Tag Archives: paris

Lutz Bacher at Treize, Paris

11 November 2022

By Alex Turgeon

The martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus, is said to have been the result of being flayed alive for his acts of Christianity by the Armenian King Astyages.1 The saint is often depicted in votive images carrying his flayed skin about him like a cloak, his anatomical musculature exposed as if it were truly rid of all worldly possessions from his selfless act of piety. One of the most iconic representations of Saint Bartholomew is his inclusion in Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement (1535-1541), which was part of the artist’s commissions for the Sistine Chapel. There, Bartholomew is presented under the right foot of Jesus, carrying his representative cloak of flesh in-hand. The face of this draped skin is often considered a self-portrait of the artist Michelangelo himself, rendered in the hollow folds of its mask-like face—absent of a body.

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Jeremy Shaw’s ‘Phase Shifting Index’ at Centre Pompidou

2 March 2021

By Helen Lee

There is no fresher horror to the modern-day luddite than the social media Live Video function. In the Live Video, the subject is tripled: there is the subject filming, the subject being viewed, and the subject auto-saved for posterity by the filming interface. Live Video has a forebearer in performance art, such as Joan Jonas’ incorporation of live video into her “actions” during the 1970’s. In describing Jonas’ performance Vertical Role (1972), curator Barbara London writes that by using live video, Jonas invokes the “unedited present” as a means of dislocating space and elongating time. (1) In contrast, the practice of “going live” on social media renders the unedited present as digital content to be viewed and shared on a for-profit platform. The medium of video art in the contemporary context is uniquely positioned to ask: Where is a better vantage point from which to view the present than Live?

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