I am writing this Minus Plato post on my phone, while sitting in the car outside MOCA Cleveland, waiting for my son to wake up from a nap. Inside may lie in wait an exhibition, an artist, an artwork, that could be the subject of a future Minus Plato post. But all I can do […]
In my Classics 2220H: Classical Mythology/Contemporary Art class last week, each of the students delivered presentations that connected their exploration of myths of creation, love and art with individual art works from the exhibition Open This End: Contemporary Art from the Collection of Blake Byrne at the OSU Urban Arts Space here in Columbus. Leaving […]
Tomorrow I will be attending the 5th International Conference on the Ancient Novel (ICAN) in Houston, Texas and on Friday I will be giving my first public performance under the persona of Minus Plato. My performance – which is not an academic paper – will re-wire Apuleius’ Metamorphoses into the strange machine known as the […]
Sometimes a Minus Plato post needs to leave all discussion/explanation/analysis in the background and we should simply just admire what contemporary artists are capable of. Look, see. Richard Hawkins, Untitled (Slash/Twombly) (detail), 1992 Cy Twombly, Fifty Days at Iliam: Shades of Achilles, Patroclus, and Hector, 1978
Another mobile post, so I’ll be brief. I’m currently reading Seth Price’s novel Duck Seth Price (ah the magic of auto-correct!), while at the same time writing a paper for the upcoming 5th International Conference on the Ancient Novel in Houston next week. I am meant to be delivering a paper on Apuleius’ Metamorphoses in […]
This is my first stab at a mobile Minus Plato post. So it’ll nice ‘n’ short & sweet. Sitting in Anthropologie in the Short North, leafing through the Taschen coffee-table book Matisse Cut-outs, I stumble across some typical art historical Latin etymologizing maneuver. (See the text in the photo below). I guess my question is: when […]
Artist and publisher Paul Chan was recently interviewed by 032c magazine about his recent book projects with his press Badlands Unlimited that include a series of erotic fiction written exclusively by women (New Lovers) and a radical new edition of a Platonic dialogue (Hippias Minor or the Art of Cunning). I know that I have […]
On Wednesday this week the 29 students of my Classical Mythology/Contemporary Art class had the pleasure of visiting the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library – the largest cartoon library on the planet and an amazing place for unique exhibitions, events and workshops as the epicentre for the Columbus cartooning community. It was here that Frank Santoro […]
While flicking through Martin Parr and Gerry Badger’s The Photobook: A History volume III (Phaidon 2014) – a great birthday gift from my Dad – I was transfixed by the following image: This photograph graces the cover of the book Billy Monk (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2011) and it immediately made me want to know more, […]
There is no original text, no “right,” perfect, whole object; we only have a broken bit of ceramic, mediated by centuries. This is how Page duBois, in her book Sappho is Burning (complete with a Nancy Spero work on the cover), describes the potsherd that contains what we know of as Sappho fragment 2. Here […]