Kyle Thomas Hemingway: The ephemera edit

“Outlining historical connections in colour can only get you so far—there’s an element that’s missing if you don’t experience it in person. In honour of this, the exhibition is itself an exercise in experimenting with colour, with the Vitra Design Museum´s collection acting as the material that Marcelis is manipulating. The museum’s team are happy to give themselves up to this process, partly as it has allowed them to re-discover ‘objects that were previously virtually unknown or at least somewhat hidden,’ as Steinmüller describes it, and provide these objects with ‘the space to glow.’”

“Cohen’s argument is not a pep talk that promises losers that ‘the only way is up.’ That way of thinking plays into the same unhelpful binary: By optimistically imagining a win on the horizon, we are still acting out our fear of loss. Instead, salvation lies in humility, which Cohen describes as ‘the consequence of an awareness that truth doesn’t belong to us.’ Like loss, humility is characterized by an absence: of pride, self-regard, entitlement. This absence humbles us when we lose, and when we win—as Cohen writes, ‘Humility reminds us of the large portion of arbitrariness that determines any personal success or failure.’”

“Three hours later—some part of which I’d spent fearing for the life of the 76-year-old artist when he fell off a table during an extended force-feeding session—sat down with the two performers over red wine and pizza. I was grateful not only that Paul and Lilith had showered extensively before dinner, but also that the two—perhaps the greatest, most convincing, and most abysmally terrifying pair since Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton—were now in a state of absolute lightness. All the perturbance from that afternoon had evaporated. They seemed free and familiar, like 8-year-old best friends at a birthday party, and you could tell from the faces of the other dinner guests that their catharsis had clearly rubbed off.”