Quodlibetica originated from the desire to write about art and visual culture in ways not confined by academic conventions or journalistic hype. Part journal, part blog, Quodlibetica fosters critical conversations about visual arts in a forum that is accessible, engaging, and committed to quality writing. Based on the Latin quodlibet, which has entered the English language as (1) a statement proposed for disputation, (2) the actual discussion, and (3) the whimsical combination of familiar elements, Quodlibetica is a space to argue eloquently and whimsically about art, find out what’s happening in the Twin Cities art scene, and engage with writers, artists, and critics, who like to think. Contact us if you want to get involved.
Death
Death is an ideal subject for art: marginalized, terrifying and ultimate. In our second constellation, Quodlibetica looks at death in contemporary art and invites writers and artists to talk about death, art, and ethics. Click here for details: http://www.quodlibetica.com/the-call-of-death
Patitas (little parts)
The Statement
How do we face the abruptness of death? How do we capture life’s departure? How do we part? These drawings engage with the act of leave-taking. They are somewhat ironic and painful reflections imbued with the deeply felt desires for whom and what can no longer be. By exploring the [...]
Published 11.23.2009
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, [...]
Published 11.23.2009
“You’re dying now. Get used to it!”
- Jim Crace, Being Dead
Death is an odd subject. It is everywhere, happens all the time, and yet we go to elaborate lengths to pretend it doesn’t affect us. Perhaps it takes a fictitious doctor of zoology, courtesy of Jim Crace, to state the obvious. Perhaps it [...]
Published 11.23.2009
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 [...]
Published 11.23.2009
While I was visiting Finland in September I ran into two artist projects that involved the death of animals: Terike Haapoja’s video installation at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, titled Community, presents life-size video projections of real-time infrared images of the energy leaving the bodies of recently dead animals (see http://www.terikehaapoja.net/2009/). As the [...]
Published 11.23.2009
In case you have not yet noticed, angels are all the rage. Long gone are the days of Wim Wenders’ gloomy, alienated voyeurs stalking unsuspecting Berliners in Wings of Desire (1987). The angels of counter-culture, most famously Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1993), have gone mainstream: think of Emma Thompson’s imposing, majestic, [...]
Published 11.23.2009
Roxanne Jackson savors images of the “the kill,” the dead, and the undead in her exhibition “We Believe in Some thing,” recently on view in the galleries of the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program (MAEP) at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Disturbing body dismemberments and monstrous hybrids signal the violence that polices the cultural categories “human” [...]
Published 11.23.2009