Liquid Antiquity

PUBLISHED BY THE DESTE FOUNDATION

Liquid Antiquity is neither an academic textbook nor an art book, but a unique platform that explores the intersection between contemporary art and antiquity in a fluid stream of images, ideas, and voices. An experiment challenging our petrifying idea of classicism, this publication radically breaks the traditional notion of temporality with a visual essay spanning more than twenty-five hundred years of art history that is set in an open-ended dialogue with a series of critical texts, and interviews with contemporary artists. Liquid Antiquity explores the possibility of reinventing classicism and argues for its enduring influence on contemporary art.

Liquid Antiquity includes: a critical essay by Brooke Holmes, investigating the concept of “liquid antiquity”; a series of 27 lexemes that critically rethink the traditional language of classicism, written by prominent critics and scholars (Lucia Allais, Emanuela Bianchi, Joshua Billings, Joy Connolly, Page duBois, Jaś Elsner, Richard Fletcher, Devin Fore, Hal Foster, Simon Goldhill, Constanze Güthenke, Yannis Hamilakis, Polina Kosmadaki, Miriam Leonard, Glenn W. Most, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Spyros Papapetros, Mark Payne, James I. Porter, Effie Rentzou, Rebekah Rutkoff, Giulia Sissa, Michael Squire, Maria Stavrinaki, Yorgos Tzirtzilakis, Phiroze Vasunia, and Christopher S. Wood.); and ten interviews with contemporary artists (Matthew Barney, Paul Chan, Haris Epaminonda, Urs Fischer, Jeff Koons, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Charles Ray, Asad Raza, Kaari Upson, and Adrián Villar Rojas.)

Edited by:
Brooke Holmes and Karen Marta
Year of publication:
2017
ISBN:
978-2-8399-2067-4
English / Hardcover / 24 x 17,1 cm / 304 pages