I will return in a future post to the 1980s, specifically to the shift from the appropriation practices of the early years of the decade (e.g. Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine) to the participatory art of its end (e.g. Group Material, Felix Gonzalez-Torres), and what happened to the question of sexual difference in the process. I […]
Continuing the thread of my last few posts on 1980s appropriation, I wanted to focus on Sherrie Levine and her 1981 work Untitled (After Edward Weston). But rather than simply reproduce and comment on her work here, I wanted to offer you a series of images that point to and expand on the spirit of […]
Following Louise Lawler for Art after Modernism, the New Museum and MIT series ‘Documentary Sources in Contemporary Art’ continued to commission artists as photo editors for their future volumes. Barbara Bloom selected the images for the second volume – Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of Writings by Contemporary Artists, while John Baldessari included a photographic sketchbook […]
Yesterday I discussed the question of ‘Who Speaks for Sappho?’ and Louise Lawler’s work that extends the ‘mansplaining’ ‘of Sappho’s poetry into a general critique of patriarchy. Today let’s take one example of the very literal ‘mansplaining’ of ancient Roman poets – Catullus 51 as a remake of Sappho 31 (here are the translations of […]
Who speaks for Sappho? I was reminded of this question this morning when I saw this post on Hans Urich Obrist’s Instagram feed depicting a work by Kasper Bosmans (an artist whose engagement with antiquity I blogged about on the first day of 2017): Bosmans’ drawing imagines the smoke of incense somehow ‘speaking the name […]
Carmen Herrera Untitled, 1952. Museum of Modern Art. The Athenian is no Plaster-of-Paris man, nor cast-iron either, the exact equivalent of every other Athenian, as every Spartan was of every other stupid Spartan. Athens was not reproducing a pattern; she was not copying the ways of her neighbours, she was giving them an ideal; and […]
Back in 2013 I wrote a Minus Plato post about Jimmie Durham’s Public Monument for the Birthday of Rome, 1995. I was reminded of this work on looking at the catalogue for the Hammer Museum retrospective of Durham’s work Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World, as a picture of Durham’s Rome work, which I had never seen […]
Ecce occupy , number 89 of the 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts series published as part of 2012 dOCUMENTA(13), was created by the collaborative pair of Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri (Iran/Palestine/USA). The long title of the work runs as follows: Ecce occupy: Fragments from conversations between free persons and captive persons concerning the crisis […]
In 2010, Italian-Libyan artist Adelita Husni-Bey created a 5 monitor installation called Lethe as part of extensive research trips around Lake Como to uncover exact sites of partisan executions in the years leading up to 1945. While the history books vividly record the executions of Mussolini in this region in April 1945, this was also the […]
