Australian artist Gordon Bennett (1955-2014) ends his polemic text ‘The Manifest Toe’ (which I am reading in the brilliant book on the artist Gordon Bennett: Be Polite published by Sternberg Press) by reflecting on the idea of the self as part of the artist’s investigation into his own Aboriginal heritage: The self remains relative, and […]
To be idiomatic in a vacuum is a shining thing – Frank O’Hara What am I actually doing as I move my fingers over these computer keys from which, over the years, the letters have been worn away? And where, exactly, am I doing it? Is all of this transpiring in my head? In […]
The current exhibition Gray Matters at the Wexner Center for the Arts brings together 37 contemporary artists (all women) who across a variety of media and processes have produced vibrant work out of the unassumingly neutral palette of black, white and gray. Curator Michael Goodson, writing in the handsomely produced gallery-guide, designed by Erica Anderson […]
The powers of photography have in effect de-Platonized our understanding of reality, making it less and less plausible to reflect upon our experience according to the distinction between images and things, between copies and originals. It suited Plato’s derogatory attitude toward images to liken them to shadows—transitory, minimally informative, immaterial, impotent co-presences of the real […]
In the 8th book of his Description of Greece, the 2nd century CE Greek writer Pausanias describes a curious cave in Phigalia, Arcadia, dedicated to Black Demeter (Demeter Melainai). It was here, Pausanias tells us, that the goddess went after being raped by the god Poseidon and when her daughter Persephone had been abducted by […]
Take a look at the Basquiat painting Untitled (1982) that just sold for $110.5 million at the recent Sotheby’s auction. What do you see? While you’re thinking about it, consider what Sotheby’s sees: Untitled is among the most important paintings by the artist still in private hands. The vast canvas marks a critical moment in […]
After an intense week reading Eric Baudelaire’s Anabases, for today’s post I want to share with you a fun project that is more tangentially related to the core themes of Minus Plato. Back in August 2015, I founded Myth Club Columbus, an informal Sunday morning class for my son, Eneko and some of his friends. A typical […]
Today is my last post on Eric Baudelaire’s Anabases book and so it seems fitting at this end point to return to the beginning (which, as we now know, in any anabasis, is no longer where we started). A few weeks ago, after returning from New York on seeing the Whitney Biennial and attending a […]
There are a total of 40 footnotes in Anabases, all of which are found in Homay King’s essay “Anti-Odyssey”. The majority of these footnotes lead us to theoretical texts of Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Freud, Bergson, Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze, Agamden and Badiou. Several others take us to works by artists Jeff Wall, Hito Steyerl and Walead […]
In an interview, Eric Baudelaire describes one of the origins for his interest in the idea of the Anabasis theme as follows: I don’t know why this figure is so important to me, but I remember already being touched by it when reading Charles Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil (1857) as a teenager. You can look […]