In the documentary ‘Bosch: The Garden of Dreams,’ Chinese artist Cai Quo Quian picks out a relatively innocuous detail in the surreal, polyamorous super-abundance of Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights.’ An image of animals drinking from a river or lake. He connects it with his own work, specifically the installation entitled ‘Heritage’ in which all […]

Can something be both superficial and deep-rooted? You’d think it would be a contradiction, but if you consider roots horizontally extended over decades and centuries,  the space opens for the two concepts to co-exist. A superficially attractive idea, an assumption based on appearances, an error, these can persist and the longer they do the more […]

To eat a tortoise you must first break its protective shell. Chances are, you hadn’t given this particular challenge much thought up to now, but it seems to have been the prompt for two Aesopic fables, two which over the years have undergone a number of transformations. The key action, as it impacts the victim, […]

  ~~~ In late 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, an elementary school in rural California received warning of an imminent nuclear attack. As the yellow light flashed on their control panel, the administration tried to establish whether this was a fault or a test. Unable to get confirmation, they had to […]

‘Little Fugitive’ is a vérité style independent feature feature film shot in New York and Coney Island in the early fifties. I wasn’t aware of it until recently, but I probably should have been. It won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival and was a key influence on the French New Wave and […]

‘The Astrologer who Fell into a Well’ is a mean-spirited anecdote that demonstrates a common sense truth: you need to look where you are going, otherwise you may trip and fall. It goes like this: An astrologer went walking at night to study the stars. He fell down a deep well. A passer-by answered his […]