Entries published during September, 2023

September 16, 2023

Entry 52: Magnetic North (V)

Tuesday, June 20

Donna Stonecipher

Martin Eder, Elysium
Galerie EIGEN + ART

Pro QM Buchhandlung

I.S. Kalter/Yana Tsegay
Mountains Gallery

On this day we determined to meet poet Donna Stonecipher and spend some unstructured time with her. We would begin with Galerie EIGEN + ART, last hold-out of the gallery wave that defined Auguststraße as emergent art district twenty years ago and representative of the Leipzig School, notably Neo Rauch. Most of the galleries that traversed the merger from East to West have left—most recently the conceptual gallery Barbara Wien—but EIGEN + ART kept its original location while branching out. (A search to find out what happened to the former Waschmachine gallery yields no trace but ads for the Whiteware brand of washing machine and “Hot German girl fucks dildo on Waschmachine,” on Xhamster). Such references intersect, in their vulgarity, with the work on view: a theatrical series of hyper-post-consumer-utopian-quasi-religious-fantasy tableaux by Martin Eder titled Elysium. As the gallery handout reads: “Since there are no blemishes, no disease, no suffering, and thus also no death in Elysium, the fresh moisture on the figures’ skin must come from the dew on Paradise’s meadows. ‘Dewy,’ as the beauty tutorials in the Internet call it.” The stretch from the conceptual rigor and ideology critique the gallery brought to Berlin, to the cynical avowal of kitsch grandstanding as having somewhat the same effect, defines the times we are in. Not much comment to make, so we proceed to a late lunch and walk a mile across Linienstraße to Pro QM Buchhandlung, nearby the always-beating heart of Left Berlin of Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, the Volksbühne, Babylon Mitte, and the headquarters of Die Linke. After the surrealists’ calling as “specialists in revolt,” Pro QM sells books for “specialists in transformative urbanism,” from the psycho-geographical dérives of the situationists to current architectural studies and city guides, such as the one I brought back on Eisenhüttenstadt. It is home-in-exile on an intellectual plane that shows why we came here in the first place: to map the excitement of Berlin’s evolution as a city onto critical and creative projects. It is a source of thinking the city as one is within it.

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September 2, 2023

Entry 51: Magnetic North (IV)

Friday, June 16
DB ICE 1040 Bergen auf Rügen > Berlin Hbf

54 Ebertystraße, Friedrichshain, Berlin

Carla Harryman
Ragna Berg
Florian Werner

Ellen Allien
Hamburger Bahnhof

Just about to get there; we have been away. Time crosses space, beginning in Rügen Island and ending in Berlin. Then we were advised to come and we would arrive. The party crowd is aware of its having a location in time and space, had been there for awhile—before we came. The party crowd at the Hamburger Bahnhof, celebrating the new director, a new orientation for art. As we come from a distance, the music invites us in, not yet there. On arrival it is there, an insistent pulse, meditative, cruising on horizontal, an endless plane of immanence, synced in time. He is coming soon, wrote Wittgenstein; he will be coming, he will have come. That must be the new director. Then he will have arrived. Gertrude Stein repeated the phrase, only with modulation. Ellen Allien is the legitimate appointee of the new director, hired to entertain and inspire the crowd, to be a work of art in herself. The party crowd is a work of art in itself, an instance of Gertrude Stein advancing in time. As the director himself had written, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world“—that is the principle of new art at the Hamburger Bahnhof. It is raining, the crowd is moving slightly then more openly, Ellen Allien gestures to the sky, arms raised, rain is coming down. A steady pulse of the language of limits becomes an episode in time and space. We are not afraid of speaking.

A man coming.
Yes there is a great deal of use in a man coming but will he come at all if he does come will he come here.
How to you like it if he comes and look like that. Not at all later. Well anyway he does come and if he likes it he will come again.
Later when another man comes
He does not come.
Girls coming. There is no use in girls coming.
Well anyway he does come and if he likes it he will coming gain.

Ellen Allien is the legitimate heir of Gertrude Stein. Nonsense, she pushes a button and there is a new orientation to the beat. Nonsense. Pulse, difference. Slight movements under an umbrella, the umbrellas are folded. We learn the new meaning to experience time and space, under the auspices of the new director, as an example of the new art. The art is coming all over with newness, like Gertrude Stein coming to Radcliffe, GIs arriving in the Bavarian Alps. The movement begins with a slight dancing, becomes more pronounced, is shared by many in the crowd. Finding a position in the middle, unable to really get a look at Ellen Allien, stepping back, her arms are raised with the beat. And a gigantic pause makes ensuing pulse more danceable, this is the basic grammar of techno. Nonsense. Now take a position a bit farther back, focus and click. On the pause that makes the pulse happen. Let us say what Ellen Allien teaches: electronic dance music teaches. She is the instructor of the moment, hired by the director, as an example of the new art. Her whole life is oriented toward this moment of instruction, in the form of a work of art, a way of being historical. This is the mandate of the Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart: to preserve the present as ethical obligation in the form of Ellen Allien and the crowd, moving under rain, skies now clearing, continuing as may be, a work of art.

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September 1, 2023

Event 103: Poetry, Translation, Crisis

SESSION PROPOSAL WITHDRAWN

Poetry, Translation, and Crisis:
From the Post-Soviet Moment
to War and Emigration

American Comparative Literature Association
Montréal, 14–17 March 2024

Due to the difficult circumstances of the global present,
the organizers have canceled this session proposal.
Stay tuned for plans for a virtual colloquy in 2024.  

In 1989 and 1990, eight American avant-garde poets traveled to then-Leningrad to meet with Soviet counterparts, experimental poets working under quasi-nonofficial conditions during late Perestroika. These meetings followed extensive travel and translation activities in the 1980s. Among then-Soviets, the poetic schools of “metarealism” and “conceptualism” were well represented—by poets such as Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Alexei Parshchikov, Nadezhda Kondakova, Ivan Zhdanov, Ilya Kutik, Nina Iskrenko, Dmitrii Prigov, and Lev Rubinshtein. These events and developing contacts led to the publication of the collectively authored Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union and a flurry of translations. Three decades later, the dialogue between American poets and poets of the former Soviet territory, including both Russia and Ukraine, has continued. A comprehensive anthology of American experimental poetry, Ot “Chiornoi gori” do “Yazikovo picmo” (From Black Mountain to Language Writing), appeared from NLO in late 2022, with a publication event in Moscow and subsequent online reading. Other translations are imminent or postponed under the present circumstances, while interest in and translation of two generations of poets, now disrupted by war and emigration, continues. This session solicits contributions on past and on-going translinguistic, transcultural projects from both periods: the post-Soviet moment and now. What “cultural work” is being undertaken and advanced in these works of translation and affiliation, crossing over global spaces of conflict and establishing global poetic networks? The session language will be mainly in English, but contributions in Slavic languages are encouraged, and hopefully English translations can be arranged.

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