back a small red suitcase worth of books from my travels. I persuaded myself that these books were bought out of necessity, especially for my investigations […]