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 […]
Last year I visited Brisbane, Australia for a conference called ‘The Classical and the Contemporary’ as part of the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial. Before going I spent some time looking at the artists on the Queensland Art Gallery website and I was immediately drawn to a work by US-Iraqi artist Rheim Alkadhi called The Eye […]
Just before leaving Columbus in summer 2014 to spend a sabbatical year in Madrid, along with my partner, Rebeka, and our son, Eneko, I discovered that the french filmmaker Chris Marker contributed photographs to a little book on Homer, published in 1958 by Paris-based Éditions du Seuil (where Marker worked between 1954-8), as part of […]
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
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 […]
Ulysses turned his back on the harbour and followed a rough track leading through the woods and up to the hills towards the place where Athena had told him. A group of men were idling around an oil barrel in which a fire was burning. He muttered a greeting and stood for a moment with […]
I am writing this from Madrid, in our tiny flat in Calle Olivar, our new home for the next year. As you would expect, I have spent the first week here exploring the wonders of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. In my three visits so far, two were centered on Picasso’s Guernica. […]
I have finally found some time to post an update about my class Classical Myth/Contemporary Art. We have the final presentations on Monday on the topic of ‘Conflicted Identities’, so I thought what better way to warm up for the post following that class than to highlight this particular topic in some of the previous […]
For our second session of presentations in my Classical Mythology/Contemporary Art class (last Wednesday), the students focused on the theme of ‘Heroes & Villains’ in the following art works: Gerhard Richter October 18, 1977, 1988Adrian Piper Cornered, 1988Rineke Dijkstra The Buzzclub, Liverpool, UK/Mysteryworld, Zaandam, NL, 1996-1997, 1996-1997Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, Zidane: A Twenty First […]
On Monday in our Classical Mythology/Contemporary Art class, we had our first session of student presentations. Ten students discussed ten art works (listed below in no particular order) in relation to the theme of ‘War, Trauma & Homecoming’. They described the work and then considered how they resonated with the ‘Epic’ Myths we had been […]