May 25, 2010
I Met (Exchange)
13–24 May 2010
Modernity, Mobility, and Displacement:
Transnational Perspectives from Detroit
Wayne State University
(after On Kawara)
Heike Paul
Meike Zwingenberger
Harald Zapf
Alexandra Ganser
Barbara Hahn
Costinela Dragan
Katharina Gerund
Katharina Erhard
Tanja Aho
Sarah Bernhard
… More
May 11, 2010
The New Yorker’s recent gatekeeping effort to separate Rae Armantrout from the rest of her friends in the Language school. While it is never true that negative reviews sell books—they can kill a book as often as they sell it—here the demon of curiosity can only be let out of the bag with tantalizing references to an entire literary history a middle-brow readership has never heard of, and of course will only want to know more about:
http://www.english.wayne.edu/fac_pages/ewatten/pdfs/Who%20is%20Rae.pdf
May 1, 2010
post_moot 2KX / poetry + performance: a convocation
Miami University (Oxford, Ohio), 22–25 April 2010
Meetings, encounters, events, various types of collaboration between people, games, festivals, and places of conviviality, in a word all manner of encounter and relational intervention thus represent, today, aesthetic objects likely to be looked at as such, with pictures and sculptures regarded here merely as specific cases of a production of forms with something other than a simple aesthetic consumption in mind.
—Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (les presses du réel, 2002), 28–29
Nicolas Bourriaud’s account of new forms of aesthetic practice is simple enough: after Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Rancière, he identifies a range of “outer-directed” art practices that have emerged since the 90s in alternative venues. While originating in conceptual art, site-specific sculpture, installation, and performance from the 60s and 70s, these new forms translate the earlier ones into modes of social interaction. We are no longer speaking of “genre” per se, as with the position of painting and sculpture above. The aesthetic becomes the location of open interaction that connects artwork and community—to become a model, even instigator, of sociality. The open forms of formerly distinct genres—conceptual art, site-specific sculpture, installation, and performance—are further dismantled and recombined toward a horizon of social engagement as art practice.
April 25, 2010
I Met (post_moot)
22–24 April 2010
post_moot convocation
Miami University (Oxford, Ohio)
(after On Kawara)
cris cheek
Catherine Wagner
Alan Golding
Maria Damon
Lisa Samuels
Chris Mann
Rodrigo Toscano
Adeena Karasick
K. Lorraine Graham
K. Silem Mohammad
Rod Smith
Mel Nichols
… More
April 15, 2010
Selections from Slechte Geschiedinis (Bad History), trans. Samuel Vriezen, Parmentier 19, no. 1, special issue on “Documentaire poëzie” (Documentary Poetics; March 2010), 48-56.
http://www.literairtijdschriftparmentier.nl
De eerste Parmentier van dit jaar staat grotendeels in het teken van hedendaagse ‘documentaire poëzie’ uit Amerika. Documentaire poëzie is poëzie die zich nadrukkelijk presenteert als een vorm van documentatie en zich plaatst te midden van allerhande nieuwsfeiten, historische gebeurtenissen en situaties. In het door hen samengestelde en ingeleide dossier laten Arnoud van Adrichem, Frank Keizer en Samuel Vriezen zien wat er gebeurt wanneer documentaire vormen als krantenberichten, wetteksten en beleidsrapporten onderdak krijgen in de poëzie.
April 12, 2010
Sampling The Grand Piano
@noon, 12 April 2010, with Marie Buck
Department of English, Wayne State University
Today I read samples from The Grand Piano to an appreciative group of faculty and students at Wayne State. The samples followed the position of my section in the volumes, not the volume number. For instance I began with the opening two paragraphs of section 1 from part 2, with an additional paragraph for counterpoint, and then read the third through fifth paragraphs of section 2 from part 1. I think of these reading sequences as compositions in their own right, and so will record the order of selections here:
1. Part 2, pp. 11-12, “On May 1, 1975, I attended a public meeting . . .” to “There was no money, and few agreeable jobs”; p. 17, from “Kathleen Cleaver met with an impromptu group . . .” to “. . . but all I saw there was a modern airport.”
2. Part 1, pp. 13-15, “I remember talking with the editor at UC Press . . .” to “This writing is his tombstone; we survived.”
March 13, 2010
I Missed (Paris)
11–13 March 2010
John Ashbery in Paris
Université Paris VII
(after On Kawara)
Michael Davidson
Lori Chamberlain
Bob Perelman
Francie Shaw
Donna Stonecipher
Hélène Aji
Sarah Riggs
Omar Berrada
Joshua Clover
Abigail Lang
Antoine Cazé
Olivier Brossard
Nicholas LoLordo
Paul Grimstad
Jennifer Dick
Françoise de Laroque
Gilles Weinzaepflen
Florence Manlik
March 12, 2010
from “Ashbery’s Historicism:
Nonsite Hypotaxis and Modernity Critique
in The Double Dream of Spring“
Presented at John Ashbery in Paris: International Conference
12 March 2010, Institut Charles V, Université Paris Diderot
What makes The Double Dream of Spring both unique and exemplary for Ashbery’s work is its positive critique of social modernity, rather than a mere ironic reversal of modernism, at the intersection of critical theory, poststructuralism, and romanticism. In the figural space of his works, Ashbery inverts of the poetics of radical particularity—seen in terms of an aesthetic of the fragment and the condition of reification under capitalism—that relocates what Altieri terms its “aesthetic agency” in an interplay of “partial local coherence” that at once proposes and disposes of any horizon of totality. … More
March 3, 2010
Michael Waltuch’s Whale Cloth Press, the original publisher of Robert Grenier’s Sentences in the Chinese box version (with ivory clasps, manufactured in Hong Kong), has put up a mediated version of the poem.
http://www.whalecloth.org/grenier/sentences.htm
It is interesting to think about the tensions between the work in its print/index card/box format and its digital one—they are not identical. For one thing, even though the cards are displayed in a random order, different each time, they can never be displayed spatially—tacked up on a bulletin board, or placed on steps, or photographed in the crotch of a tree. The box was a three-dimensional boundary (like the skin surrounding the body of the work) that is quite a bit unlike a frame for a static two-dimensional image or an html page with flash animation. And yet the work is finding a new reception that reads the individual instances of the text in a kind of “free space” of interpretation:
http://steveroggenbuck.blogspot.com/2010/02/i-would-say-that-robert-grenier-makes.html
March 2, 2010
Ice house, Detroit, 2010.
A link to the Ice House Detroit project, courtesy Joe Paszek. In this project, Detroit artists sprayed an abandoned house with water in January, in a reversal of the usual method of getting rid of excess housing inventory by fire (a.k.a. Devil’s Night, a custom that seems to be on the wane). There is a description of a similar midwestern moment in Wyndham Lewis’s Self-Condemned (1954), where he describes a Toronto hotel encased in ice after a fire.
