Archives
It is the first day of classes here at Ohio State and I am gearing up for two exciting courses that I am teaching in coordination with the exhibition that I am curating for the Ohio Art League at the Riffe Gallery: Come Along With Me. The exhibition brings together 18 artists from across Ohio […]
Opening on January 20th (can’t think of anything else important happening that day…) at the Drawing Center is Amy Sillman’s new exhibition After Metamorphoses. It comprises an animated drawing (with soundtrack) that she made on the iPad inspired by the mythic tales of change, desire and power from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. While I need to wait […]
Tonight Blake Turner’s Manifesto Library published the Minus Plato Manifesto, which I posted in early December last year. But, more importantly, it published two other manifestos that are of more pressing concern than anything presented on this blog. First of all, the Mexican feminist Con Nosotras manifesto, translated by Rebeka Campos-Astorkiza, that calls for an […]
Today was my first time in the Wexner Center for the Arts after the end of the exhibition Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933-1957. It was a strange experience as I’d lived with that exhibition in such an intimate way over the past few months. I taught two classes that inspired and engaged […]
Flicking through artist Ian Cheng’s book Live Simulations, I came across the following description of his 2014 work Metis Suns: Pichaku [sic?] looked into her eyes and instantly understood her every molecule. But it wasn’t any special ability on his part: he was 85% idiot with humans. It was hers. She precisely caricatured her face, her […]
You may have seen images of or heard about Kara Walker’s epic 2014 work A Subtlety that she made for Creative Time in the remnants of the Domino Sugar Factory on Brooklyn. The work is an immense sugar-coated sphinx that responds to the racially charged labor-history of the factory. In conceiving of this work, Walker […]
As Minus Plato continues on its daily posting schedule, I will be comparing how artists take up the task of creating work as or about daily activities and ancient philosophy as a way of life. As Pierre Hadot has discussed throughout his work, ancient philosophers wrote ‘spiritual exercises’ which acted as hypomnemata (memory aids) – […]
Leafing through the recent edition of Mousse magazine, I came across the work of Belgian artist Kasper Bosmans and was struck by his varied use of images and ideas from antiquity. In two installations pieces – Hermès in Exile (low and high versions) and Juno Sospita and Coco (Silver Denarius), Bosmans makes indirect connections between the iconography […]