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15/1/2002

Textual operations

WhiteBox Art Center, New York

Organized by A.S. Bessa

In writing, the device of addressing the reader is an old trick, equivalent to the author’s wink begging for sympathy. In 1855 Charles Baudelaire famously made use of this recourse at the end of "Au Lecteur", the poem-preface to Les Fleurs du Mal, in these carefully chosen words that have become emblematic of modernism:

Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
Hypocrite lecteur, --mon semblable, --mon frère!

Baudelaire reveals the "reader", perhaps for the first time, as an accomplice of the author -- an equal, a brother, a knowing hypocrite, a partner in the scene of writing. The "text" (I am here assuming that "ce monstre délicat" is in reality "the text") as an unruly bundle of moral, esthetic and spiritual threads that the author alone can’t sort out. Any reading thus becomes an operation between author and reader.

"Textual Operations" is a series of ten lectures on art and language featuring leading contemporary artists and scholars. The series will address relevant issues that inform the present state of conceptual art from the writings of Marcel Duchamp and Jean Arp, to the visual explorations of Concrete and Language Poetry.

September 25: Bruce Andrews "The Poetics of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E"
October 10 : Kay Rosen "Lifeli[k]e"
November 14: Benjamin Binstock "Writing (to) Vermeer"
December 20: Carl Skelton "Dada Lama Ping Pong"
January 16: Craig Dworkin "Reading the Illegible"
February: Eduardo Kac "Transformative Textuality: From Light to Life"
March: Eric Robertson "Arp’s Concretions"
April: Marjorie Perloff "Duchamp’s Conceptual Poetics"
May: Richard Sieburth "Pound & Picabia"
June: Carolee Schneemann "A B C -- We Print Anything In The Cards"

ABSTRACTS
The first evening of "Textual Operations" will feature the poet and composer Bruce Andrews who will discuss the poetics of Language Poetry. As the editor, together with Charles Bernstein, of the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Bruce Andrews has been at the forefront of the poetic scene in the United States since the mid 1970s. He has published several books of poetry and is also the composer in residence for the Sally Silvers Dance Company. Following on the tracks of Ezra Pound and James Joyce, Language Poetry has been the most influential poetic project to appear in United States after the Vietnam War and has inspired an entire generation of young poets.

Kay Rosen is one of the most important contemporary artists working with text today. Her work has been the basis for a survey by the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles, in 1999, and last year she participated in the Whitney Biennial with a project for the museum’s façade. At the present moment her work can be seen at the Aspen Art Museum in the exhibition "Kay Rosen: Up and Down", and also at Mass MOCA as part of the "Game Show". Rosen, who has a background in Linguistics, will lead the audience through her process of working with text as material and subject in her paintings. Her talk, "Lifeli[k]e," will focus on an aspect of her work which proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that text, as art, not only represents, but imitates life.

Benjamin Binstock teaches art history and critical theory at New York University. His writing and interests range from the history of art history to contemporary cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, viewed through and as a means of viewing the rich material of Renaissance, Baroque and Modern art. He has translated the great Viennese formalist art historian Aloïs Riegl and is currently editing and will introduce a new translation of Riegl's "Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts." Last year, Binstock initiated a month-long series of inter-disciplinary symposia, exhibitions, and performances devoted to the work of Jacques Derrida at NYU and cultural institutions in downtown New York. This year he is completing his revisionist and iconoclastic study, Art as Life: The paintings of Johannes and Maria Vermeer. For this series Binstock will examine issues of interpretation of Vermeer’s paintings, specifically in relation to the themes of reading and writing, as paradigmatic of fundamental problems in art history today.

bp Nichol was one of Canada’s most inventive poets. Originally part of the Four Horsemen group, Nichol also experimented with concrete poetry, children literature and collaborated with visual artists. Carl Skelton met bp Nichol in 1982, at Coach House Press and the two were to collaborate in a project at Open Studio, in Toronto. Skelton calls "Dada Lama Ping Pong", "a virtual collaboration between a visual poet and an artist who talks too much. "Dada Lama Ping Pong" is based on a sound poem/homage to Hugo Ball, that Nichol recorded in1967. It will combine various aspects of bp Nichol’s extensions of poetry into the visual and aural fields, and Skelton's promiscuous practice of splicing and mangling architectural, narrative, and tactile Image Implantation Protocols.

The January event will feature Craig Dworkin, a writer and professor at Princeton University. Dworkin has recently published in October and Sagetrieb. "Reading the Illegible", a critical study of artistic appropriation and misuse is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. Dworkin’s work is influenced by Language poetry to which he applies a rigorous analytical method. Dworkin’s text aim to reveal language as a purely abstract structure of repetition and modulation.

Eduardo Kac is a visual artist, poet and performer. Originally influenced by the Brazilian Concrete poetry, Kac has explored many different media, such as Holography and the Internet, and their pertinence to our understanding of language. Since the mid 1980s Kac has pioneered and developed new art forms, which he call Teleepresence, Biotelematics and Transgenic Art. In early 2000, Kac succeeded in creating a rabbit with a fluorescent gene as part of his Transgenic project. In "Textual Operations", Kac will discuss his most recent projects involving writing and genetic coding.

Jean Arp is mainly known for his plastic work, which has been forever linked to the aesthetics of Modernism. And although his contribution to the Dada movement has been widely explored, there is an aspect of his work that is often neglected­his early experiments with poetry that he once referred to as "concrete". Eric Robertson, an Arp scholar and Lecturer at the Royal Holloway, University of London, has dedicated much of his time studying this aspect of Arp’s work. For "Textual Operations", Robertson will concentrate on Arp’s poems in relation to the sculptures of the early 1930s that he called "concretions", and to the conceptual and aesthetic implications of this term in a broader context

For several years Marjorie Perloff has been one of the most engaged critics of the avant-garde either through her incisive study of Italian Futurism or championing new poetry in America and elsewhere. In the last few years Perloff has begun to explore the role that Marcel Duchamp’s aesthetic plays in the context of new radical poetries. According to Perloff, the seeds of current avant-garde notions have been planted by Duchamp in his readymades, his verbal texts, and especially his boxes. She contends that when Duchamp poses the question, "Can one make works which are not works of ‘art’?", he raises the key question that haunts late twentieth-century aesthetic.
In "Duchamp’s Conceptual Poetics", Perloff will present an analysis of Duchamp’s little-known "literary" texts like "THE", "Rendezvous 1916," and "With Hidden Noise" in relation to later poetries, and explore the question of replication versus repetition in the boxes and boites en valise. Duchamp shows that "aura" is still with us and that reproduction need not destroy it at all.

Richard Sieburth: "Pound & Picabia" (Abstract still not available)

Carolee Schneemann’s ABC--We Print Anything In The Cards is an image-text box of 139 cards, a little-known masterpiece. Printed in individual cards of three colors, ABC--We Print Anything In The Cards is the quintessential experimental book. It asks the reader not only to shuffle the cards but to perform them. Although its subject matter is quite simple­a love triangle­Schneemann fragments her narrative with many layers: the book is a compilation of personal notes, commentaries on the state of the art world, fragments of dream, an accumulation of contradictory advice and the interlaced photographs. Schneemann will guide the audience through one of the possible readings of her book. Cards from the book will be on display at the entrance of White Box.

A.S.Bessa is an artist and writer. He is also a collaborating editor for zingmagazine and the editor of poetry for fahlstrom.com. As a "concrete poetry" scholar, he has papers published in several magazines­Cabinet in NY, Ord & Bild in Sweden­and at Ubu.com. Last year he curated an exhibition at Apex Art titled Double Space that explored the relations between writing and architecture. He is currently working on a book of translations of the poetry of Haroldo de Campos.

WHITE BOX
525 WEST 26TH STREET
NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10001 USA
TELEPHONE: 212.714.2347
FAX: 212.714.2349

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