At the beginning of his reign, he would spend hours alone every day doing nothing but catching flies and stabbing them with a needle-sharp pen – Suetonius Domitian – Pablo Ríos, sketch for Presidente Trump: Dios perdone a América
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– O troubled humanity! O the emptiness of life! – Who wants to read about that? – Are you asking me? No one, by Hercules! – No one? – No one or two. –That’s wretched, pathetic. You know how to serve up warm tripe, Make a shivering client the gift of a second-hand cloak, Then […]
Dear Adam Pendleton, I want to write about your Black Dada project but I have no idea how to connect it to Classics, the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome. Do you have any suggestions? Black Dada is a way to talk about the future while talking about the past; it is our present moment. […]
I will write a longer post when I have more time about the work of Tunisian-Russian artist Nadia Kaabi-Linke. For now, for the mere playfulness of the visual juxtaposition, here is her 2008 work These goddamned boys all stealing and Cy Twombly’s Achaeans in Battle, from his 1978 Fifty Days at Iliam series.
My copy of January’s Artforum arrived yesterday and its cover compounded my disappointment that I’ll not be able to see Kerry James Marshall’s exhibition Mastry at the Met in the flesh. I was, however, lucky enough to be living in Madrid when Kerry James Marshall: painting and other stuff was on display at the Palacio […]
I just brought my class on ancient philosophical ideas of happiness and the good life to see the new film by Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade in The Box at the Wexner Center. The short, 7-minute film, O Caseiro (The Caretaker), is a split screen account of two very different lives and daily routines. On […]
Today is the first day of my Semina Seminar – a pedagogical experiment created after the model of Wallace Berman’s Semina (Latin for ‘seeds’), a hand-printed assemblage-zine that Berman made between 1955 and 1964. As Berman’s friend and collaborator, poet Michal McClure wrote about Semina, it is as much a form or genre than a single, […]
Given that I am teaching two courses about ancient philosophy as a way of life it is somewhat understandable that I’m obsessed with the ‘Consumer Reports’ published on the Art News website. Each report tracks a day in the life of a contemporary artist, not necessarily focused on what they do or make, but on […]