‘I come in fear, an exile’s book, sent to this city: kind reader, give me a gentle hand, in my weariness: don’t shun me in fear, in case I bring you shame: not a line of this paper teaches about love. Such is my author’s fate he shouldn’t try, the wretch, to hide it with […]
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 […]
In their project The Rumors of the World, Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khali Joreige investigate the abundance of spamming and scamming on the internet and the resulting questions of trust and the construction of identity in the post-internet world. In addition to installations of video works in which actors play the roles of the […]
Yesterday I visited the new exhibition at the Columbus Museum of Art – A Dangerous Woman: Subversion and Surrealism in the Art of Honoré Sharrer. It was a revelation and, as a Classicist, I was immediately struck by Sharrer’s feminist reworkings of Greek and Roman myths, often mediated by art historical predecessors. I am sure […]
Arge, iaces, quodque in tot lumina lumen habebas, exstinctum est, centumque oculos nox occupat una. excipit hos volucrisque suae Saturnia pennis collocat et gemmis caudam stellantibus inplet. Argus, you are overthrown, the light of your many eyes is extinguished, and one night sleeps under so many eyelids. Juno took his eyes and set them into […]
Opening on January 20th (can’t think of anything else important happening that day…) at the Drawing Center is Amy Sillman’s new exhibition After Metamorphoses. It comprises an animated drawing (with soundtrack) that she made on the iPad inspired by the mythic tales of change, desire and power from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. While I need to wait […]
I have just visited the Colombian artist José Antonio Suárez Londoño’s brilliant, bright and colourful retrospective exhibition Muestrario (‘Samples’) at La Casa Encendida in Madrid. Here is the catalogue, with a substantial and representative selection of Londoño’s intricate and surreal sketches throughout his career: Since 1997, Londoño has kept drawing notebooks based on reading a […]
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 […]
The presentations on the topic of ‘Origins & Creation’ in my class Classical Mythology/Contemporary Art were delivered on the following art works. Peter Fischli & David Weiss The Way Things Go, 1987Hans-Peter Feldmann 100 Years, 1996-2001Alighiero Boetti Map, 1989Sheela Gowda And Tell Him of My Pain, 1998-2001 Vija Celmins Untitled (Ocean), 1990-1995Damian Ortega Cosmic Thing, […]
It just so happened that a day or so after Vladimir Umanets (aka Wlodzimierz Umaniec) ‘defaced’ one of Mark Rothko’s 1958 Seagram murals at the Tate Modern in London, I taught the latest Classical Myth/Contemporary Art class on the topic of Objects vs. Ideas: Conceptual Art. While I had the below list of artworks to […]