Minus Plato has a mission for you, if you choose to accept it. As you may have noticed, the last few posts have been getting closer and closer to discussing the book Medea by the Soundwalk Collective. I had seen the book many years ago in the Wexner Center Store and on discovering that the […]
Paris-based Vier5 are one of the four design studios participating with documenta 14 (the four others are Ludovic Balland, Laurenz Brunner & Julia Born, and Mevis & van Deursen). Their work could be found across Athens, from the iconic floor-text marble slabs to the Map Booklet insert. My first encounter with their distinctive font was on […]
Spinal Discipline is the name of Irena Haiduk’s performance at documenta 14 in which thirteen members of the “Army of Beautiful Women” walk while balancing the surrogate Proust book Seductive Exacting Realism on their heads. This use of a book as a tool for correct posture and grace is accompanied by other seemingly superficial features […]
If you open the book, which you saw in yesterday’s post (and you can see here if you missed it) balancing on people’s head in Athens (in a photograph and as a performance), as part of a darkened installation in Kassel (along with its 12 sisters), and which I held in my hand in the […]
Homer’s Margites, which is deplorably lost, bore, says Aristotle, the same analogy to comedy, as his Odyssey and Iliad to tragedy. The gods had taught him neither to dig nor to plough, nor any other skill; he failed in every craft – Aristotle, Nic. Eth. vi. 7, 1141:
After the horrific actions at the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virgina yesterday and the president’s complicit equivocal response, today I turn to William Pope. L for words, images and objects of wisdom and resistance. I hope to write another time about his amazing Whispering Campaign, spread across Athens and Kassel (below is a shaky […]
Victor Klemperer published his LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen (The Language of the Third Reich: A Philologist’s Notebook) in 1947, but he had been taking notes on how Nazi propaganda was changing the German language for at least ten years before then, documenting its daily shifts, like an undercover reporter building his […]
Come on let me out or I’ll explode…I am Noman…of Ithaca, son of Runawayhorse… – Philocleon in Aristophanes’ Wasps Our three Athenians living in Kassel have just finished their daily performance for documenta 14 and they are feeling especially happy and content with their day’s work. Since returning from their act of defiance and resistance, […]
If any lover runs up to him to complain because he is furious at seeing the object of his passion derided on the stage, he takes no heed of such reproaches, for he is inspired only with honest motives and his Muse is no pander. – the Chorus of wasps in Aristophanes’ Wasps Far from […]
I think we’ll win ourselves a name among the Greeks as those who brought an end to warfare. – Lysistrata in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata Previously on Three Athenians in Kassel: After Alexis was kidnapped and nearly eaten and Nina was attacked and had her head shaved, our three Athenians went in search of answers. They visited […]