In The Illogic of Kassel, Enrique Vila-Matas never warms to the role he was invited to play at dOCUMENTA (13), as ‘Writer in Residence’ at a Chinese restaurant on the edge of Karlsaue Park. He spends the majority of the novel attempting to escape this role, including the invention of a fictional writer to go […]
Five years ago, in the rotunda of the Fridericianum, where I sat with the other participants in The Parliament of Bodies for last night’s talk by Georges Didi-Huberman, there stood what artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev called ‘the brain’ of dOCUMENTA (13). A few posts ago I mentioned this area as encountered by Enrique Vila-Matas in […]
Today I left behind the sun of the South in Malaga, and traveled North, to the rain of Kassel. At the same time, I also felt like I was leaving behind that other city of the South, with which this German city has (so generously) shared this year’s documenta exhibition, and it would be part […]
I did not visit Kassel five years ago, but I cannot forget Alyce Kaplan’s work in the hexagonal room on the top floor of the Orangerie. While I didn’t see it in person, her work appeared on the gray carpeting on the landing as a colorful reflection. I don’t recall stepping closer to that reflection, […]
Since arriving in Malaga a couple of weeks ago, I have been on a no beer diet. In this land of Sangria, Ribera, Rioja and Vermut, you’d think that would be a pretty easy task. However, scattered across Malaga city are several craft beer bars that offer the widest possible variety of temptation. Last night, […]
To give you a brief respite from documenta 14, from my memories of Athens and preparations for Kassel, here is R. B. Kitaj’s 1960 work “The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg”. I saw this sublime work at the Picasso Museum here in Malaga, as part of the exhibition “Bacon, Freud, y la Escuela de Londres” and […]
I missed My Sweet Country, the series of performances by Prinz Gholem at the Temple of Olympian Zeus and the Odeion of Agrippa in the Agora. However, I was luck enough to meet someone in Athens who had been there and she sent me some photographs and videos she took of their performances, such as […]
When I take students to Rome, I try to get them to to visualize the immense scale of what the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus must have looked like on the Capitoline Hill by asking them to imagine a ‘Pantheon in the sky’. According to our typical itinerary, we would have seen the Pantheon the […]
How much time did you spend in Athens with your face up against a window, peering into a closed building, trying to get a glimpse of a work of art or at least the space in which it was made? Did this happen to you at Archimidous 15 and Nikhil Chopra’s Drawing a Line through […]
Did you know when you took the photograph of this quiet performance piece, with its rustle of aligning sunlight, that its creator’s name, Marie Cool Fabio Balducci, was some form of collective pseudonym? Did you read about ‘them’ in an interview article called ‘The Politicization of Anatomy’, in which ‘they’ respond to a question about […]