Just before attending a gallery tour of the Wexner exhibition Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life by artist Sheilah Restack (Wilson), my friend, artist Suzanne Silver, with whom I had taught the class Drawing Ideas a year ago, handed me a copy of Amy Sillman’s zine The O.G., the eleventh issue of which was focused on […]
My struggles, bared teeth, growls, howls, and so on, look and sound no different to those of a bear, badger, or what have you. And Plato ought to agree, I think, that my struggles are not merely similar to the animal’s struggles, but that they arise from the same psychological source. Plato, of all people, […]
This post could have been written on Monday, which saw the celebration of Columbus Day and when my son, Eneko, learned all about the ‘discovery’ of America at school. Yet I am posting it today, October 12th, as the anniversary of the actual day in 1492 that Columbus set sail. In the same issue of […]
As I sit here on the Oval of the Ohio State campus after a day of teaching, I am thinking about a moment in Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid. During his visit to the Underworld, Aeneas hears of the future heroes of Rome from the shade of his father Anchises. He also learns of the […]
Today some men told me “you are the problem” and suddenly I was transported back to Freud’s 1932 lecture on femininity: Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of femininity. Nor will you have escaped worrying over this problem – those of you who are men; to those of you who are […]
Cornelius Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra were vital presences at documenta 14. In Kassel, the score of the composer’s Treatise was not only displayed in the Neue Galerie, but also reproduced on the glass windows of Documenta-Halle, while there were concerts of Cardew’s Thälmann Variations and We Sing For The Future!, on September 8th (I missed it […]
It is a Sunday like any other… and to paraphrase John Cage quoted in Molly Nesbit’s essay ‘The Tempest’ on Grabriel Orozco, from her recent book Midnight: The Tempest Essays (p. 158)… Sunday is a day, as much for art as it is for life, for people to keep on washing dishes, to keep on […]
I first encountered the installation The Refusal of Time by South African artist William Kentridge (b. 1955) in the pages of Enrique Vila-Matas’ The Illogic of Kassel – a fictional account of dOCUMENTA (13) back in 2012. While I have not seen the work in person, I have just read the publication produced for that […]
from: Richard Fletcher <fletcher.161@osu.edu> to: National Philistine <feed@nationalphilistine.com> date: Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 4:08 AM subject: Re: Font commission mailed-by: gmail.com Dear Mr Chan, Thank you for getting back to me. I have several interests in your work, which I first encountered not long ago, when I spent a month in Bilbao and saw […]
For our Myth Mother Invention meeting today, between last week’s ‘Conception’ and next week’s ‘Birth’ we’re focusing on ‘In Utero’. Of course, when we use this technical Latin term for pregnancy, many of us, of a certain age, cannot but think of the Nirvana album and its cover with the transparent anatomical manikin of a […]