America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956 – Allen Ginsberg ‘America’ When Plato died, the only material possessions he left behind were a small garden next to the Academy, two slaves, a bowl with which he made offerings to the gods and a tiny […]
[Minus Plato is undergoing some technical difficulties with image uploads so I apologize for the scarcity of pictures to accompany this post. I hope to have this rectified before tomorrow] When I woke up this morning I had a somewhat modest plan for the day: to visit the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA) by way […]
Today, on my way to start my first full day at documenta 14 at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), I took a detour past the Lysikrates Monument. This small cylindrical building was erected in 335/4 BCE (a few years after Philip of Macedon’s conquest of Greece) to commemorate the work of the ‘chorus-producer’ […]
I finished my good friend and fellow Classicist Johanna Hanink’s brilliant new book The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in the Era of Austerity before boarding the plane from Madrid to Athens. I am here to experience, research and write about the documenta 14 exhibition, specifically how both ancient sites and themes are activated by the […]
Yesterday at the Guggenheim Bilbao I saw Pierre Huyghe’s remarkable 2014 film Untitled (Human Mask). It stars the monkey Fuku-chan (who came to fame in a YouTube video that depicts her working as a waitress north of Toyko) dressed in a mask and wig waiting impatiently in an abandoned restaurant. Set and filmed in 2011, […]
Tonight in Athens, between 7-8pm in the Odeon (Athens Conservatoire) you can experience the 51st rendition of Bilbaino artist Mattin’s ‘durational concert’ Social Dissonance, created with Dafni Krazoudi, Danai Liodaki, Ioannis Sarris, and Eleni Zervou. Here is the score for each nightly performance (excluding Mondays): Social Dissonance Score: Listen carefully. The audience is your instrument, […]
Greetings from Madrid! On the flight over I was reading the new issue of Afterall magazine which is dedicated to the idea of indigeneity (a term that combines the adjective indigenous and the noun identity). In her essay ‘Floating Between Past and Future: The Indigenisation of Environmental Politics’, Lucy Lippard discusses the artist Cecilia Vicuña […]
Today starts a new phase of this year of daily posts (Minus Plato Today), as between now and early August I will be posting while traveling throughout Europe (including stops in Madrid, Bilbao, Athens, London, Malaga and Kassel). Central to this journey is my experience of documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel and the question […]
I just read Mirela Baciak e-flux post Footnotes from Athens which begins as follows: I spent four weeks in Athens starting in early February 2017. I conducted thirty interviews with people, some of whom have been living in Athens and working in the field of art for at least a few years, and others who, […]
Here in Columbus, at the Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies at OSU, we celebrated the opening reception of VOID WRITING – an exhibition by 조은영 (which I blogged about a few days ago). As part of the exhibition of five of Choey’s monumental hanging pieces, the curator of the Center, Wendy Watkins, selected some […]