How much time did you spend in Athens with your face up against a window, peering into a closed building, trying to get a glimpse of a work of art or at least the space in which it was made? Did this happen to you at Archimidous 15 and Nikhil Chopra’s Drawing a Line through […]
Did you know when you took the photograph of this quiet performance piece, with its rustle of aligning sunlight, that its creator’s name, Marie Cool Fabio Balducci, was some form of collective pseudonym? Did you read about ‘them’ in an interview article called ‘The Politicization of Anatomy’, in which ‘they’ respond to a question about […]
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, […]
For the next seven days I am going to document my experience reading French artist Eric Baudelaire’s book Anabases (as well as Xenophon and, perhaps Arrian). Here is the blurb (written by Morad Montazami) so you have some idea of what’s in store: This book is not for reading but for wandering. Its lines do […]
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 […]
Maybe the Trojan Horse was the first activist artwork – Lucy R. Lippard Click either image above to reveal Odysseus and friends.
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 […]
My copy of January’s Artforum arrived yesterday and its cover compounded my disappointment that I’ll not be able to see Kerry James Marshall’s exhibition Mastry at the Met in the flesh. I was, however, lucky enough to be living in Madrid when Kerry James Marshall: painting and other stuff was on display at the Palacio […]
For today’s post, since it is exam week, I pose the following question: Do you need to read Homer’s Odyssey to fully appreciate the net art classic My Boyfriend Came Back From the War (or MBCBFTW) (1996), by Russian artist Olia Lialina? Answer with reference to other digital art forms and projects, including the idea […]
