four culture things that are haunting me of late:

a) sarah kane's blasted--pat and i left the theater, thinking to ourselves, well that was a formal excercise in shoving as much offensiveness as possible into 90 minutes--and that was part of it, but it was also a formal discussion of compactness, and the difficulties of describing the horror of our everyday life, of making violence less rhetorical and more emobodied--imagine john webster and harold pinter rewriting no exit.
b) el antusi's peak mountain set at rom. first thing--why this show isn't at the ago, and the ethnographic history of that is a problem, but this one peice, a group of mountains constructed out of the gold lids of peak canned milk, has everything. it is beautiful, and it is redemptive, and it is easy enough for a five yr old to say shiny (& one did), but it is also about how ghana was once an empire of gold, and ghana was the place where gold was made from slaves--the push and pull of commerce, acculmated into carefully constructed piles of detrius, has an intensity that rises and falls, like an undertow, never breaking the surface.
c) david hutton at mocca, the room is black, and there is a set of diaramas, of common places, exquisite, slightly gimmicky, but at the end of the show, i was genuinely afraid of the dark.
d) pae white's two peices, one of smoke, which i wrote of before on this blog, but which also has a connection between digital media and new history. there is also a v. funny, v. big, one on one translation of a 1970s macrame and green yarn peice that was printed onto a white field, complete wtih auction tags. whites work is exactly about what it means to translate the empeheral into the tangible, but the addition of digital complicaitons made it much more complicated and kind of ravishing.