Frank Castorf: Erniedrigte und Beleidigte
Watching Frank Castorf's adaptation of Dostoyevsky's "Erniedrigte und Beleidigte" feels like being invited to a family party where everybody knows each other, but nobody knows you.
Rene Pollesch: Pablo in der Plusfiliale
How should I integrate this into my sexuality? If you want to fuck globalisation, technology and the neo-liberal rhetoric of the new left, you have to deconstruct the whole notion of sexuality.
Donald Judd at the Kunstsammlung Nordrheinwestfalen
Tell me, what is so interesting about those bloody boxes?
Paul McCarthy: Brain Box Dream Box
Rubbing it in is what Paul McCarthy does, whether with paint, ketchup or chocolate sauce. Excess is the name of his game. McCarthy likes pushing things too far, in his drawings, but most of all in his performances, which always end up a complete mess.
Guy Cassiers: Proust 1 and 3
When Dutch theatre critics wrote of Guy Cassiers' adaptation of Marcel Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu", that it was a masterpiece and that he was approaching perfection, I was at once curious and skeptical.
Rem Koolhaas|OMA: Content (The Book)
With SMLXL Rem Koolhaas redefined the architectural monograph. Now with Content he has done it again.
OMA|Rem Koolhaas: Content (The Exhibition)
A solo architecture exhibition not only shows what a practice does, how it wants to be perceived and what it stands for, it also conveys something of its mentality.
Michel Houellebecq: The Elementary Particles
A friend recently told me she had read about a dozen books during an illness and wondered how many books she could have read if she hadn’t partied so much all her life. I have read many books and I often wonder how much I could have lived if I hadn’t read so much.
Michael Cunningham: The Hours
The Hours is a book about happiness, the happiness that resides in the simple things which we only become aware of long after the moment itself has passed.
Djuna Barnes: Nightwood
Nightwood by Djuna Barnes is one of the few books I’ve read more than once. The sentences seem to flow over the pages, at once 'heftig bewegt', then 'utterly tranquil' or 'quietly flowing' as Anton Webern annotated his Five Movements for String Quartet.
Georges Perec: Life a User's Manual
Life A User's Manual is a book for readers, and the more you have read the more you will appreciate the subtle references to other novels and popular culture. But to say so would do injustice to a book that is quite simply a marvel to read.
Roberto Calasso: The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
I must have been 9 or 10 years old when my mother gave me a big encyclopaedia of Greek mythology. I absolutely loved it. I bought The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony the year the Dutch translation was published, in 1991. I was hooked from the first page. This was the book I’d been waiting for.