Now the dust has settled on my experimental class on Classical Mythology/Contemporary Art, I want to make 2 final posts on this topic before moving onto the topic of my next project as part of an Ancient Philosophy course this coming semester (watch this space). This post will merely list the topics and art works […]
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 […]
For our second session of presentations in my Classical Mythology/Contemporary Art class (last Wednesday), the students focused on the theme of ‘Heroes & Villains’ in the following art works: Gerhard Richter October 18, 1977, 1988Adrian Piper Cornered, 1988Rineke Dijkstra The Buzzclub, Liverpool, UK/Mysteryworld, Zaandam, NL, 1996-1997, 1996-1997Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, Zidane: A Twenty First […]
On Monday in our Classical Mythology/Contemporary Art class, we had our first session of student presentations. Ten students discussed ten art works (listed below in no particular order) in relation to the theme of ‘War, Trauma & Homecoming’. They described the work and then considered how they resonated with the ‘Epic’ Myths we had been […]
We had our first discussion about Contemporary Art in my class Classical Mythology/Contemporary Art today and it was on the topic ‘Same as it ever was: Appropriation Art’. As part of the lecture, we looked at Sherrie Levine’s 1990 work La Fortune (after Man Ray): Sherrie Levine, “La Fortune” (After Man Ray: 4), 1990. Felt […]
The new Semester has (already!) started here at Ohio State and I am teaching a class called Classical Mythology/Contemporary Art. Now, unlike many of the essays in the illuminating recent volume of essays on this topic – Isabelle Loring Wallace and Jennie Hirsh (eds) Contemporary Art and Classical Myth (Ashgate, 2011) – my course is […]
In the Spring, I recorded a podcast for the Philadelphia Museum of Art about Cy Twombly’s Classicism. The first half is a talk based on the introduction I delivered at the American Philological Association Annual Meeting in January for a panel I put together called Abstracting Classics: Cy Twombly, Modern Art and the Ancient World […]
The Roman poet-philosopher Lucretius, in his De rerum natura (‘On the Nature of Things’) introduces a discussion (and refutation) of Empedocles’ theory of the Four Elements (or Roots) – Earth, Water, Fire, Air – with a description of his predecessor’s homeland of Sicily (DRN 1. 716-725). David Sedley in his book Lucretius and the Transformation […]