If I admire, or even excuse, a brutal act committed two thousand years ago, it means that my thought, today, is lacking in the virtue of humanity. – Simone Weil ‘The Great Beast: Some Reflections on the Origins of Hitlerism’, in Simone Weil: Selected Essays, 1934-1943 (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1962) p. 133, quoted in […]
He turned, finally, to the book Moyra Davey published on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition for the 2018 Scotiabank Photography Award in 2018. It is the largest book by Davey he owns, like Index Cards an anthology of texts, but also a rich survey of the artist’s photographic and film work. While flicking through […]
We live in a world of unreality and dreams. – Simone Weil, 1942, from ‘You Are Here’ by Nicholas R. Bell in “Wonder” (2015) Forgive me, please, but I would like to speak of something else, to speak of Tubal – Rosee Rosen from “The Blind Merchant 1989-1991”
…a collective choreography of banal movements…[1] …even protesting a museum exhibition is still a form of participation…[2] …not even if I had ten tongues and ten mouths…[3] …a Roman would always think we…[4] …Judith beheading Holoferenes: make art history scream…[5] …at the Old Library Wex’s book starts to come alive…[6] [1] Hey you, yes you, […]
“The Wall is the Wall, it has never changed or evolved from the first day I conceived of it.” Sure, the idiotic idea of your never-to-be-built-wall may have emerged, fully-formed, from your head, like some phantom Athena (the “Wall”). But this Wall remains a figment of your limited imagination no matter how many real-time revisions […]
How can I expect anyone to read these daily posts of Minus Plato? Whenever someone comes up to me and says that they have read some posts, but they cannot keep up on a daily basis, I always tell them that there is no way I would expect anyone to read Minus Plato every day, […]
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 […]
Ever since I watched it, I have wanted to write about Jean-Luc Godard’s 2004 film Notre Musique. Set in Sarajevo, it tells the story of two women – Olga and Judith – and debates ideas of violence, ethics, colonialism, the Other and the Israeli-Palestine conflict. The main reason that I obsessed over the film was […]
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 […]
