“I was involved with banal images. I realised that people respond to banal things; they don’t accept their own history; not participating in acceptance within their own being. I started then to take that into the body. Where do people start to feel guilt and shame and rejection of the self?” Jeff Koons
In The One Hour Laugh the four members of Barbara Cleveland perform a routine of endurance laughter. Over the course of the hour, their laughter travels between tedium to strain, to genuine hilarity, to humiliation. Barbara Cleveland’s unsettling laughter parodies the austerity of performance art documentation through overt theatricality and seemingly senseless enjoyment.
DOG is a dog book that tries to be more than a dog book! An intermix of dogs, art and politics! To view dogs as myth, symbol, aesthetic musings and in scenes of casual and/or extreme tension such as the extremities of state violence. Images are jittered and fractured visually and informationally, concrete and irrational. […]
In this film, Haim Steinbach discusses the ideas behind his exhibition ‘Travel’ at White Cube Mason’s Yard, observing how the notion of travel is both a state and an activity and something that we are all involved in for the duration of our lives.
So let me tell you something, faithful Minus Plato readers. I have to confess that I have been debating taking a break from my daily posting on Minus Plato – I recently passed the 100 day mark of daily posts and didn’t want to burn out too soon (there is still so much to attend […]
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 […]
In Pythagoras’ speech in the 15th and final book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the vegetarian philosopher of rebirth tells the tale of the phoenix bird (Met. 15. 392-407). una est, quae reparet seque ipsa reseminet, ales: Assyrii phoenica vocant; non fruge neque herbis, sed turis lacrimis et suco vivit amomi. haec ubi quinque suae conplevit saecula […]
On hearing the news of the travel restrictions on passengers carrying large electronic devices in their carry-on luggage from 8 Muslim-majority countries, for some reason I was reminded of an obscure curatorial intervention in the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Between the years of 1993-2003 the then director Suzanne Pagé worked with […]
Although my posts of the last couple of days have moved away from my recent interest in contemporary ‘conceptual’ dance, I have still been reading and thinking about this work. Of course, today with the sad news of the death of Trisha Brown, I was brought back to its origins in this pioneer of movement. […]
Recently I have been thinking about the Forum as a model for an exhibition – not only the Roman Forum, but also the Imperial Fora and even Domitian’s palace complex. What would it mean for an audience to encounter performative artworks in the way ancient Romans encountered speeches at the Rostra, ambassadors at the Graecostasis […]