February 6, 2022

Entry 46: Invocation of Fourier


Fourier it’s all too depressing
     to see them emerging from one
     of the worst cess-pools in history
Infatuated with the maze that
     leads back to it
Impatient to start all over
     for a better jump

—André Breton,
     Ode to Charles Fourier

The image to the left is what now exists of the monument to Charles Fourier, located at the end of the Boulevard de Clichy before its leftward turn toward the Place de Clichy with its restaurants and skin trade, under the imagined shadow of the Montmartre Cemetery, site of pitched battles in the Paris Commune. This was the object of a pilgrimage I made in the company of Carla Harryman and Françoise de Laroque at the end of a rainy afternoon in November in the year 2021. The statue itself preserves the original plinth of the monument raised in 1899 in homage to the utopian socialist by supporters of his imagined utopia at the site of its historical suppression. After many historical turns, from the melting down of the statue of Fourier in 1945 to its reconstruction by Situationists in 1968, the base now presents a ludic apple inscribed with outlines of the globe and reflecting lights of the boulevard at night. As an homage to the theorist of the gastrosophic state and phanerogamous morals, it is a fully realized work of surrealist art. … More

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January 23, 2022

Entry 45: Writing in the Event

Writing in the Event:
“The Beirut/Hell Remix
(After Etel Adnan)”

Last October I had the good fortune to preview Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure, the Guggenheim Museum’s career retrospective of Adnan’s visual art, which makes significant reference to her writing. The cross-genre and multi-languaged aspects of her work could not be missed, an opening beyond the usual categories that art history and museum curating maintain. The museum was also making a political point in showing Adnan’s work along with a deep selection of the abstract painting of Vasily Kandinsky. The move from landscape to abstraction unites the two, but the differing contexts for abstraction are equally the point. Eurocentric modernism is in transition, refunctioned as a global cosmopolitanism, which arrives with the breakthrough moment of Adnan’s painting at dOCUMENTA 13 (2012) at what I have described as a “global archive.”

The occasion itself was compelling and bittersweet. Etel herself could not attend the opening but was represented by her partner, Simone Fattal—whose solo show at the Whitechapel Gallery in London was also on the global agenda. With Carla Harryman, we made plans to meet in Paris in November; we would have a French Thanksgiving, the day after the American one. Etel Adnan died on November 14, a Saturday. The news came through friends the next day. From all corners and all kinds of people the reaction was profound: the passing of a figure who had touched many, over many decades. We would still be coming to Paris as travel was arranged and plans had been made; the Omicron curtain had not yet come down. Everything was up in the air, suspended. Simone texted after we arrived; will you still be coming to dinner? Meetings with a remarkable woman on the rue Madame. We discussed everything and nothing as friends came and went. One resonant detail concerned Etel’s daily attention to events in Beirut, from economic collapse to the 2020 explosion. Not coincidentally, the Institut du Monde Arabe was exhibiting visual art referencing Beirut before and after the explosion under the title “Lumières du Liban,” in which Etel and Simone were both strongly present. We told Simone we would attend, and reported back after we did.

The museum bookstore stocks an impressive array of titles by Adnan, in many languages. I was immediately taken by Galerie Lelong’s 2021 publication of L’Express Beirut–Enfer, which brought together three texts, the first originally written in French and then later published in her English version. Meanwhile, plans that had been under way at the Guggenheim Museum were also up in the air, with the news of Etel’s passing, the onset of the Omicron surge, and the Guggenheim’s new partnership with the Academy of American Poets. In the end, I would agree to provide a written work, on commission, for the tribute to Etel, to be published online in conjunction with a virtual reading by poets who could perform in New York. Both events took place: the reading, while impeded by some gapping due to bandwidth issues, features an epochal performance by Anne Waldman along with tributes by Ammiel Alcalay, Omar Berrada, Stephen Motika, and Asiya Wadud, made available on Vimeo. And my text, “The Beirut–Hell Remix (After Etel Adnan),” along with an explanatory note that appears at the end of the poem, is published at the link below. One can only hope that, in future days, the many facets of this event for Etel Adnan will be seen together.

“The Beirut–Hell Remix (After Etel Adnan)” [link]
Original by Etel Adnan composed 1970; first published 1971
Adaptation/translation by Barrett Watten; completed January 2022
Online publication by The Guggenheim Museum, January 2022

Notes and links

[t/k]

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January 7, 2022

Document 95: Global Parataxis

CFP FOR PROPOSED SESSION(S)
“Global Parataxis and the Avant-Garde:
Rethinking Histories on a Planetary Scale”

“Globalizing the Avant-Garde”
European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies (EAM)
Instituto de História da Arte, IHA/FCSH–Universidade NOVA de Lisboa
Lisbon, Portugal, 1–3 September 2022

The conference proposal for EAM’s eighth biannual conference, reconvening in Lisbon after a two-year hiatus in 2020, clearly calls for a critical reassessment of the Eurocentric history of the avant-garde, given the multiple writers, artists, styles, and movements that bear similarities and links to the historical avant-gardes as they develop culturally but also regionally specific projects that challenge the given accounts of what is “avant-garde.” Otherwise put, if global avant-gardes overall conduct a “systemic detotalization” of the global system through radical formal means, what does that mean if the “global” is open, not yet determined, always in process, even violently contested across multiple regions. An open horizon of the avant-garde may indeed be the project of global exhibitions such as Documenta, the Venice and São Paolo Biennales, and others, often involving conceptual, site-specific, performative strategies but also new forms of positive representation. The recent handbook Global Art by Jessica Lack (2020) summarizes a compelling range of multiple movements and styles, from anti-Imperialist and revolutionary movements to movements founded at moments of independence, as acts of resistance, as interrogations of identity and collectivity, and as overtly political artistic practices. In literature, the shift of comparative literature away from Eurocentric literariness and toward a more complex account of multiple languages, diasporic histories, and possibilities of translation create opportunities for rethinking the avant-garde as always addressing cultural displacement as much as metropolitan location; here the convulsive growth of global cities comes into view in work from East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa in particular. This Call for Papers seeks to establish a multiple, decentered, global or planetary frame for the avant-garde(s), in the present, recent past, or longer history. Presentations on specific writers, artists, styles, or movements as sites of inquiry; or rethinking of what terms such as “global,” “planetary,” or “world” mean for the avant-garde in an era of pandemics and climate change, as well as political antagonism and the aporias of global capitalism will be most welcome. At the intersection of radical particularity and detotalized globality may arise new approaches that augment and depart from the historical avant-gardes.

The conference proposal deadline is Saturday, January 15. Please submit an abstract and bio for consideration by Friday, January 14 to Barrett Watten, barrett.watten@gmail.com.

Links and Notes

For PDF flyer, click here; for EAM conference site, click here.

Image: Gordon Bennett, untitled, 1989; from Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, Queens Museum, 1999.

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December 18, 2021

Event 90: I Met (en España)

I first got to know Claudia Franken through academic channels; she is a Europe-based scholar of Gertrude Stein and Arno Schmidt, a less-well-known prose writer who anticipates American postmoderns such as Thomas Pynchon. As his Wikipedia entry states, “Arno Schmidt (1914–79) was a German author and translator. He is little known outside of German-speaking areas, in part because his works present a formidable challenge to translators.” Claudia’s proposal for a session on “Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour” took up Schmidt’s early “trilogy” of novellas focusing on cultural displacement after 1945, pursued by analogies to Egyptian and Phoenician antiquity—as if the two time frames were disturbingly (felicitously) co-present (see John E. Woods’s unequaled translation). The conference itself was canceled due to COVID but was revived as a webinar in March 2021, where Claudia presented her work on Schmidt—in a form, on first hearing, that was as allegorically complex as Schmidt’s work itself. I then engaged Claudia’s essay editorially, working toward publication in the Hunan, China-based Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, where it appears (here). All this is complicated, but is what it takes to get the work done in this era of travel restrictions and ideological blockage. What resulted is a fine literary essay that the editors selected to inaugurate their issue. … More

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December 8, 2021

Event 89: I Met (Metropole)

I return here to the series of “I Met” posts, begun in January 2010 after the work of On Kawara. In a series of journal entries, On Kawara documented his life in art as identical to the names, location, and dates of his dealers, contacts, and friends, giving no further interpretation. Thus he interpreted his life as identical to his art, and his art as identical to its names, locations, and dates. This project is unique, and must be so, in its radicality; it is an essay on meaning as a “restricted code” that is at the same time a subtext of the public exhibition of his iconic works and the private circulation of artistic property (as I found when permission to reproduce one of his date paintings for Questions of Poetics was denied). In my entries, the purely conceptual project undergoes mutation to the forms of life and art I inhabit while still focusing on the intersection of names, locations, dates. At one point, the series achieved a kind of “feedback” state, as when people I met at conferences or readings would ask if there going to be an “I Met” for the event; alternately, for more than two years this form of work has been nearly impossible.

Wednesday, October 6
Delta DTW > LGA

Carla Harryman

Lisa Yuskavage @ David Zwirner
Jesse Murry @ David Zwirner
Alice Neel @ David Zwirner
Frank Moore @ David Zwirner
Tyler Mitchell @ Jack Shainman
John Currin @ Gagosian
Philip Guston @ Hauser & Wirth
Robert Rauschenberg @ Pace
Robert Longo @ Pace
Jeanne Liotta @ Microscope Gallery

Michael Gottlieb & Josef Kaplan
@ St. Mark’s Church

James Sherry
Lee Ann Brown
Tony Torn
Brenda Coultas
Drew Gardner
Kyle Dacuyan … More

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November 16, 2021

Event 88: Correlations & Conversations

Barrett Watten & Carla Harryman
Correlations & Conversations in Poetics
24–25 November 2021

[NOTE CORRECTED SEMINAR START TIME!]

  • Poetry Reading / 24 November 19:00 / open to the public / notice of attendance requested / contact Hélène Aji (below)
    Ecole normal supérieure (rue d’Ulm) / Bibliothèque des letters

World premiere of “Notzeit (After Hannah Höch)” / Barrett Watten
Reading from “Good Morning” and “Cloud Cantatas” / Carla Harryman

  • Seminar / 25 November 9:00–10:00 / by registration
    [NOTE CORRECTED SEMINAR START TIME!]
    ENS (rue d’Ulm) / salle Celan / open to students and doctoral students on prior registration / contact  Hélène Aji (below)

“Historicism and Presentism in Bad History and ‘The Annotated Plan B'”

  • Roundtable / 25 November 16:30–18:30 / open to the public / notice of attendance recommended / contact Hélène Aji (below)
    Université Paris Nanterre / salle de séminaire / 2 Max Weber

“Correlations & Conversations in Poetics”

Exchanges with Barrett Watten on Zone (Correlations, 1973–2021) and Carla Harryman on Poetics of Conversation
Discussants: Hélène Aji (ENS); Benoît Bondroit (U Paris Nanterre); Abigail Lang (U Paris); and Clément Oudart (Sorbonne U)

Policies, media, and contact

Due to COVID precautions in Paris institutions, attendance at events at ENS is limited to 30 (reading) and 35 (seminar). Please contact Hélène Aji to place yourself on the list for the reading or to register for the seminar (students and graduate students). Attendance for the roundtable at Paris Nanterre is limited 25; contact Hélène Aji to guarantee your place.

Present plans are to make high-quality videos of the reading and roundtable, to be edited and uploaded in the near future; interviews with Barrett and Carla will be made by the ENS library and uploaded to YouTube.

Hélène Aji helene.aji@ens.psi.eu
Benoît Bondroit benoit.bondroit@parisnanterre.fr
Naomi Toth ntoth.parisnanterre.fr
Barrett Watten barrett.watten@gmail.com

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October 2, 2021

Document 94: Diasporic Avant-Gardes

CALL FOR PAPERS

Diasporic Avant-Gardes:
East Asian Transitions in Form and Genre

American Comparative Literature Association
National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei
15–18 June 2022

Barrett Watten, English, Wayne State University
Lauri Scheyer, British and American Poetry
Research Center, Hunan Normal University 

This seminar continues the work of Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement (ed. Barrett Watten and Carrie Noland; Palgrave, 2009)—a collection of essays addressing the intersection of diasporic literatures and the European avant-garde, with examples from African, Maghrebi, Jewish, and Hispanic diasporas. A decade later, much new work has appeared on innovative forms and genres of poetry, prose, visual art, and media reflecting the diasporic experience of East Asians over two centuries of global migration. On the one hand, the emergence of self-described avant-garde movements that engage and depart from the Euro-American model, particularly in Japan and China but at differing moments in the 50s/60s and 80s/present, has been recognized in major exhibitions. Global figures such as Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama, Ai Wei-wei, Cai Guo-qiang, and Huang Yongping critically address issues of material form, cultural translation, commodification, economic dispossession, and global migration. The work of experimental East Asian poets such as Kim Hyesoon, Ito Hiromi, and Hsia Yu opens the way toward a developing canon of women authors in translation and has led to critical reflection on translation itself. Asian American poets with differing histories of emigration have developed a range of innovative forms, from authors such as John Yau, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Pamela Lu, and Tan Lin to Don Mee Choi, Sawako Nakayusa, Mary-Kim Arnold, and Ocean Vuong. New prose genres have appeared after the examples of Maxine Hong Kingston and Yoko Tawada in innovative fictions by Tao Lin, Eugene Lim, and Karen An-hwei Lee. The reception of Asian American visual artists from Nam June Paik, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Tehching Hsieh to the current exhibition of Hung Liu points toward the global transition of strictly Eurocentric theories of the avant-garde. This seminar seeks papers that explore individual artists and movements; reflects on their innovations of form and genre; and theorizes experiences of cultural distinctiveness in terms of migration, displacement, cultural heritage, appropriation, linguistic and stylistic hybridity, radical iconoclasm, and syncretic identity—seen in a productive dialogue with or a decisive reconceptualization of Euro-American avant-garde movements.

Submit proposals to ACLA by Sunday, October 31 here
For PDF flyer, click here; for online seminar page, here
Contact barrett.watten@gmail.com for more information

N.B. “In view of the ongoing pandemic, the 2022 conference may need to be moved online again. The board has developed a contingency plan and will make a final decision in January 2022″—ACLA.

Notes

Ai Wei-wei, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995

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September 26, 2021

Entry 44: Global Archives

About this time, on an every-other-year basis, I would be traveling to Berlin to further investigate the “Tag des offenen Denkmals”—the Day of Open Monuments (2021 program here). I see this event as a “global archive“—one of many I am engaged with, as also the documenta exhibitions in Germany since 1955, which I have written and just published on:

In defining “the global archive,” this essay refers, first of all, to the historical development of exhibitions in Germany that address a global horizon, a distinct cultural project since at least the Enlightenment. After 1945, modern art, which had been removed from public view by the Nazi state, was reintroduced as a project of reeducation as much as aesthetics. Documenta, beginning in 1955, exhibited modern and later artists in the destroyed buildings of the city of Kassel, and expanded its formal and cultural address to a global scale over its fifty-year history. Documenta itself became a kind of continuous archive of its own exhibition history, a mode of formal presentation that increasingly relied on the works it presented. Here I read in detail the archival strategies and form of dOCUMENTA 13, arguably a highpoint of this effort to archive globality as it emerges. “The Global Archive and the Future of Poetics,” Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures 5, no. 1 (June 2021): 94–108 [pdf here].

… More

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September 24, 2021

Document 93: Global Ideation

The global circulation of ideas advances with the publication of the Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, vol. 5, no. 1, edited by Laurie Scheyer from Hunan Normal University. As with last year’s special forum on “Modernity @ Zero Hour,” this issue contains a set of papers—distributed through a capacious issue with numerous related themes—that developed in an online webinar, “Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour,” which took place during conditions of COVID in March 2021. The webinar itself, thanks to Zoom, was itself global and involved participants from seven time zones, from New Zealand to Moscow. It also could include a performance event, the in-time screening of Carla Harryman’s “Occupying Theodor W. Adorno’s Music and New Music: A Re-Performance,” originally proposed for the canceled EAM conference in Fall 2020. In this best of all possible worlds, our proposed event went forward; papers were presented, comments generated, drafts revised, and the results are now distributed to the world at large. Below I list the contents and link to the six papers that were the result of that effort, seen as part of a larger conversation in a global framework. Indeed my own contribution, “The Global Archive and the Future of Poetics,” looks at the form of the global exhibition after the German documenta, but it easily applies to what we are doing here. … More

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August 21, 2021

Archive 14: World Autobiography

I return to the vexed question of autobiography, which in earlier times I believed one should “start writing” only when all other options—of world transformation, for instance—had failed. The two key terms are brought together in the 1973 cover of The World 28, the “Autobiography Issue” edited by Lewis Warsh. As I recalled when Lewis died late last year, I first met him in Mendocino, on his way down the coast to Bolinas, where I visited him before he moved back east. In his editing of The World, he wanted to radicalize autobiography not as a genre but as a mode of writing. Writing from an immediate perspective of “personhood” in any genre was of interest, from poetry to fiction to memoir, journal entries, letters, portraits, and snapshots.

Autobiography would be the royal road to writing per se; there was a tradition and consensus that “self/life/writing” was what there was to do, in fact was all that could be done. For a brief while there was in fact a kind of period style of autobiographical self-discovery, nothing like the persona poems of the workshop but evoking a tradition from Rousseau and the romantics, Zukofsky’s “the words are my life,” Beat spontaneity, and New York School everyday life. The consensus—and it was not long lived—was that “into the company of self it all returns,” one might say. Warsh’s 1973 project, bringing together writers of several diverse schools, was the highpoint of that moment.

I was the early Language writer in that group, in company with Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer, Tom Raworth, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Bill Berkson, Anne Waldman, all poets who would appear in the first issues of This, but also Diane Di Prima, Kenward Elmslie, Lee Harwood, Harris Schiff, and John Wieners. The issue should be reprinted in its entirety, to reflect on the question of writing that Lewis proposed: where the fact of writing and the events of life are seen as nearly identical. What historical circumstances obtained for that to be possible, desirable, likely? But there is also a moment of transition here: from person to language—at one pole the iconic representation of personhood, in condensed and presentable form, and on the other the endlessness of scribbling in letters and journals, a fascination of writing per se. … More

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