Mixed media, ceramic, and lead. Researched and written by Thomas McEvilley. Designed by Peter Koch and hand-lettered by Christopher Stinehour. Printed letterpress from zinc engravings onto soft lead plates by Koch. Housed loose in a glazed ceramic box created by the sculptor Stephen Braun. 

Each box, unique in color and shape, contains a selection of twenty-one selected short, philosophical performance pieces by Thomas McEvilley composed from the lore surrounding Diogenes of Sinope. As the plates are loose and unpaginated, they can be read in random order.

This “text transmission object” is a collaborative sculpture designed as a “forgery” of a hypothetical object discovered by archeologists in a dump in ancient Corinth. Purporting to carry cryptic philosophical fragments written by Cynic philosopher Diogenes, the ceramic box appears to have weathered several millennia in the ground. This piece takes the postmodern tendency to ignore context one step further by simply inventing a context in which to consider the work.

11 pages. Unbound. Ceramic case. 7×5″.

Thomas McEvilley (born 1939, Cincinnati, Ohio) is an American art critic, poet, novelist, and scholar, who was a distinguished lecturer in art history at Rice University and founder and former head of the Department of Art Criticism and Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

He is an expert in the fields of Greek and Indian culture, history of religion and philosophy, and art. He has published several books and hundreds of scholarly monographs, articles, catalog essays, and reviews on early Greek and Indian poetry, philosophy, and religion as well as on contemporary art and culture.

He has received numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Critics grant, a Fulbright fellowship in 1993, and the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism from the College Art Association.

McEvilley has been a contributing editor of Artforum, a regular contributor to Art in America, and editor in chief of Contemporanea and has appeared in two parts of the BBC television series “The State of the Art.”