At the end of January in 1981, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd. That very evening, quite by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an […]
I wanted to talk about everyone, everything at once as being mutual commodities on the shelf of the marketplace. Blackness, whiteness, femaleness, communicate and contradict each other. On certain levels we’re just folks, on the other levels we’re Americans, Nazis, niggers, Republicans, protein chains, you name it—the audience has the task of hearing, (active listening), […]
“Living in a gated community; living in a military zone; being in an airport, factory, or museum; owning an anti-paparazzo handbag; being fitted with an invisibility cloak; being a superhero; being female and over 50; surfing the dark web; being a dead pixel; being a Wi-Fi signal moving through human bodies; being undocumented or poor; […]
“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. […]
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 […]
I’m still dwelling on names and naming today and this leads me, inevitably, to the work of Josh Smith and his signature “name” paintings. Bob Nickas, in his book Painting Abstraction, describes these works as follows: The “name” paintings, composed with the letters that spell his first and last names, at first seem to identity their […]
