Dear All, It is hard to believe we were all together less than two weeks ago! I miss you all, our conversations, debates and exchanges, as well as the beautiful light, the heat and buzz of the city. When we were together, everything felt more immediate, more alive, more real somehow. Of course, it must […]
Australian artist Gordon Bennett (1955-2014) ends his polemic text ‘The Manifest Toe’ (which I am reading in the brilliant book on the artist Gordon Bennett: Be Polite published by Sternberg Press) by reflecting on the idea of the self as part of the artist’s investigation into his own Aboriginal heritage: The self remains relative, and […]
The powers of photography have in effect de-Platonized our understanding of reality, making it less and less plausible to reflect upon our experience according to the distinction between images and things, between copies and originals. It suited Plato’s derogatory attitude toward images to liken them to shadows—transitory, minimally informative, immaterial, impotent co-presences of the real […]
A few weeks ago my friend and OSU colleague Erica Levin told me about Juan Downey’s 1973 video installation Plato Now, which was re-staged in 2012 during the inaugural program at the Tanks in the Tate Modern. The Chilean artist had moved to New York in 1969 and first performed this work at Circuit: A […]
You may have noticed that the last few days’ posts have been focused on contemporary ‘conceptual’ dance. The reason for this is rather personal and somewhat perverse. On Thursday morning I bent down to pick up a pillow from the floor while making the bed and suddenly experienced a sharp pain to my lower back, […]
After yesterday’s post on Simone Weil’s Electra, I realized that I had not explained how my essay in progress related to the dynamic between Classics and Contemporary Art. All will be revealed in due course and, in the meantime, each of my posts this week will attempt to lead us there, and today is the […]