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The New Yorker Reviews ‘Restoring the Minoans: Elizabeth Price and Sir Arthur Evans’ at ISAW

November 1, 2017

The New Yorker – The British archeologist Sir Arthur Evans began excavating at Knossos, in Crete, in 1900. Based on what he found, he “reconstituted” what he believed to be the labyrinthine palace that Daedalus built to house the Minotaur, employing hundreds of artisans to rebuild a lost world whose aesthetic bore a surprising resemblance to Art Deco. In 2012 Turner Prize-winning artist Elizabeth Price’s two-channel video “A Restoration,” on view here, Evans’s quixotic construction of an ancient utopia becomes a dystopic metaphor for encyclopedic organizations of knowledge and human identity.