Monthly Archives: April 2014

Thomas Demand Hypermediation

Posted on April 30, 2014 by

Put to rest that old hoary notion that photography has a special ontological relation to reality. In works by contemporary photographer Thomas Demand, that relation is marked as hypermediation. The image is at least three times removed from the original … Continue reading →

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Noah (Not) Grotesque (Enough)

Posted on April 30, 2014 by

I always wondered why Noah planted that vineyard, got so drunk that he incapacitated himself. I always suspected that it had to do with trauma. It’s a rotten human condition it is. The world is cursed, first by “man,” and … Continue reading →

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Oranament of Empire, Pillar of the Church — Empress Flaccilla

Posted on April 29, 2014 by

Waiting around in the Byzantine gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this head caught my attention. My first thought was that she had to have been someone. I’ve since gone to look at other pictures online of this bust, … Continue reading →

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To Mend the World Queer Messianic (José Esteban Muñoz) (& Emil Fackenheim)

Posted on April 29, 2014 by

Just finished reading José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.  His philosophical lodestars are Bloch and Marcuse, Heidegger and Agamben, but I came to see here the kind of thinking associated with the Jewish post-Holocaust … Continue reading →

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(Byzantine) Woman Of Valor (Ktisis)

Posted on April 28, 2014 by

She’s one of my mother’s favorite people at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I like her too a lot, a woman of valor, and of rich substance, an image of female power and patronage, like the matrons described sometimes by … Continue reading →

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(Breathing) Him to Her After Deconstruction (Luce Irigaray Between East and West)

Posted on April 28, 2014 by

Against the better judgment of colleagues and friends I assigned Luce Irigaray Between East and West for my graduate seminar on “Religion, Art, and Aesthetics.”This year, we were looking at bodies and images of the body, starting with Nietzsche’s The … Continue reading →

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Sovereign Power and Protection (Hindu and Buddhist Art from Lost Kingdoms of Southeast Asia)

Posted on April 27, 2014 by

Went to see “Lost Kingdoms,” the blockbuster exhibition of awesome, awesome Hindu and Buddhist mostly sculpture from now vanished and forgotten kingdoms in southeast Asia dating from the 5th through 8th centuries. Holland Cotter’s review in the NYT  describes the export-migration … Continue reading →

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