Photography frames and fixes This can be enabling – seeing things through a detail, microcosmic part for whole – synechdoche – the oligopticon, where macro ladidary detail ironically offers more than the wide angle or panorama (contrast the panopticon). The world in a grain of sand. And disabling – frames restrict and compress, and fixity can…
contemporary past
political engagement, contemporary art, archaeology
Six Lines of Flight: Shifting Geographies in Contemporary Art has just closed at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art [Link] [Link] The topic of the exhibition – contemporary art in six “far-flung” cities not typically defined as traditional centers of the art world: Beirut, Cali, Cluj-Napoca, Ho Chi Minh City, San Francisco, Tangier. Ostensibly this is…
the archaeological uncanny
Gabriel Moshenska has sent me his recent and very neat article about the archaeological uncanny in the ghost stories of MR James. Gabriel is quite right, I think, to highlight the connection between Freud’s unheimlich, ghosts, and the haunting persistence, sometimes malevolent, of the past – MR James made much of the curses that can…
Alan Bennett’s satire – the National Trust and heritage
I am hearing a lot about Alan Bennett’s new play “People”, currently running at the National Theatre in London [Link] The setting is where he grew up – south Yorkshire UK, in a run down country house facing an uncertain future. What are it’s upper crust owners going to do to make ends meet? Sell…
an archaeology of the contemporary past
Today I’m in the Clark Center at Stanford, hub of the Bio-X Program – bioengineering and more. Steve Quake (Stanford Bioengineering and Applied Physics) is hosting a meeting of The Human Document Project – [Link] With us are Laura Welcher (Long Now Foundation), Tim D. White (Palaeoanthropology, Berkeley), Michael Fischer (Anthropological Sciences, Canterbury, UK), Andreas…
Coriolan/us, Brecht, site and intervention
Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes are directing another wonderful and extraordinary site specific production of a classic dramatic text. A couple of years ago it was Aeschylus’s Persians set in a simulation of a German village used for military training in the Brecon Beacons of Wales [Link]. Currently running is Coriolan/us – a hybrid of…
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