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Issue 103 Spring 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
Sponsored in part by the Frances Dittmer Family Foundation. Experimentation reached its peak in Brazil with the Paulista School, and one of its main contributors was Mendes da Rocha, the 2006 Pritzker Prize–winning architect.
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As a child, Doig lived in Trinidad; he relocated there in 2000, followed soon after by Ofili. The old friends, both painters, met to discuss how a place and its history reinvents subject.
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The painters, friends from the old days, discuss craft and the American way—an oral history ranging from basketball to the nature of art.
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Master actor John Turturro spoke with compatriot June Stein about the art of directing during previews of Yasmina Reza’s A Spanish Play.
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Doña Julia Julieta, of the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers, on Mazatec ancestral knowledge, sacred mushrooms, and one patient’s extraordinary regression through time.
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The LACMA curator’s odyssey into the cosmology of the Maya, in Lords of Creation: The Origins of Ancient Maya Kingship, her latest blockbuster show to present the art and culture of ancient Mesoamerica.
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Producer Omar Amanat speaks with author Nichole Argo on her groundbreaking study, The Human Bombs Project.
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William Katavolos’s career as an avant-gardist spans 60 years, culminating in his ongoing research into aquatecture, or liquid architecture. Colleague Deborah Gans places his vision within the trajectory of architectural history.
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This discussion on colonialism’s legacy between Nigerian novelist Chris Abani and Irish novelist Colm Tóibín was recorded at KGB Bar. BOMB co-sponsored the event with PEN American Center.
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In American Vertigo, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy follows in the footsteps of Tocqueville to bring us a provocative analysis of the American experience. This exchange with novelist Frederic Tuten delves into Lévy’s own passionate journey.
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For centuries, the urban infrastructure of the New World has been haunted by the presence of a rural culture immersed within the city, a sort of parallel slum city that José Castillo terms “urbanism of the informal.”
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Critic and curator Downey queries the 2004 Turner Prize nominee about the excess of carnival and its inversion of power. Shonibare’s latest project, the film Odile and Odette, updates Swan Lake to reflect an ambiguous contemporary morality.
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From his investigation of maritime space to his extensive travels to world seaports, Allan Sekula’s trajectory transforms and connects domains that aren’t usually compared. His practice has extended from photography into filmmaking and recently, curating.
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Portland native Brad Cloepfil is a busy man these days. With his firm, Allied Works Architecture, he is engaged in projects including the expansion of the Seattle Art Museum and the controversial renovation of Two Columbus Circle in New York.
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In her book Modernity Disavowed, theorist Sibylle Fisher calls the Haitian Revolution a non-event, precisely because it is the main event of nineteenth-century Caribbean history that has been systematically left out of many analyses of that period.
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Confronting the condition of anti-colonial utopias that have “withered into postcolonial nightmares,” David Scott proposes in Conscripts of Modernity not that we give better answers to old questions, but that we radically refashion the questions.
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The relation of images is the crux of writer David Levi Strauss’s work, though it’s by no means a sedentary position. He sat down with longtime friend and writer Hakim Bey to discuss how images operate in the public imaginary.
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Born in Nigeria, educated in London, residing in the US and working internationally, Olu Oguibe maintains that a lack of infrastructure has kept a term like global community from realization, but in his work it’s as if he is realizing it singlehandedly.
>>>Michael Roth has written on Foucault, psychoanalysis and the French Hegelians, and curated the exhibition, Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture. Philosopher David Carrier and the author discuss the minds that formed 20th-century thought.
>>>Art critic for The Nation and National Book Critics Circle Award winner Arthur Danto discusses art with Michael Kelly in anticipation of the publication of Danto’s collected essays, The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World.
>>>Renowned for his work on the witchcraft trials of the Inquisition, Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg shifted centuries to document a trajectory of crime, repentance and conspiracy that extends back 30 years.
>>>According to Alexander Nehamas there is an art to living—it’s found in television, Montaigne and Nietzsche. Fellow philosopher David Carrier challenges Nehamas to explain what he means by the “philosophical life” and how writing fits into it.
>>>Maurice Berger and Patricia Williams are old friends from very different backgrounds who have been dialoging on race for years. This time we were lucky enough to sit in as they take on the widening gap in America’s race relations.
>>>The Bohen Series on Critical Discourse. John Elderfield, Chief Curator-at-Large of the Museum of Modern Art, speaks with philosopher David Carrier about Matisse, Mondrian, Prud’hon and contemporary theories of taste and interpretation.
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