Tag Archives: Homer
After yesterday’s rather extreme post that called for a “Classics without Antiquity”, aka the grounding of any engagement between Classicists and contemporary artists in the abandoning of antiquity (at least temporarily) by the former so as to better immerse themselves in contemporary debates, today I feel a palpable sense of responsibility to offer some kind […]
When Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno made Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait, filmed at a La Liga match on April 23, 2005, they were not to know what would happen in the 2006 World Cup final. In Gordon and Parreno’s film, the pre-headbutt Zidane was like Achilles in Homer’s Iliad – the focal point, the […]
Any visitor to documenta 14, in either Athens, Kassel or both, who saw the work of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña would immediately think of the color red. Red is also the color faced by the reader of her recent book About to Happen, published by siglio press. Yet just over half-way through the book, the […]
If you open the book, which you saw in yesterday’s post (and you can see here if you missed it) balancing on people’s head in Athens (in a photograph and as a performance), as part of a darkened installation in Kassel (along with its 12 sisters), and which I held in my hand in the […]
Homer’s Margites, which is deplorably lost, bore, says Aristotle, the same analogy to comedy, as his Odyssey and Iliad to tragedy. The gods had taught him neither to dig nor to plough, nor any other skill; he failed in every craft – Aristotle, Nic. Eth. vi. 7, 1141:
Did you take this map with you when you left the cats and went to visit the Acropolis? Were you tempted to draw these diagrams in the dirt alongside the ordered remains of the ancient temple? Did you perhaps glance across from the Parthenon and its stolen marbles to the Erechtheion, lamenting the missing sister […]
In Homer’s Odyssey, while several female characters, both divine and mortal, are described in the act of weaving (and un-weaving), only two of them – Calypso and Circe – are depicted as singing while they work. In book 5, we encounter Calypso ‘singing with a sweet voice as she went to and fro before the […]
Last year I visited Brisbane, Australia for a conference called ‘The Classical and the Contemporary’ as part of the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial. Before going I spent some time looking at the artists on the Queensland Art Gallery website and I was immediately drawn to a work by US-Iraqi artist Rheim Alkadhi called The Eye […]
Just before leaving Columbus in summer 2014 to spend a sabbatical year in Madrid, along with my partner, Rebeka, and our son, Eneko, I discovered that the french filmmaker Chris Marker contributed photographs to a little book on Homer, published in 1958 by Paris-based Éditions du Seuil (where Marker worked between 1954-8), as part of […]