Category Archives: documenta 14

Tonight in Athens, between 7-8pm in the Odeon (Athens Conservatoire) you can experience the 51st rendition of Bilbaino artist Mattin’s ‘durational concert’ Social Dissonance, created with Dafni Krazoudi, Danai Liodaki, Ioannis Sarris, and Eleni Zervou. Here is the score for each nightly performance (excluding Mondays): Social Dissonance Score: Listen carefully. The audience is your instrument, […]

Greetings from Madrid! On the flight over I was reading the new issue of Afterall magazine which is dedicated to the idea of indigeneity (a term that combines the adjective indigenous and the noun identity). In her essay ‘Floating Between Past and Future: The Indigenisation of Environmental Politics’, Lucy Lippard discusses the artist Cecilia Vicuña […]

Today starts a new phase of this year of daily posts (Minus Plato Today), as between now and early August I will be posting while traveling throughout Europe (including stops in Madrid, Bilbao, Athens, London, Malaga and Kassel). Central to this journey is my experience of documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel and the question […]

I just read Mirela Baciak e-flux post Footnotes from Athens which begins as follows: I spent four weeks in Athens starting in early February 2017. I conducted thirty interviews with people, some of whom have been living in Athens and working in the field of art for at least a few years, and others who, […]

Here in Columbus, at the Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies at OSU, we celebrated the opening reception of VOID WRITING – an exhibition by 조은영 (which I blogged about a few days ago). As part of the exhibition of five of Choey’s monumental hanging pieces, the curator of the Center, Wendy Watkins, selected some […]

Euripides, the beautiful boy in the HSBC T-Shirt  – Q(uinn) L(atimer) to M(oyra) D(avey) The Athenian cult of beauty had a supreme theme: the beautiful boy. Euripides, the first decadent artist, substitutes a bloody moon for the golden Apollonian sun. Medea is Athens’ worst nightmare about women. She is nature’s revenge, Euripides’ dark answer to […]

It is hard to write about any exhibition from a distance, let alone one as ambitious, expansive and rooted in its immediate contexts as documenta 14. So, until I get to Athens in early June, Minus Plato will limit itself to reacting to reports from those who have been lucky enough to experience it firsthand. […]

Tomorrow documenta 14 opens in Athens. Like the fifth book of Cicero’s On Moral Ends, I want Minus Plato to be the place that you can encounter Athens, its sites (such as the Temple of Olympian Zeus) and the artists’ work (e.g.Prinz Gholam’s My Sweet Country) through a far-away simulation and an imaginary dialogue. So, […]

In Homer’s Odyssey, while several female characters, both divine and mortal, are described in the act of weaving (and un-weaving), only two of them – Calypso and Circe – are depicted as singing while they work. In book 5, we encounter Calypso ‘singing with a sweet voice as she went to and fro before the […]