Self Portrait as Achilles

Andrea Mary Marshall, Self Portrait as Achilles, 2015

#andreamarymarshall #postclassicisms #lecture #achilles #artincontext #asfa #artincontextlab #photography #selfportrait #falling #rupture 

Life without Tragedy

Not yet removed ..

Life without Tragedy, 2019

Commissioned by @occny

#governorsisland #sculpture #kostisvelonis #debate #onassisfoundation #assembly #nyc

@zacharyschulmanphotography

Q&A Goes Horribly Wrong

Q&A Goes Horribly Wrong

Classicists engage in frequent debate about whether the field is “too white,” whether Western civilization is a manufactured idea and what new lines of inquiry will ensure classics’ continued relevance -- or even its survival.

But at an annual gathering of classicists this weekend in San Diego, that debate crossed the line from professional to personal, from real inquiry to racism.

The incident involved an attack on Dan-el Padilla Peralta, an assistant professor of classics at Princeton University, by an independent scholar named Mary Frances Williams. It happened during a question-and-answer period at a panel on the future of classics Saturday at a Society for Classical Studies conference.

Panelists included Peralta, who spoke about an alleged incident of racial profiling at the conference site, in which two classicists of color were stopped and asked for identification. He also cited classics journal publication data showing that authors are largely white, and pushed for diversification of the field. Another speaker was Sarah Bond, an associate professor of classics at the University of Iowa whose research and public outreach often focuses on the idea that our notions of race in the classical world are much more informed by Eurocentric Renaissance views than historical reality.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/01/07/racist-comments-directed-classics-scholar-disciplinary-meeting-floor-classicists

Scott Jaschik contributed to this article

Hyperion Has Stumbled

Hyperion Has Stumbled (detail), 2018 

When you daydream while walking—and, with your eyes set on the sky, you find that evidently you are not Hyperion, celebrated by Hölderlin in his writings, who lingers above earth—it is easy to stumble. Yet the daydreamer’s clash with reality is from another perspective a creative or even an insightful encounter, and one of the ideal media that causes people to fall over obstacles is sculpture. In this lecture, I will argue for a conceptual shift from the celebrated dexterity of the hand to the despised clumsiness of the leg. I will share samples of my work that stick to and never leave the ground. These works confirm the close dependency of sculpture on an onerous and yet surprisingly generative reality.

Location: Scheide Caldwell House
Title: Hyperion Has Stumbled
Speaker: Kostis Velonis (Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellow)
Respondent: Mitra Abbaspour, (Princeton University Art Museum)
Time: 1:30 p.m.

December 7 at Princeton University

From Damocles to Socrates, the classics in / of Hip-Hop

From Damocles to Socrates, the classics in / of Hip-Hop  

Growing up in 1990s Harlem, I couldn’t have escaped hip-hop if I’d wanted to. The streets bumped with it: the boombox action on the corner and in the park, the speakers screaming from apartment windows, the cars reverberating with bass. On the way home from school every weekday, a nerdy Dominican boy listened to the beats and was mesmerized. None of that loud music in our house, my mother would always say — but I itched to bump the beats at home on our radio. Sometimes, if Mom had stepped out to the store and I was feeling brave, I’d tune in to Hot97 and live a few minutes of glory.

It wasn’t only the sonic architecture of the bass that snared me. The allure was in the verses themselves with their mighty torrent of words: sharp and cutting, smooth and coy, boisterous and threatening. And the prolifically inventive rhyme schemes! When, at the innocent age of twelve, I first heard the Notorious B.I.G. rap “Escargot, my car go / one sixty, swiftly” I had no clue what escargot was and had to look the word up — but even before receiving enlightenment from the dictionary I knew the verse was a gem. As much as the books I devoured at the local library, the rap game expanded my cultural horizons.

https://eidolon.pub/from-damocles-to-socrates-fbda6e685c26  

Text by Dan-el Padilla Peralta 

thrown off a cliff

thrown off a cliff, 2018 

Marble, wood, acrylic 

19 x 33 x 19 cm

Liquid Antiquity: A New Fold

This workshop engages scholars, curators, and artists in a response to the multimedia project “Liquid Antiquity,” commissioned by the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, in order to extend further its explorations of alternative models of engaging classical antiquity and to enrich collaboration between the academic and art worlds in new forms of public engagement around the legacies of classicism.

“Liquid Antiquity,” is a platform for radically rethinking the relationship between the classical and the contemporary. Antiquity is an irrepressible source of meaning today. But what it means is never fixed in stone. It must instead be continually rethought for an always changing “we” under always changing conditions of local and global significance. Resisting classicism as dead weight, “Liquid Antiquity” aims to make the ancient Greek past available as a fluid resource for the present by shifting attention from the matter of antiquity to the question of why antiquity matters. “Liquid Antiquity” was therefore designed as an exhibition without antiquities that stakes out the book as its primary site. Through word and image, the book stages an encounter with a “liquid” antiquity as well as a series of reflections on this encounter through contemporary artistic practice and the history of classicism over millennia. Spanning twenty-five hundred years in an unprecedented collaboration between leading artists, theorists, writers, art historians, classicists, cultural historians, and archaeologists, “Liquid Antiquity” is a handbook, deeply collaborative in spirit and experimental in form, for the creative work of reimagining the present through the ancient past.  It is complemented by a video installation designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro on view in the antiquities galleries at the Benaki Museum in Athens.

“Liquid Antiquity: A New Fold” is inspired by two guiding commitments of the initial project: first, the commitment to collaboration and conversation; and second, the commitment to a way forward that is always unpredictably emergent out of the past—hence, the idea of a fold introduced here. An interdisciplinary group of scholars and artists are invited to reflect on “Liquid Antiquity” and think together about strategies—conceptual, aesthetic, pragmatic—for the ongoing work of “doing” classical reception under the sign of liquidity.  Time will be primarily devoted to discussion rather than formal presentation.

“Liquid Antiquity: A New Fold” is organized by Dimitri Gondicas (Princeton Athens Center), Brooke Holmes (Princeton/Postclassicisms), and Polina Kosmadaki (Benaki Museum) and supported by the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies and Postclassicisms.

Confirmed participants:

Joy Connolly (The Graduate Center at CUNY)

Richard Fletcher (Ohio State University)

Phoebe Giannisi (University of Thessaly)

Constanze Güthenke (Oxford University)

Brooke Holmes (Princeton University)

Despina Katapoti (University of the Aegean)

Polina Kosmadaki (Benaki Museum)

Christodoulos Panayiotou (Independent Artist)

Nina Papaconstantinou (Independent Artist)

Dan-el Padilla Peralta (Princeton University)

Stefania Strouza (Independent Artist)

Giorgos Tzirtzilakis (University of Thessaly/DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art)

Kostis Velonis (Independent Artist)

 http://www.postclassicisms.org/workshops/forthcoming-2/liquid-antiquity-a-new-fold/