I recently picked up the new issue of F.R. David and after a few years break, Will Holder’s project (which began over 10 years ago) continues to connect and inspire in unusual ways the interface between art, design and writing. Included in this, the 13th issue called “Inverted Commas”, which, among other delights, offers an […]
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, […]
At the 54th Carnegie International in 2004, in addition to four other works, Trisha Donnelly created a performance called Letter to Tacitus. According to descriptions of the performance I have read online, Donnelly selected an elderly male museum guard to read a letter that she had written, imagined to have been to the Roman historian Cornelius […]
Yesterday we returned home to Columbus, so it seemed fitting to end this week of posts on the ancient sites of New York City (inspired by Kenneth Goldsmith’s Capital) with the following excerpt from Adam Gopnik’s Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York: We will somehow escape Manhattan, fleeing like the last Trojans, […]
Goldsmith records the following source-less entry early in his “Antiquity”: On an Upper East Side roof top in 1956 a Greek nymph, clutching her lyre as she surveys the city, her terrace is a chapel, sacred to a Mediterranean cult of physical delectation.NJ I was unable to find an image of this rooftop numph, so […]
In his “Roman” section of “Antiquity”, Goldsmith records five entries on the grandeur of old Penn Station. (I visited the ‘new’ station this morning and there is nothing there to write home about!). One entry describes the design of the great Hall as a response to the Baths of Caracalla. Another singles out the ‘soot-stained […]
On August 1st, 1918 the 42 st shuttle opened between Union Station and Time’s Square. IT was closed the next day due to chaos described in The New York Times as follows: One of the reasons for the confusion was that there was no way of passengers knowing which direction they needed to go out […]
The same architect firm who designed the penthouse Greek temple on Wall Street, McKim, Meade & White, also created the General Post Office on 8th Avenue. According to Meyer Berger’s New York (p. 202) it was William Mitchell Kendell, senior architect at the firm, who translated a passage from Herodotus to make the comparison between […]
I am heading to New York City today and so for the next week I will be posting about how this great American city has appropriated ancient sites illustrating the entries on ‘Antiquity’ in Kenneth Goldsmith’s epic New York: Capital of the 20th Century. (Here is an earlier post on the same work) Here is […]
