In a similar gesture, Douglas Gordon’s Under Darkness, Between Shadows (2000), hovered over the city. I first heard rumours of this work in the 1990s, and included it in Justified Sinners (co-edited with Ross Birrell, 2002), an anthology surveying the archaeology of Scottish counter-culture, of which Gordon’s darkness marked an endpoint. ‘Under Darkness, Between Shadows’ is a proposal to […]
A ghost, even of a library, recognizes its own. I see myself reflected in Friedl Body’s 1975 photograph of the dark, hollowed eyes of Harry Smith starting out at me from page 150 of Jonas Mekas’ A Dance with Fred Astaire (Anthology Editions, 2017). In 1987-1988, Smith – musicologist, filmmaker, painter, anthropologist and paper-plane collector […]
On October 29, 1949, the Gen. Howze pulled into New York Harbor with 1,352 refugees on board. I was one of them. I settled down in Williamsburg, the poorest part of Brooklyn, but that was the luckiest day of my life.
The exhibition “Voyage around my Room” curated by Kika Kyriakakou (with production coordinator Vicky Tsirou), took place between March 18th and May 2nd this year at the Athens Municipality Arts Center in Parko Eleftherias. Conflating Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own” (1926) and Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage Autour de Ma Chambre (1794), the […]
In our current state of governmental chaos, I hark back to a surprisingly overlooked statement by President Trump’s White House physician, Dr. Ronny Jackson. After completing his medical assessment of Trump, Jackson stated, and I paraphrase, that Trump was highly unusual in that each day he begins anew, unfettered by memory or attention to consequences […]
The hardy Trojans feel a cold shiver go through them, Their prince from the depths of his heart beseeches The god: “Phoebus, you always had pity for Troy And her troubles, it was you who steadied Paris’ aim and directed the arrow Into Achilles, you who were pilot As I entered sea after sea, skirting […]