Fresh from my flying visit to Los Angeles for the opening of William E. Jones: Heralitus Fragment 124, Automatically Illustrated at the David Kordansky Gallery, I thought I would share with you a couple of thoughts about how I translated the fragment, which William E. Jones transformed into one of the works in the exhibition […]
Here is a shameless plug for the upcoming William E. Jones exhibition, for which I contributed an essay for the catalogue. Also, William and I will be having a conversation before the opening – this Saturday January 11th – on the topic of ‘Heraclitus in Limbo’. If there are any L.A.-based Classicists out there, it […]
As I was soaking up the last day of the Wexner Center’s wonderful Blues for Smoke exhibition today, I finally had a moment to pay closer attention to one of the works that had intrigued me in previous, rushed visits: Jimmie Durham’s The Caliban Codex. Jimmie Durham Caliban’s Mask, 1992 In a sequence of diary […]
I believe in Godas fully physical thus the Outer Předmostof the World on which we ‘hang’as though it were wood and our own bodies arehanging on it – Charles Olson Maximus Poems, III, 13, 1963 Allen Ginsberg Charles Olson “Poet Maximus elder” during the Vancouver Poetry Conference, July 1963. c. Allen Ginsberg Estate Ben Shahn, Maximus […]
Painted sometime between 1938 and 1941, a work of Rothko’s so-called ‘mythic’ period, before his ‘classic’ work of the 1950s, Antigone depicts a tangle of torsos, rising from a rectangular blue box of feet and other strange objects, coalescing into a series of four (or five) heads – two red-faced males, one with curly hair […]
Dani Leventhal, Untitled, 1999 This startling quotation comes from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Language, which I stumbled across while idly leafing through Jacques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind. The statement is a reference to the famous anecdote about the origin of drawing or painting that was first described by Pliny the Elder […]
I have no idea who (if anyone) reads this blog, so I thought I would try a little experiment to see who is out there & at the same time, discover a little something about you, specifically if it is your curiosity about the Classical or the Contemporary (or both) that brings you here. To […]
For more, if still tantalizing, information, go here or click on any of the above images.
As his latest Balloon Dog (this time of the orange variety) goes under the hammer at Christie’s tonight, it is worth noting that, when given the chance, its creator, Jeff Koons, has consistently described this particular work of his as a ‘Trojan Horse’. From the current Christie’s sale: “It’s a very optimistic piece, it’s a […]
A browse through the Store at the Wexner Center for the Arts here in Columbus, Ohio, never fails to inspire me in my ongoing education in the weird and wonderful world of contemporary art, and also with topics to post on Minus Plato. The latest is Frank Santoro’s Pompeii, which is a brilliant graphic novel […]