Please join us for a monthly lit reading in the company of art @Agitprop in North Park, co-sponsored by the gallery and local smallpresses 1913, Kuhl House, and Tougher Disguises.
This event is free and open to the public. There will be a receptionafter the reading. Donations to the gallery are greatly appreciated.
Poets Brian Kim Stefans & Geoffrey Dyer will read from their work on Saturday May 2 @ 7pm in the Agitprop Gallery in North Park:
2837 University Ave (entrance on Utah), San Diego, California, 92104,619.384.7989.
Brian Kim Stefans’ recent books include “Kluge†(Roof Books, 2007),“What is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers†(Factory School, 2006)and “Before Starting Over: Selected Essays and Interviews†(SaltPublishing, 2006). Recent digital projects include the interactiveKluge (http://www.arras.net/kluge/) and a series of digitalprojections called “Scriptor†that are intended for gallery andenvironmental settings, one of which appeared in the show “Contranym†in New York City’s ABC Gallery in September, 2008. He is presentlyAssistant Professor of English and Digital Humanities at UCLA, editsthe online mag arras.net and writes the Free Space Comix blog; helives in Los Angeles half a block away from Scarlett Johansson (’sface on a billboard).
Geoffrey Dyer’s first book of poems, “The Dirty Halo of Everything,â€was published by Krupskaya Press in 2003. Of Dyer’s work, John Yauwrites, “Welcome to the ‘valley of the near yonder hell, an Out Westsort of place,” where you will find “Golgotha embellished in cement”and the “mascara of Andromeda.” While you are here, “pay attention tothe words collaborating inside [y]our skull.” Geoffrey Dyer certainlydoes. So much so I swear that Apollinaire, William Eggleston, andHarry Dean Stanton have been slipping Dyer some potent Kickapoo Joy Juice. …This is America. And, like Eggleston and Stanton, Dyer is adamned wonderful guide.” An original member of the New Brutalistpoetry collective and a graduate of Mills College’s MFA Program, Dyerlives and blogs in the Bay Area.
Inappropriate Covers: Opening and Artist Talk by Stephanie Syjuco
Friday, April 10
5:30pm
List Art Center Auditorium, David Winton Bell Gallery
http://www.brown.edu/Facilities/David_Winton_Bell_Gallery/future_frameset.html
The David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University presents Inappropriate Covers, an exhibition of multimedia works by 11 established and emerging artists through Friday, May 29, 2009. Artists participating in the exhibition include Jim Campbell, Brian Dettmer, Kenneth Goldsmith, Kelly Heaton, Christian Marclay, L. Amelia Raley, Ted Riederer, Brian Kim Stefans, Stephanie Syjuco, John Oswald, and Mark Wallinger.
An opening will be held on Friday, April 10, with an artist talk by Stephanie Syjuco (http://stephaniesyjuco.com/) at 5:30 p.m. in the List Art Center Auditorium. Reception to follow. The gallery will be open from 5:30 to 7:30pm, during and after the talk.
STEPHANIE SYJUCO is a visual artist who’s recent work uses the tactics of bootlegging, reappropriation, and fictional fabrications to address issues of cultural biography, labor, and economic globalization. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her objects mistranslate and misappropriate iconic symbols, creating frictions between high ideals and everyday materials. This has included re-creating several 1950s Modernist furniture pieces by French designer Charlotte Perriand but using cast-off material and rubbish in Beijing, China; starting a global collaborative project with crochet crafters to counterfeit high-end consumer goods; photographing models of Stonehenge made from cheap Asian imported food products; and searching for fragments of the Berlin Wall in her immediate surroundings in an attempt to revisit the historical moment of “the end of History.”
Saturdays: 4:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. 308 BOWERY, just north of Houston $6 admission goes to support the readers
FEBRUARY 28
JOHN GIORNO and BRIAN KIM STEFANS
John Giorno is the author of many books of poetry, which have been translated into several languages. Subduing Demons in America: The Selected Poems of John Giorno, 1962-2008, a career-spanning survey of his work, will be published by Counterpoint/Soft Skull in 2008.
Brian Kim Stefans’ most recent books are What is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (Factory School, 2006), Kluge: A Mediation, and other works (Roof, 2007) and Before Starting Over: Selected Writings and Interviews (Salt, 2006). He just moved to Los Angeles to take a position as professor of English and Digital Humanities at UCLA.
Please join us at 21 Grand on Sunday, February 15 at 6:30pm as The New Reading Series welcomes…
Laura Elrick and Brian Kim Stefans
21 Grand
415 25th St (@ Broadway)
$3, BYOB
LAURA ELRICK lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her books of poetry include sKincerity (Krupskaya 2003) and Fantasies in Permeable Structures (Factory School 2005); some audio pieces and an interview can be heard on the Ceptuetics radio show here: http://ceptuetics.blogspot.com/2008/04/anne-tardos-laura-elrick.html. She has been a contributing editor to Future Poem Books and is currently on the organizing committee for the Advancing Feminist Poetics and Activism conference to be held in New York next Fall. On Feb 15, Laura will be performing her video/poem Stalk, which includes documentation of a recent spatial-poetic intervention into several prominent Manhattan commercial districts.
BRIAN KIM STEFANS’ recent books include Kluge (Roof Books, 2007), What is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (Factory School, 2006) and Before Starting Over: Selected Essays and Interviews (Salt Publishing, 2006). Recent digital projects include the interactive Kluge (http://www.arras.net/kluge/) and a series of digital projections called “Scriptor” that are intended for gallery and environmental settings, one of which appeared in the shown “Contranym” in New York City’s ABC Gallery in September, 2008. He is presently Assistant Professor of English and Digital Humanities at UCLA and lives in Los Angeles half a block away from Scarlett Johansson (‘s face on a billboard).
I’ll be reading at this event… hope to catch up with a lot of you in San Francisco!
The reading is on Sunday, Dec 28th at the Forum at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on 701 Mission Street between 3rd and 4th Streets. The event starts at 7:00 and will go until 10:00.
…in San Francisco at the end of December. Let me know if you’ll be around (looking for a couch to crash on, actually). Be reading at the big poetry shebang on the 28th and a discussant on a panel concerning experimental literature in Asia. Details below…
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Sunday, December 28th
Small Press Distribution is hosting this year’s MLA off-site reading for visiting poets on Sunday, December 28th from 7-10. With the generous sponsorship of the Poetry Foundation, we have secured the Forum in Yerba Buena Center on Mission Street between 3rd and 4th Streets in San Francisco. It will be a nice space to read in and is located within a few blocks of all of the MLA hotels. We expect to include 60 or so readers from out of town, along with a few local poets, in the event. There will be many great readers, books galore and much else to please and surprise you. Brent Cunningham and I will be your emcees.
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Monday, December 29th
695. Literary Experimentalism in East Asia
7:15–8:30 p.m., Nob Hill D, Marriott
Program arranged by the Division on East Asian Languages and Literatures after 1900
Presiding: Walter K. Lew, Univ. of Miami
1. “Digital Complex: Redefinition of Literary Sensibility in Japan,†Koichi Haga, Josai International Univ.
2. “Writing Machine Collectives: Digital Poetry in Hong Kong and Taiwan,†Karen An-hwei Lee, Santa Ana, CA
3. “Negotiating between Languages: The Poet Kim Su-yông’s Resistance to Monolingualism in Postcolonial South Korea,†Serk Bae Suh, Univ. of California, Irvine
1.00-3.00: Litterality 1.
Writing is not speech, it is letters on a page. What do we make of the inclusion in writing of non-alphabetic signs, symbols, diagrams; writing as map or score; invented writing notations; or the book as object? Johanna Drucker, Salvador Plascencia, Latasha Diggs, Shanxing Wang
3.30–5.00: The Meaninglessness or -fulness of Language.
As a vehicle, is language empty, saturated with meaning, both, or something else? Jessica Smith, Bob Grenier, Christine Wertheim
5.00-6.00: Drinks at REDCAT with participants and audience
8.30-10.30: Evening Readings/Performances
SATURDAY October 25thMorning
10.30-12.00: Appropriation and Citation.
Whose work and what material gets appropriated, cited and resurrected? Who owns texts? Is there a difference between appropriation and citation? Steve McCaffery, Doug Kearney, Kenneth Goldsmith
12.30–2.00: Litterality 2.
Writing is not speech, it is letters on a page. What do we make of the inclusion in writing of non-alphabetic signs, symbols, diagrams; writing as map or score; invented writing
notations; or the book as object? Brian Kim Stefans, Julie Patton, Vincent Dachy
3.30–5.00: The Concept of Conceptual Writing.
What is the relation between conceptual writing and the trajectory of conceptual art? Stephanie Taylor, Heriberto Yepez, Young-Hae Chang+ Marc Voge
chashama ABC Gallery
169 Avenue C at 10th Street
Train: F to 2nd Ave, L to 1st Ave
Gallery Hours: Wednesday to Sunday, 11a – 7p
New York, NY – The curatorial team of Kelly Kivland, Alisoun Meehan, and Christopher Stackhouse are pleased to present the exhibition, CONTRANYM, in conjunction with the New Voices, New York series at chashama ABC Gallery. Exploring the complexities and dubious nature of visual expression and vocal utterance, CONTRANYM will present how language is dependent on the dualities of silence and absence, presence and matter. The exhibition will include the following works by Robert Delford Brown (performance), John Cage (painting), Victoria Fu (video), Stephanie Loveless (sound/performance), and Brian Kim Stefans (digital poetics):
Robert Delford Brown, Explosion of a Tile Factory
John Cage, 10 Stones
Victoria Fu, The Lake House
Stephanie Loveless, (nothing of nothing)
Brian Kim Stefans, Scriptor
During the opening reception, visitors will be part of an original Robert Delford Brown interaction. A Fluxus artist who began his artistic life in 1950s NYC, Brown will transform the gallery front into a vibrant explosion of recycled materials, as part of a collaborative installation that is testament to joint, spontaneous action. Armed with the duct tape, string, scissors, spray paint, and newspaper, Brown and visitors will collectively create a temporary sculpture splayed out from floor to ceiling.
“The ecstatic power that has marked Brown’s art since the 1960s threw a monkey wrench into the avant garde in those days. He touches a nerve at the core of the social codes that organize not only our behavior but also the limits of our art…Robert Delford Brown’s transcendent vision takes on a great signiï¬cance.†– Allan Kaprow
In John Cage’s “10 Stones,†painting functions as spiritual notation creating a lexicon beyond letters. The chance stone tracing is based on Cage’s ‘Where R = Ryoanji’ drawings inspired by the Ryoanji rock garden in Kyoto, Japan – a seminal meditative work on material and transformation.
Victoria Fu’s short video, “The Lake House,†is a palindromic riddle illustrating the convergence of affection and opposition, intimacy and estrangement in human interaction.
Brian Kim Stefans, editor of the new media poetry website www.arras.net, will premiere the digital poetics work “Scriptor,†featuring dynamically generated, largely scriptural typeface that anthropomorphize words and text with Flash animation.
The premiere of Stephanie Loveless’ sound installation in continuum, “(nothing of nothing),†developed through live performance throughout the exhibition run, weaves and re-envisions the voices of iconic divas, splitting the ghostly from the presently living, the preternatural from the basic material.
***
chashama is a non-proï¬t arts organization that provides opportunities for performing and visual artists. We support the development of art by awarding grants, producing shows and providing subsidized studio, rehearsal and performance space. Since 1995, we have provided artists with a home and the support resources necessary to present and create art that engages the community of New York. For more information, please visit www.chashama.org
Please join Les Figues Press and editors Christine Wertheim & Matias Viegener, to celebrate The noulipian Analects, an alphabetical survey of constrained writing by some of today’s most innovative writers.
Hosted by: Robert Fitterman
With readings by contributors: Christian Bök, Vanessa Place, Brian Kim Stefans, Rodrigo Toscano, Matias Viegener, and Christine Wertheim
Thursday, January 31, 2008
7:00 p.m.
The Mercantile Library Center for Fiction
17 East 47th Street
New York, NY 10017
About the book, in the words of Charles Bernstein [The noulipian Analects is] An Alpha Bestiary of Exogenously Exotic Essays and Dazzlingly Delectable Design, Complexly Charismatic Constraints and Occasional Oulipian Outrages, Thoughtful Theoretical Threads and Ludicrously Ludic Limits, Gutsy Gender Gaiety and Dantesque destinies Detourned, Quixotic Queneau Quests and Cocky Combinatorial Collisions, Real Rubber Roses & Radiantly Removed R’s…What We Wanton Woeful Whimsical Wanderers Willingly Want.
About the People Performing
Robert Fitterman is the author of 9 books of poetry; 3 of which constitute his ongoing poem Metropolis. Metropolis 1-15 was awarded the Sun & Moon New American Poetry Award (1997), and Metropolis 16-29 (Coach House Books, 2002) received the Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award in 2003. A new collection of various writings, rob the plagiarist, is forthcoming in Fall 2008 (Roof Books). Fitterman is on the writing faculty at NYU and at Bard College. He lives in New York City with his wife, poet Kim Rosenfield and their daughter Coco.
Christian Bök is the author not only of Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, but also of Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001), a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has also earned many accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry (particularly the Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters). His conceptual artworks (which include books built out of Rubik’s cubes and Lego bricks) have appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. Bök is currently a Professor of English at the University of Calgary.
Vanessa Place is a writer and lawyer, and a co-director of Les Figues Press. She is the author of Dies: A Sentence, a 50,000-word, one-sentence novel, and a chapbook, Figure from The Gates of Paradise. Her nonfiction book The Guilt Project: Rape and Morality is forthcoming from Other Press; her novel La Medusa will be published in Fall 2008 from Fiction Collective 2.
Brian Kim Stefans is the author of Free Space Comix (Roof Books, 1998), Gulf (Object Editions, 1998, downloadable at ubu.com), Angry Penguins (Harry Tankoos Books, 2000) and What Does It Matter? (Barque Press, 2003). Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics (Atelos Press), a collection of essays, poetry and interviews, appeared in 2003. His newest books are What Is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (Factory School, 2006), collecting over six years of poetry, and Before Starting Over (Reconstruction S.) (Salt Publishing, 2006). He is the editor of the /ubu (â€slash ubuâ€) series of e-books at www.ubu.com/ubu and the creator of arras.net, devoted to new media poetry and poetics.
Rodrigo Toscano latest book is Collapsible Poetics Theater, which was a National Poetry Series 2007 selection. Toscano’s experimental poetics plays, body movement poems, polyvocalic pieces have recently been performed at the Disney Redcat Theater in Los Angeles, Ontological-Hysteric Poet’s Theater Festival, Yockadot Poetics Theater Festival (Alexandria, Virginia). Toscano is originally from the Borderlands of California. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Matias Viegener is a professor at the California Institute for the Arts, and a member of the art collective Fallen Fruit. His criticism appears in the collections Queer Looks: Lesbian & Gay Experimental Media (Routledge), and Camp Grounds: Gay & Lesbian Style (U Mass). He is the editor and co-translator of Georges Batailles’ The Trial of Gilles de Rais. He has published in Bomb, Artforum, Artweek, Afterimage, Cargo, Critical Quarterly, Framework, Oversight, American Book Review, Fiction International, Paragraph, Semiotext(e), Men on Men 3, Sundays at Seven, Dear World, Abject and Discontents and X-tra.
Thursday, December 6th 7pm FREE
Teachers & Writers Collaborative
520 8th Ave, Suite 2020
A,C,E, to Penn Station
wine, cheese reception to follow
Brian Kim Stefans’ recent books of poetry are Kluge: A Meditation (Roof Books) and What Is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (Factory School). A book of interviews and criticism, Before Starting Over, was published by Salt Book in 2006. He teaches new media studies at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey and lives in Philadelphia, PA.
Eric Baus is the author of The To Sound (Wave Books), Tuned Droves (Octopus Books, forthcoming), and several chapbooks. He is a contributing editor for PENNsound and publishes Minus House chapbooks. He lives in Denver.
Mobile Libris will be selling books.
“Hope I die before I get there!” — Pete Townshend.
I got caught up in a lulu.com fever a couple of years ago and started creating this book, which collects my collaborations with Sianne Ngai, Judith Goldman and Jeff Derksen among others, and contains a lot of poems that I never put in my books, occsionally because they just “didn’t fit,” but also because I either forgot about them or didn’t like them at the time, though like them now.
It’s been for sale at Lulu for a few months now but I’ve held off telling anyone about it, but I’ve read from the book at a few readings over the past month and people have been asking about it. So here it is. I’m pretty happy with it — have finally stopped tweakng the shit out of it — and I really like the cover, which features a painting by a Stockton student named Mike Bruno.
The back cover features Charlotte Rampling in a still from “Zardoz,” with the words “It’s Not Time” floating over her — that was the original title of the book, but it’s now just the title of the second section, of “early poems.”
Other features of the book: more translations from Rimbaud, as well as Apollinaire, Jules Laforgue, Emile Nelligan, Guido Gozzano and Virgil; another short play I wrote called “Being John Malkovich”; some more crazy computer-assisted gobbledy-gook; a series of sound translations of Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus”; my one and only collaboration with my little sister, Cindy; leftover visual poems from my first book, Free Space Comix as well as the visual poems that have been on ubu.com for nearly a decade (with a few more that don’t appear there); two New York School sestinas and other brands of Ashberian ooze; more stuff in the style of “Les Assis” from my last book; etc.
Pasted below the blurb from the site is the acknowledgements page so you can see where this stuff comes from. Not all of the poems I’ve published appear in it — I tried to keep the quality high and threw away a ton of garbage, just for you. Some of the really old poems have actually only appeared recently in print because they give me that old Language tingling sensation in my toes.
“Booty, Egg On” includes poetry mostly from the nineties, as well as translations of Virgil, Rimbaud, Guido Gozzano, Apollinaire, Jules LaForgue and Emile Nelligan. Collaborators include Judith Goldman (the Haki Pok poems), Jeff Derksen (“Mao’s Gift to Nixon”), Stephen Rodefer, Sianne Ngai (“The Cosmopolitans”) and the poet’s sister Cindy Stefans. Poems have previously appeared in Chain, The Impercipient, dANDelion, Callaloo, Drunken Boat, Premonitions, Interlope and the Asian Pacific America Journal among other places. Previous books by Brian Kim Stefans include Kluge: A Meditation (Roof, 2007), What Is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (Factory School, 2006), Before Starting Over: Essays and Interviews (Salt Publishing, 2006) and Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics (Atelos, 2003). He runs www.arras.net, devoted to new media poetry and poetics, and his blog is Free Space Comix, at www.arras.net/fscIII.Â
PREVIOUS APPEARANCES OF SOME OF THESE POEMS:
Arras: “The Golden Age of Swimwear,” “At the Entrance of the Arbor”
Asian Pacific American Journal: “Author Photo,” “Calypso”
Bard Papers: “Houseboat”
Callaloo: “Fact’s Bird,” “A Bronx Tambourine”
Chain: “Folk Music,” “Heritage”
dANDelion: “Mao’s Gift to Nixon”
Drunken Boat: “Countering the Luddite Itch with a Tin Switch,” “Dailies,” “Jim Jarmusch”
First Intensity: “The Storm,” “Free to be Yu and Mee,” “Poem 33”
580 Split: “Cheqw!,” “The Royal Life (As Told To…)”
Hodos: “A Dream of Winter,” “Poem, ‘As'”
The Impercipient: “Poem (Thank the gales…),” “Poem (Now…),” “Scattered Norm”
Interlope: “The Cosmopolitans”
Itsynccast “Angeles”
Jacket: “The Apple Generation,” “Pastoral Disposal”
Model Homes: “Before Odilon Redon,” “Postlude: the appropriation of peach,” “The Streets of Baghdad”
Mora: “Wednesday’s Children”
Object: “Thermosaging Wayne”
Ocho: “White Sestina,” “Complaint of Pierrot”
Poetic Inhalation: “Very Light and Sweet”
Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of Asian American Poetry: “Astoria”
Read me: “Frances Chung’s Booklist”
Trowel: “from The Aeneid”
Ubu: Visual Poems
We 19: “Mutter Tongue (To Hearing),” “Thugs”
“Mon Canard” appeared in Stephen Rodefer’s book of poems Mon Canard (the Figures, 2000). A later version of “Mao’s Gift to Nixon” appeared in Jeff Derksen’s book of poems Transnational Muscle Cars (Talonbooks, 2003). A shorter version of “Booty, Egg On” is available for free download on the website ubu.com.
Just letting you know that on Nov. 3 in NYC there’s going to be a great reading to launch the first issue of President’s Choice magazine.Â
The readers:
Rodrigo Toscano
Kim Rosenfield
Kareem Estefan
Brian Kim Stefans
Robert Fitterman
Lawrence Giffin
Â
& possible extra-special guests
Brad Flis
Marie Buck
Myself (???)
All appearing at:
The 169 Bar (169 East Broadway) in Manhattan,
on Saturday, Nov. 3, from 5:30 – 8
One of the handful of young artists who really inspired me back when I was still haunting the streets of New York was Jeremy Blake, who died this July.
I think I first heard about him through Lytle Shaw, who is much more on the scene than I am (or was). I know that the first piece I saw of Blake’s was at a group show — a single panel video on a huge, wide flatscreen that moved very slowly and could have been mistaken for some terribly gaudy if baroque piece of teak furniture collecting dust in the corner, though opening and closing its doors as if by a poltergeist. It was the most beautiful thing there — a fetish object that was really just a television set — and I was intrigued.
The second was at the Whitney Biennial around the same time. This one involved three flatscreens, two on one wall, one on the other, and resembled a very slow moving anime film, but without any characters (we call them “figures”). There seemed to be some story being told between the three uncoordinated panels having to do with trains, mysterious doors (like the numbered doors on the Price is Right) and toxic gasses that killed off entire (unseen) populations. The colors were bright, sharp, almost fluorescent, the mood haunting and apocalyptic. I spent a lot of time gazing at this one, wondering how the three panels interacted, trying to suss out the narrative if any, confused about whether the images were digitally created or drawn with pastels, and really wondering if I was seeing a brand new form of art being born.
[Addendum: I remembered last night, just before falling asleep — fittingly — that I had seen a Blake piece even earlier at P.S. 1 in a basement room with my friend Melanie Rios. It was a single screen projection, and involved a section that seemed to be snowflakes falling, followed by sections of colored boxes fading into place. We sat and stared at it for a long time, really not knowing what we were witnessing or why it was so engaging. I remember thinking it was trivial at first, a little too passive, but it managed to be kind of aggressively controlling as well. Anyway, you’ll notice I have no memories for the names of these projects, I’m bad with that — I just hope my descriptions are accurate.]
Blake “started as a painter” — such a cliche these days to “sex up” the resume of a digital artist, but in his case very relevant given his prodigious visual vocabulary — but his work eventually ended up in a space all his own between photography, illustration and film (surely some of the slowest moving cinema since Warhol, possibly the slowest moving animation ever, and moving in the opposite direction from many videographers after they get their hands on Final Cut).
Blake might be best known to the world as the person who did the transition scenes for the movie Punch Drunk Love with Adam Sandler and Emily Watson. Another flirtation with pop success was being asked to do a video for Beck:
What is really strange (and I won’t dwell on it, there are obituaries all over the web) is how he died. After his partner, the new media artist Theresa Duncan, died on July 10 — some suspect a suicide, though she overdosed on Tylenol PM and bourbon, which seems an odd choice for me — Blake simply walked into the ocean and drowned. This is from Wikipedia:
On July 17, 2007, Blake was reported missing off New York’s Rockaway Beach. According to news accounts, a woman called 911 to report that she saw a man swimming out to sea. Blake’s clothes and wallet were reportedly found under the boardwalk at Rockaway’s 122nd Street Beach, along with a suicide note that referred to Duncan.
On the morning of Sunday, July 22, 2007, a body thought to be that of Jeremy Blake was discovered 4.5 miles off the coast of Sea Girt, New Jersey (which is 35 miles south of Rockaway Beach). Police announced on July 31, 2007 that they had identified his body.
In addition, both Duncan and Blake had thought they were being pursued and harassed and by Scientologists — Beck is a Scientologist, and both thought Blake had somehow troubled the waters enough to get them on the Scientologist black list, like an informal Jihad of some nature. Of course, the Scientologists deny any such thing, but Blake had prepared a 27-page “chronicle” in preparation for a lawsuit that he was planning to file, so he clearly took it quite seriously — it was no passing paranoia, and they both shared this fear. Blake had just gotten a hot job at Rockstar Games — maker of the Grand Theft Auto video game series — so he was hardly down on his luck. The couple had just moved back to New York from Los Angeles.
In any case, I was really hurt by the news of his death. I really felt that he was part of “my generation” and someone whose work I could look forward to for many years in the future as a sort of guide, someone to goad me on by producing work I could only struggle to understand. Another artist I really admire, even cling to in a way, is Paul Chan, and both Blake and Chan are similar in that they conceived — and coolly, charismatically completed — ambitious digital art projects that really go against the grain of what it means to do “digital” work.
That is. both artists choose craft over pressing all the buttons and rushing a work out to the periphery of the technologically possible, and prefer conceptual simplicity and meditative registers over intellectual showboating and machismo, and yet neither are less than provocative and have some complex “message” to convey. Some of Chan’s most impressive Flash work uses only black and white pseudo-silhouette images — the only video art I’ve seen in Philadelphia was a Chan piece that depicts figures of all natures falling either downward or upward like a nightmare from 9/11, projected diagonally across a floor — or images based on the drawings of Henry Darger and the writing of Fourier.
The Beck video is not really representative of Blake’s work, at least not the stuff I’ve seen, and I think the inclusion of Beck’s face in the video was probably a record company decision (like the overlays of Morrissey’s face on the original “Ask” video, directed by Derek Jarman). It does share with his other work the basic premise of long, slow fades between colorful images with certain colors lingering longer than others so that, between images, a sort of “interstitial” composite is created. It takes the idea of the afterimage on the retina — stare at something red long enough and you’ll see blue — and makes it tactile, forcing a different state of perception on the viewer, slowed by the pace yet never at rest.
By the way, do any of you thirty-somethings remember the first version of the video for U2’s “One,” created by David Wojnarowicz? It was rejected by the record company as too uncommercial after appearing on MTV for about a week — there was a world premiere and everything. It was finally pulled and replaced by two other versions, one a bleeding-heart-Bono quickie like every other U2 video, and another directed by the celebrity photographer Anton Corbijn of the band in drag (probably a result of bad conscience, as Wojnarowicz died of AIDS soon after the first video premiered). Since I’m high on the YouTube stuff recently, here’s the original “Buffalo” version of “One,” AIDS allegory and all:
I found that Derek Jarman Smiths video on YouTube as well… oh the glory. The video was made spontaneously by Jarman, who is best known for the punk rock movie Jubilee and who eventually also died of AIDS. When the record company decided to use his film for promotion, they demanded Morrissey’s face appear at regular intervals to keep the kiddies engaged:
In any case, check out Jeremy Blake’s installations if they come to town since I doubt they work as at-home video watching. I’m sure there will be retrospectives and other sorts of appraisals and encomiums to come, though I’m surprised that it took me so long to find out about his death — I had just happened to check out the Philly artblog a few days ago and read about it. And don’t take anything, or anyone, for granted, given the fickle, recalcitrant nature of death. Bergman and Antonioni in the same week? But they both lived a long time.
Yo-Yo Labs, The Figures, Roof, United Artists, Granary, & Ugly Duckling invite you to a party at:
Jack Shainman Gallery
513 W. 20th
May 17th, 2007
from 5:45-8PM
celebrating the publication of the following books:
a (A)ugust, by Akilah Oliver
UNTITLED WORKS, by Tonya Foster
NOTES FOR SOME (NOMINALLY) AWAKE, by Julie Patton
FERVENT REMNANTS OF REFLECTIVE SURFACES, by Evelyn Reilly
ARE WE NOT BETRAYED BY IMPORTANCE, by Francis Picabia
SEEING OUT LOUD (back in print), by Jerry Saltz
COLUMNS & CATALOGUES, by Peter Schjeldahl
MINE, by Clark Coolidge
IFLIFE, by Bob Perelman
FOLLY, by Nada Gordon
MAKING DYING ILLEGAL, by Madeline Gins & Arakawa
KLUGE : A MEDITATION & Other Works, by Brian Kim Stefans
NINETEEN LINES : A Drawing Center Anthology, ed. by Lytle Shaw
MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY, by Barbara Henning
SOLUTION SIMULACRA, by Gloria Frym
JOIN THE PLANETS, by Reed Bye
ACROSS THE BIG MAP, Ruth Altmann
SOME FORMS OF AVAILABILITY, by Simon Cutts
A TESTAMENT OF WOMEN, by Johanna Drucker
PARADIGM OF THE TINCTURES, by Steve McCaffery & Alan Halsey
ALMA, OR THE DEAD WOMEN, by Alice Notley
PAPER CHILDREN, by Mariana Marin
INSPECTOR VS. EVADER, by Paul Killebrew
THE HOT GARMENT OF LOVE IS INSECURE, by Elizabeth Reddin
THE STATES, by Craig Foltz
COMPLETE MINIMAL POEMS, by Aram Saroyan
Conference by poet, e-poet and Web artist Brian Kim Stefans
The NT2 Laboratory on Hypermedia Art and Literature at UQAM University (http://www.nt2.uqam.ca/) invites you to a conference by poet, e-poet and Web artist Brian Kim Stefans:
“Reading Blocks: Constrained Text for Digital Environments”
Brian Kim Stefans has published several poetry books including Free Space Comix (Roof Books, 1998), Gulf (Object Editions, 1998, downloadable at ubu.com) and Angry Penguins (Harry Tankoos, 2000). His newest books are What Is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (Factory School, 2006), collecting over six years of poetry, and Before Starting Over: Selected Writings and Interviews 1994-2005 (Salt Publishing, 2006). Stefans is the editor of the /ubu (�slash ubu�) series of e-books at www.ubu.com/ubu and the creator of arras.net, (http://www.arras.net/) devoted to new media poetry and poetics.
This conference is presented by the NT2, The Laboratory on Hypermedia Art and Literature and Figura, the Research Center on Textuality and the Imaginary and will be held on:
WEDNESDAY MARCH 28th 2007
6 pm – 8 pm
Universite du Quebec – Montreal,
Judith-Jasmin building,
Room J-4255
(Berri-UQAM metro)
Corner Saint-Denis-De Maisonneuve E.
The conference will be given in English
Free Entry
Friday, Dec 29th
9-11
Art Alliance (SE corner of Rittenhouse Square, 251 S. 18th St.)
Aaron Kunin
Adam Fieled
Sasha Steensen
Dennis Barone
Aldon Neilsen
Juliana Spahr
Bill Howe
Bob Perelman
Brent Cunningham
Brian Stefans
C. A. Conrad
Camille Martin
Carla Harryman
Caroline Bergvall
Cathy Eisenhower
Charles Bernstein
Christian Bok
Eduardo Espino
Elaine Terranova
Ethel Rackin
Evie Shockley
Frank Sherlock
Hank Lazer
Herman Beavers
Jena Osman
Jenn McCreary
Jennifer Scappetone
Joan Retallack
Johanna Drucker
John Wilkinson
Josh Schuster
Barrett Watten
Kathy Lou Schultz
Lamont Steptoe
Laura Moriarty
Leevi Lehto
Linda Russo
Linh Dinh
Loren Goodman
Mark Wallace
Matthew Cooperman
Michael Tod Edgerton
Michael Davidson
Nat Anderson
Nick Monfort
Norma Cole
Patrick Durgin
Peter Middleton
Prageeta Sharma
Ron Silliman
Susan Schultz
Timothy Yu
Tom Devaney
Tom Orange
Tyrone Williams
Walter Lew
Will Esposito
Yunte HuangÂ
[Here’s an announcement about an event I’ll be reading it in New York this Friday…]
The Theatre of a Two-headed Calf and Paul Willis bring you:
Salon-Saloon #9
Friday, December 15
Party starts at 8.
Performances start at 9.
Winter Company performs electronics(Paula Matthusen & Jenny Olivia Johnson)
Brian Kim Stefan reads
Johanna Meyer dances
Michelle Handelman shows some video
The Loft of Paul Willis in DUMBO
135 Plymouth #305
Brooklyn
F Train to York
$5 gets you in
$10 gets you in and 3 drinks
$20 and you drink for free all night
$50 = happy ending
Here’s where you can watch videos and performance of Michelle Handelman: www.michellehandelman.com. There’s one under “performance” called Passerby>Ghost Sites that I love.
Here’s the fascinating poetry etc… website that Brian Kim Stefans runs: www.arras.net
Johanna Meyer has creating and performed dance/theater at all the big places (DTW, Movement Research, PS 122, etc…) and will perform an excerpt from her new piece BEARSHOW.
