You are leading a Study Abroad program to a significant ancient city (e.g. Athens, Rome, Alexandria) and one morning, midway through the trip, you usher your students onto a small platform at one end of the room where you have breakfast in the hotel where you are all staying. In the room are chairs arranged […]
Today is the last day of documenta 14 and rather than retracing my steps over what happened between Athens and Kassel since April, instead I want to look to the future, specifically to an ongoing project that I first encountered in the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA) and then again in an exhibition organized […]
Tomorrow is the last day of documenta 14, the exhibition that split itself between Athens and Kassel. To mark the closure of this unique experiment, e-flux has published a joint statement by many of the artists who participated. What struck me about this statement was the way in which the living artists emphasized the significance […]
He was praying like that and holding on to the altar When the Sibyl started to speak: “Blood relation Of gods, Trojan, son of Anchises, It is easy to descend into Avernus. Death’s dark door stands open day and night. But to retrace your steps and get back to upper air, That is the task, […]
Then as her fit passed away and her raving went quiet, Heroic Aeneas began: “No ordeal, O Sibyl, no new Test can dismay me, for I have foreseen And foresuffered all. But one thing I pray for Especially: since here the gate opens, they say, To the King of the Underworld’s realms, and here In […]
Meanwhile, the Sibyl, Resisting possession, storms through the cavern, In the throes of her struggle with Phoebus Apollo. But the more she froths at the mouth And contorts, the more he controls her, commands her And makes her his creature. Then of their own accord Those hundred vast tunnel-mouths gape and give vent To the […]
When I take students to Rome, I try to get them to to visualize the immense scale of what the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus must have looked like on the Capitoline Hill by asking them to imagine a ‘Pantheon in the sky’. According to our typical itinerary, we would have seen the Pantheon the […]
Tomorrow documenta 14 opens in Athens. Like the fifth book of Cicero’s On Moral Ends, I want Minus Plato to be the place that you can encounter Athens, its sites (such as the Temple of Olympian Zeus) and the artists’ work (e.g.Prinz Gholam’s My Sweet Country) through a far-away simulation and an imaginary dialogue. So, […]
I hope you have all been enjoying your Apuleian holiday – it has definitely been a refreshing sojourn for me. While we were busy following that ass Lucius (@donkey30123?) and his exploits, there has been an opening and book launch in Athens that is right up Minus Plato‘s alley. The project is called Liquid Antiquity conceived […]
I have just returned from an exhilarating week in Brisbane, Australia where I attended ‘The Classical and the Contemporary’, a conference organized to coincide with the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial (APT8) by the Postclassicisms network at Princeton University, The Queensland Art Gallery, and the University of Queensland. It was a multi-faceted affair, including two public […]