I've been working so much on the Antena show at Blaffer
(which opened last week)
and on the new Antena website
(which went live last week)
that I have not done much on this site in a long time.
And then also, there is Facebook. But somehow this site still makes sense
for some things. I get the urge to post and it is still here
figuring out its place in the landscape.
(which opened last week)
and on the new Antena website
(which went live last week)
that I have not done much on this site in a long time.
And then also, there is Facebook. But somehow this site still makes sense
for some things. I get the urge to post and it is still here
figuring out its place in the landscape.
"I like to be absolutely out of view and out of earshot."
- Jenny Holzer
- Jenny Holzer
Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.
- James Baldwin
Sentimentality shifts away from forms of analysis.
- bell hooks
From this video here of a conversation between Melissa Harris-Perry and bell hooks
- James Baldwin
Sentimentality shifts away from forms of analysis.
- bell hooks
From this video here of a conversation between Melissa Harris-Perry and bell hooks
I'm a young cowboy /
and I know I've done wrong.
I'm tired of "working"
I'll go read.
From a US Department of Justice Form:
You are not required to supply the information requested. However, if you do not furnish the information, the processing of your request will be suspended, and you will receive no further consideration.
I loved I Go To Some Hollow by Amina Cain. I felt floaty and floated happily for several days after reading it. Like my brain had been taught to reevaluate all connections between previously connected things. Like my brain had decided to let all those previous connections go for a while. I can't wait to read Creature.
I wish I could find the time to write a longer reflection. I hope I still do.
I wish I could find the time to write a longer reflection. I hope I still do.
Algunas cosas que quisiera intentar recordar
some notes from (algunos apuntes del) hemi convergence - los angeles 2013
fred moten
+ necessary
& righteous unsustainability of experimental collectivity
+ how not to be a hyperactive
& hyperactivist avatar moving from one place to another dispensing our
wisdom
+ to see
if its possible to create resevoirs or temporary spaces to create
collectivities to take care of one another
+ let's
not stay together, rather move in and out of experimental collectivities (not
predictable or organizable)
+ how to find each other & then lose each other
again
benvenuto chavajay
+ esa
palabra—arte—no existe en tzutujil
+ mejor
alejarse del “arte”
+ el arte
es una forma de colonializar
+ tenemos escuelas de arte (y está bien) pero deberían empezar con la enseñanza del sentir de la vida y de la tierra
+ me
estoy desviando hacía la ciudad capital
+ con mi
amigo matematico vamos a enseñar el “sentir de la vida”
+ no se
debe de decir arte
+ como la
tortilla, se está perdiendo
+ soy
testigo – si me dicen q soy artista, verdad – pero me considero testigo, y uso las
practicas del arte
pienso
en tzutujil y siento en tzutujil
+ hago
chuches—objetos— que estoy traduciendo, si miran un partido de fútbol como una
traducción
+ siento muchas cosas detrás de esto
+ uno escarba en el ombligo y lo cortan y lo entierran, y entonces intento encontrar mi ombligo a
través del arte, de la politica, de la resistencia
+ una
manera de congelar la historia, congelar la memoria histórica
+ anular,
borrar
kency cornejo
+ pero
creo q mejor cuando hablamos del “arte contemporaneo” – una historia que dice que el performance art y arte
conceptual nace en europa y en EEUU en los años 60 – hay que reconocer que el
performance ya existía
carmen valencia (activista de vieques)
+ hablo
el inglés cuando me da la gana y si no me da la gana, no lo hago.
édouard glissant
+ we have a right to be opaque
People should witness things, at the very bottom level, be witnesses.
"Paisaje Roto / Passage Rot"
Jorge Galván Flores
On view October 5 - November 15, 2013
Opening reception: Saturday, October 5th, 5-10 p.m. @ Fresh Arts
Fresh Arts presents "Paisaje Roto / Passage Rot", a new cross-cultural multimedia exhibition by artist Jorge Galván Flores. Using projected video, drawing, watercolor and sculpture, Flores has created a mash-up of contemporary Mexican topiary, the royal gardens of Renaissance-era France and working-class culture. "PaisajeRoto / Passage Rot" explodes the idea of topiary into an array of different objects and images, as it blurs boundaries between high and low culture, public and private, popular and elite.
The public is invited to a free reception with the artist beginning at 5 p.m., Saturday, October 5th at Fresh Arts, 2101 Winter Street, Studio B11, Houston, TX, 77007. Free valet parking is available until 10 p.m.
In addition to the opening reception, the public is invited to an artist talk with Flores at Fresh Arts on Saturday, October 19 at 1 p.m.
To anyone whose land is burning
by Layla Welborn
There’s no comfort I’m offering
Just that there will be more becoming
It will burn
More—or less hot
You will compare this hill to that, when it’s done
Marvel at which green thing made it
Ponder what happened to the animals
And, because you don’t find their bones, you’ll cheer for
their imagined escape
You will finger every remaining piece
Surprised by what’s whole and what’s not—
like perfect tea cups and melted car parts
Ash, first fallen, looks like snow
You might rub your body with the molecules of your old
things
Your lungs surely will burn with the smoke of them
It will be years before you’ve recounted all the things gone
And these things will begin to fertilize the ground
Behind your ribs, your home is there—all the dimensions and
perfect light in tact
Outwardly, the center point leveled, home is in the wider
circles now
The wind will reach you quick and strong, undeterred by any
branch
You will notice the shape of the ground itself, un-obscured
by anything
The wider horizon will pull on your breath
Then the earth will sprout and thicken around the base of
the tree-trunks-turned-to-coal-spires—like a child turned her picture of the
forest upside down, the tips of the old trees rooted in the sky
The stories will start to change
You will turn and seed the burned dirt; it will push up
poppies
And you might cherish how the old tin roof—scavenged to
begin with, and now again—is showing its rust behind the woodstove of the new
cabin
Note: My friend Layla wrote this poem and sent it to me. I loved it and asked her if I could post it on my blog for anyone to find and read and treasure. Thanks, Layla.
I < 3 Tere O'Connor
Another Critique of Conceptualism and a Response from Vanessa Place
Since my last post on the many and varied critiques of conceptualism emerging in recent weeks, there have been more!
Principally, Cal Bedient's attack on conceptualism in favor of "affect" (aptly titled "Against Conceptualism") in the Boston Review. I couldn't read the whole thing in detail; it was so dry and dull (and he attacks Zong! for a small part of the book that is in gray font; Zong! is one of my favorite books ever, so it's hard to take him seriously). I found his argument to be about 1/4 as interesting as the comments by Bhanu Kapil and Anna Joy Springer or Eileen Myles's critique of conceptualism, also largely based on a certain idea of emotionality. Yet a completely different texture to Myles's sense of what emotion actually is or could be. Myles says:
One of the most important things I know about poetry is that the words don’t need to be heard. They aren’t ever. Not all of them. And I think of that as an emotional truth. Poems are not made out of words. They’re made out of emotional absences, rips and tears. That’s the incomplete true fabric of the text.
While Bedient says:
The under-examined bone of contention in today’s poetry is the value of affect in art. More and more poets are suspicious of lyrical expression and devote themselves to emotionally neutral methods. The representation of affects—feelings that are often either transports or afflictions—has been increasingly muted in American and European art since the 1960s. Vehemence of feeling nonplusses the modern personality, a hostage to ambiguity and irony.
The idea that conceptual or constraint-based or avant-garde writing avoids emotion is just so laughable. Much of Vanessa Place's and Kenneth Goldsmith's work dwells in spaces of uncomfortable emotionality, grief and horror. And that's not even to mention Myles or the authors she mentions:
[I]n fact CA Conrad, Ariana Reines, Daniel Borzutsky, Jenny Zhang, Dana Ward, Dottie Lasky, Simone White, and Karen Weiser just to name a few are all doing unabashedly postmodern work that is free wheeling and exacting in its deployment of emotion.
Or as Bhanu Kapil says in her comment:
There is more to say about why withholding a lyric position might resemble -- might be the very thing -- that stands in: for the kind of organ speech: Bedient is writing about here. How the heart, in a T-shirt, is throbbing next to the body in the snow. How do you write into the history of bodies that don't remain intact? That don't get to: express? Perhaps the lack of affect is, in fact, an involuntary reversal of an ululation: the call from the body that is not: cried? A cry, that is, that is cut off before it exceeds the bodily position -- to be received by others?
Exactly. Thanks for saying it so beautifully.
Anyway, today I got an email with Vanessa Place's response to Bedient in the form of a review of two books (Seven American Deaths and Disasters by Kenneth Goldsmith and Manchester: August 16th & 17th 1819 by John Seed) at the Constant Critic. I am glad her response to Bedient actually looks at recently published books, i.e. it contributes to an on-going dialogue on contemporary poetry, contemporary reading of small-press, anti-industrial books. And Place's prose is always so damn sharp. In the end, we have to read in order to opine:
No one could be happier than those who swallow the bait about not reading conceptual poetry, for they conveniently miss the corollary that one might at least think about it. It, again, referring to the text product.
So yes, back to reading...
Principally, Cal Bedient's attack on conceptualism in favor of "affect" (aptly titled "Against Conceptualism") in the Boston Review. I couldn't read the whole thing in detail; it was so dry and dull (and he attacks Zong! for a small part of the book that is in gray font; Zong! is one of my favorite books ever, so it's hard to take him seriously). I found his argument to be about 1/4 as interesting as the comments by Bhanu Kapil and Anna Joy Springer or Eileen Myles's critique of conceptualism, also largely based on a certain idea of emotionality. Yet a completely different texture to Myles's sense of what emotion actually is or could be. Myles says:
One of the most important things I know about poetry is that the words don’t need to be heard. They aren’t ever. Not all of them. And I think of that as an emotional truth. Poems are not made out of words. They’re made out of emotional absences, rips and tears. That’s the incomplete true fabric of the text.
While Bedient says:
The under-examined bone of contention in today’s poetry is the value of affect in art. More and more poets are suspicious of lyrical expression and devote themselves to emotionally neutral methods. The representation of affects—feelings that are often either transports or afflictions—has been increasingly muted in American and European art since the 1960s. Vehemence of feeling nonplusses the modern personality, a hostage to ambiguity and irony.
The idea that conceptual or constraint-based or avant-garde writing avoids emotion is just so laughable. Much of Vanessa Place's and Kenneth Goldsmith's work dwells in spaces of uncomfortable emotionality, grief and horror. And that's not even to mention Myles or the authors she mentions:
[I]n fact CA Conrad, Ariana Reines, Daniel Borzutsky, Jenny Zhang, Dana Ward, Dottie Lasky, Simone White, and Karen Weiser just to name a few are all doing unabashedly postmodern work that is free wheeling and exacting in its deployment of emotion.
Or as Bhanu Kapil says in her comment:
There is more to say about why withholding a lyric position might resemble -- might be the very thing -- that stands in: for the kind of organ speech: Bedient is writing about here. How the heart, in a T-shirt, is throbbing next to the body in the snow. How do you write into the history of bodies that don't remain intact? That don't get to: express? Perhaps the lack of affect is, in fact, an involuntary reversal of an ululation: the call from the body that is not: cried? A cry, that is, that is cut off before it exceeds the bodily position -- to be received by others?
Exactly. Thanks for saying it so beautifully.
Anyway, today I got an email with Vanessa Place's response to Bedient in the form of a review of two books (Seven American Deaths and Disasters by Kenneth Goldsmith and Manchester: August 16th & 17th 1819 by John Seed) at the Constant Critic. I am glad her response to Bedient actually looks at recently published books, i.e. it contributes to an on-going dialogue on contemporary poetry, contemporary reading of small-press, anti-industrial books. And Place's prose is always so damn sharp. In the end, we have to read in order to opine:
No one could be happier than those who swallow the bait about not reading conceptual poetry, for they conveniently miss the corollary that one might at least think about it. It, again, referring to the text product.
So yes, back to reading...
Extraño las cartas, los mensajes bobos, las fotos pixeleadas con tonos magenta.
Ahora la información en flujo (donde todos son hermosos y felices y muestran su plato de comida) me aturde y me hace querer volver a este silencio concentradamente solo.
- Lorena Mancilla @ Batahola
+
I miss letters, silly messages, pixelated photos in magenta tones.
Today's flow of information (where everyone is pretty and happy and showing their plate of food) bewilders me and makes me want to go back to that silence: concentrated, alone.
- My translation.
When did blogging become nostalgic?
Sugar Sammy!
Whatever we do, we cannot keep aloof from the general world situation, it is silly to think we can... Persons who begin writing lyric poetry a young age are deeply concerned with themselves... As they mature they begin to grow out of themselves and they feel concern for others. Lyric poets who continue writing lyric poetry are likely to go into a dry rot and just write the same thing over again.
- Acclaimed lyric poet Edna St. Vincent Millay
- Acclaimed lyric poet Edna St. Vincent Millay
Welcome to the Critiques of Conceptualism
Remember the Marjorie Perloff attack on lyrical poetries from last year?
Remember the Matvei Yankelevich response to Perloff defending the gray area?
Remember Perloff's response?
No? Well, click on those links to get up to speed!
Well now this year, here comes another series of trenchant critiques of conceptual writing.
All fascinating to read:
Amy King analyzes capital and capitalism and the beastly po-biz:
Ultimately, these groups are unabashedly vying for central positions of power in order to enjoy the accompanying accesses, attentions and rewards – as the now-christened official verse culture’s “avant-garde” in a supposed attempt to destabilize that system by selling poetic techniques as their trademarked products. What do we call this alleged progress when its advancement requires the denigration of other poetries? Surely there is a plurality of poetries working right now in multiple ways to throw capital off-course –conceptually and materially. Why not acknowledge and explore the intersectionality of those diverse efforts?
Jill Magi argues for a different kind of economy at work in I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women:
Around what ethics and erotics does the work turn? Who is speaking for whom? Who is looking at whom? What is the subject? How is it treated? Conceptualism applied to writing may not help us read what is made; rather, it may serve us best as an engine to generate texts to be worked on, considered, revised.
And Eileen Myles transparently critiques Perloff for her transparency. And points out the critical place of mourning in all this:
I feel like the back story of Marjorie’s avant garde mandate is mourning. I think Perloff has sustained an enormous amount of loss in her life and along with her championing of avant garde practice in her criticism she’s also deeply engaged in controlling the emotional climate of the room she’s in. Who gets to feel what when, and how! And that’s a problem because poetry is a community not an institution and we’re always at multiple purposes here in this room.
I'm happy for all of these critiques of conceptualism, but if you read the comments for example on Rumpus below King's articles, the majority of readers worldwide still don't seem to have any damn idea what conceptual writing even is. So I'd argue for both and. Something I think Myles and Magi and King and Yankelevich would all agree on. Though Goldsmith and Place and Perloff have other fish to fry, so to speak.
Remember the Matvei Yankelevich response to Perloff defending the gray area?
Remember Perloff's response?
No? Well, click on those links to get up to speed!
Well now this year, here comes another series of trenchant critiques of conceptual writing.
All fascinating to read:
Amy King analyzes capital and capitalism and the beastly po-biz:
Ultimately, these groups are unabashedly vying for central positions of power in order to enjoy the accompanying accesses, attentions and rewards – as the now-christened official verse culture’s “avant-garde” in a supposed attempt to destabilize that system by selling poetic techniques as their trademarked products. What do we call this alleged progress when its advancement requires the denigration of other poetries? Surely there is a plurality of poetries working right now in multiple ways to throw capital off-course –conceptually and materially. Why not acknowledge and explore the intersectionality of those diverse efforts?
Jill Magi argues for a different kind of economy at work in I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women:
Around what ethics and erotics does the work turn? Who is speaking for whom? Who is looking at whom? What is the subject? How is it treated? Conceptualism applied to writing may not help us read what is made; rather, it may serve us best as an engine to generate texts to be worked on, considered, revised.
And Eileen Myles transparently critiques Perloff for her transparency. And points out the critical place of mourning in all this:
I feel like the back story of Marjorie’s avant garde mandate is mourning. I think Perloff has sustained an enormous amount of loss in her life and along with her championing of avant garde practice in her criticism she’s also deeply engaged in controlling the emotional climate of the room she’s in. Who gets to feel what when, and how! And that’s a problem because poetry is a community not an institution and we’re always at multiple purposes here in this room.
I'm happy for all of these critiques of conceptualism, but if you read the comments for example on Rumpus below King's articles, the majority of readers worldwide still don't seem to have any damn idea what conceptual writing even is. So I'd argue for both and. Something I think Myles and Magi and King and Yankelevich would all agree on. Though Goldsmith and Place and Perloff have other fish to fry, so to speak.
Thanks for all of it, Edna, all of it
Scrub
If I grow bitterly,
Like a gnarled and stunted tree,
Bearing harshly of my youth
Puckered fruit that sears the mouth;
If I make of my drawn boughs
An inhospitable house,
Out of which I never pry
Towards the water and the sky,
Under which I stand and hide
And hear the day go by outside;
It is that a wind too strong
Bent my back when I was young,
It is that I fear the rain
Lest it blister me again.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
If I grow bitterly,
Like a gnarled and stunted tree,
Bearing harshly of my youth
Puckered fruit that sears the mouth;
If I make of my drawn boughs
An inhospitable house,
Out of which I never pry
Towards the water and the sky,
Under which I stand and hide
And hear the day go by outside;
It is that a wind too strong
Bent my back when I was young,
It is that I fear the rain
Lest it blister me again.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay