“I was involved with banal images. I realised that people respond to banal things; they don’t accept their own history; not participating in acceptance within their own being. I started then to take that into the body. Where do people start to feel guilt and shame and rejection of the self?” Jeff Koons
In The One Hour Laugh the four members of Barbara Cleveland perform a routine of endurance laughter. Over the course of the hour, their laughter travels between tedium to strain, to genuine hilarity, to humiliation. Barbara Cleveland’s unsettling laughter parodies the austerity of performance art documentation through overt theatricality and seemingly senseless enjoyment.
DOG is a dog book that tries to be more than a dog book! An intermix of dogs, art and politics! To view dogs as myth, symbol, aesthetic musings and in scenes of casual and/or extreme tension such as the extremities of state violence. Images are jittered and fractured visually and informationally, concrete and irrational. […]
So let me tell you something, faithful Minus Plato readers. I have to confess that I have been debating taking a break from my daily posting on Minus Plato – I recently passed the 100 day mark of daily posts and didn’t want to burn out too soon (there is still so much to attend […]
I’m still dwelling on names and naming today and this leads me, inevitably, to the work of Josh Smith and his signature “name” paintings. Bob Nickas, in his book Painting Abstraction, describes these works as follows: The “name” paintings, composed with the letters that spell his first and last names, at first seem to identity their […]
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 […]
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 […]
Our OSU Humanities Institute Pilot Working Group Rough Draft got off to a great start yesterday with the event Constellations: Mapping Space. Dani Leventhal and I introduced four short talks on a wide range of topics from an eclectic group of speakers whose research or creative work all involved the idea of mapping the night […]
Just before New Year 1932, Walker Evans (1903-1975), the iconic American photographer, set sail to Tahiti on a luxury schooner called the Cressida. Walker Evans Portrait of a Woman, Tahiti 1932, silver print, ca. 1930s, 6 1/2 x 9 1/4. www.leegallery.com In letters sent from there, and on his return a few months later, Evans recounts […]
