Tree of Magic: Religion and Conspiracy in Popular and Art Cinema
In the following article, I call out a current and historic trend regarding the universal, the primitive, and the creator in film art. The trend has reversed the usual trajectory: Rather than innovations in art film trickling down to the popular cinema, a two-decade fascination with afterlife, vampirism, dissociation and quantum physics in popular media [...]
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We Interrupt this Short Film with a Brief Announcement
By Collier White
In keeping with Quodlibetica’s flexible interpretation of visual art, co-editor Collier White will use this space to discuss film and video as visual art. Or, to be more precise, in this space we will, whenever it suits us, approach questions of linearity, narrative, and other comparative modes made [...]
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Border Patrol
First generation Hmong-American artist Song Thao self-consciously works a gray area between Hmong and western traditions. Is the emerging graduate student working out meaningful syntheses, or, in refusing to choose a single idiom, is Thao bound to fall between the cracks?
Full disclosure: Song Thao is a former student of [...]
That’s Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
by Collier White
A rotten tomato for public art’s ugly face.
Imagine this: for most people, the pinnacle of sculpture and public art in the Twin Cities is the “cherry spoon.”
Does that depress you?
You know, that flagship piece of the Walker Art Center’s own sculpture garden? Actually titled “Spoonbridge and Cherry,” the playfully phallic atrocity [...]
Rooms of One’s Own
Marjorie Schlossman’s Fargo Chaplets
with personal history and annotations
by Collier White
1985, outside Palo Alto, California: I am eight years old. Outside my bedroom door, in the brightly lit hallway visible from my bed, is one of Marjorie Schlossman’s large, abstract expressionist paintings. Partially obscured by the doorframe, the cool blue background and the green and red [...]
Inviting Death’s Release: Antichrist and The Box
Let me weep my cruel fate,
and let me sigh for liberty.
May sorrow break these chains
Of my sufferings, for pity’s sake.
– Handel’s Rinaldo
What a stir Lars von Trier creates with each of his movies. He is the Danish director you love to hate and who, until recently, loved to be hated. His latest film, [...]
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Dead Seductive: The Icky Allure of Pamela Valfer’s Fauna
After seeing Pamela Valfer’s exhibition at the Phipps, I seize on a single word from her artist’s statement: abject. Common definitions indicate the hopeless, rejected and impoverished, but I guess that Valfer was working from a more academic definition: I settle on the definition developed by Julia Kristeva. My most cynical take on Valfer, before [...]
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Wondrous Artifacts
By Collier White
I meet a friend in Denver to stay at his parents’ house for a few days. We’ve both flown a great distance, and on the day we arrive, his grandfather dies, expectedly. As he and I drive away from the tent city of Denver International Airport, imperceptibly gaining altitude as we traverse the [...]