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 […]
Happy New Year everyone! Here’s a post about the use of Eros/Cupid in advertising, courtesy of a work by Seth Price, its source and extension: “I had the idea for the Bonne Annee pieces when I saw an actual holiday greeting card from the French Communist Party, probably from the early 1970s, that used Vermeer’s […]
I’ve been thinking about digital culture and Classical mythology recently, specifically in terms of how the slickness of a myth (an endlessly reproduced story that maintains its core as its details change) compares to the glitches of mythmaking (e.g. Cicero’s dream of Scipio as a remake of Plato’s myth of Er). In this vein, I […]
I am taking a break from Simone Weil and Carthage, which gives me a chance to post about a revelation I had in Paris this past October. On visiting the post-retirement exhibition of Maurizio Catellan Not Afraid of Love at the Monnaie de Paris, it slowly dawned on me that the new work of the […]
Ever since I watched it, I have wanted to write about Jean-Luc Godard’s 2004 film Notre Musique. Set in Sarajevo, it tells the story of two women – Olga and Judith – and debates ideas of violence, ethics, colonialism, the Other and the Israeli-Palestine conflict. The main reason that I obsessed over the film was […]
After yesterday’s post on Simone Weil’s Electra, I realized that I had not explained how my essay in progress related to the dynamic between Classics and Contemporary Art. All will be revealed in due course and, in the meantime, each of my posts this week will attempt to lead us there, and today is the […]
