Portrait by L. Ying

There is no more stage. There are no more footlights. You are among the people. Then be modest. Speak the words, convey the data, step aside. Be by yourself. Be in your own room. Do not put yourself on.

Speak the words with the exact precision with which you would check out a laundry list…The poem is nothing but information. It is the constitution of the inner country. If you declaim it and blow it up with noble intentions then you are no better than the politicians whom you despise. You are just someone waving a flag and making the cheapest kind of appeal to a kind of emotional patriotism. Think of the words as science, not as art. They are a report.

(Leonard Cohen, How To Speak Poetry, from Death of A Lady’s Man, 1979)

Writer Statement 1

What should a writer be stating? Should it be something rebellious like ‘Viva la revolution!’? Should it be something gentle like “I love you’ or should it be something morbid-smart-ass like ‘Writing is like death and death is the end and that is the limit and trying to go beyond that limit is futile’ and all that kind of stuff?

No, those don’t sound like real statements. They sound like somebody wanting attention.

Maybe a writer is somebody who wants attention? Maybe he is seeking attention? Maybe he just doesn’t want to be alone? Maybe that is the feeling he is transferring to the reader?

The writer writes.

The statement states.

That is the inherent contradiction in a Writer’s Statement.

A writer tries to hide by writing, not to state something.

So in fact he is not looking for attention. He is trying to draw attention to his writing so that he can escape in the meantime. It’s like a decoy. Writing is a decoy.

He writes in order to erase himself.

This should be my Writer Statement:

“I am a writer and I am going to disappear. While you are reading this I am already somewhere else. You will never find me.”

Portrait by Veniamin Kazachenko

Writer Statement 2

To write a Writer Statement means that I already admit that I am a writer in first place. Only a writer can write a writer statement. Someone who isn’t a writer shouldn’t be writing any kind of writer statement. But if I am already stating that I am a writer isn’t that what the statement should be proving? That I am a writer. That I write. It is a confession that I am a writer. A writer statement is a confession that one is a writer.

I confess.

I am a writer.

 
—

22.1.12

My nose hurts.

At first I thought it hurts because its growing,
growing from all of my lies like Pinocchio.

I imagined myself walking around a little Italian village
and meeting some guy who would promise to make me real,
to make me real famous.

Then I sat around and thought to myself that writing is like lying,
because it always misses the point
there is always something else I want to be talking about,
but I end up talking about what’s in front of my nose.

What if I were to stop writing?
Would my nose stop growing?
Would it stop hurting?

But writing is what makes me feel real.

And how would I become real,
how would I become real famous,
if I were to stop writing?

Would I be able to become real famous by stopping to write?
Maybe stopping to write would make me real?
Maybe It would make me focus more on life
and less on telling all these lies.

The Thinker (After Rodin), Ohad Ben Shimon, 2012

Maybe my nose will stop hurting,
and my lies would stop lying,
and I would be just ‘one of us’,
a good old jew boy with a big nose.

_

AN INDIRECT DIALOGUE

The following exchange took place by email from 23rd-25th January 2012.

VSK:  That’s a very interesting statement by Leonard Cohen isn’t it! Particularly those ideas of “information” and “report” and how those might sit with us now.

I’m thinking about this alongside your previous residency writings – that sense in the last post of observation, reportage in some ways, in the bar…. the way that from post to post I feel as a reader I can follow a series of kinds of attentions, not a linear flow but a series of distinct positions…

Out of the Cohen comes a cluster of terms and concerns through which to think about writing – the ambiguity of how it feels and effects: “state” and “statement”, different notions of paying attention, being attentive, and wanting attention. How “attention” changes when it is something to be received not given!

The concerns of the writer leading to the creation of a text which has its own life to lead…

OHAD: I was thinking of the notion/definition of art, as such, and here referencing the Conceptual Art’ preoccupation with who defines Art. The problematic of the artist defining what is art in comparison to the writer stat-ing or the relation between the writer and the state.

Perhaps then we can say that the space between writing and art practice is defined by a double failed negation. The Artist in his or her attempt to define what is art or who is an artist and the writer on his or her behalf to make any clear statement about writing.

VSK: Given what we have been discussing about writing in an art context, I enjoy this sense of “writer’s statement” in relation to the more familiar “artist’s statement” and the particularities/ peculiarities/ contexts of that form… that writing is somehow counter to the writer or the writer’s thoughts and intention- how that “counter – to” works itself out…

So if this ‘writer statement’ is impossible even as it is acted out then it suggests there might be other ways we can talk about this, which also returns to certain literary forms such as fiction, poems, fables..  we also turn to everyday experiences and anecdotes to try and find another way of speaking this, or to find an energy that might feed into our ‘writer statement’ even as it escapes it…

OHAD: I like very much you pointing out that the impossibility of a writer’ statement being acted out (and indeed it is reminiscent for me of the artist statement) can lead to or suggest other detours to talk about it… you mention literary forms… and I think visual forms can also function as such detours… perhaps that’s the dance/oscillation between the textual and the visual in my practice.

VSK:  In The Writing Life Annie Dillard tells a story of a writer who would repeatedly stop writing and go out for a walk, come back home, then type up the whole story again, hoping that each time the impetus of the walk followed by typing enabled the writer to build up a momentum that continued the story for a few lines or pages. In this way the novel was written…

OHAD: Well, it took me a while to figure out some images and I played with some options.. At last I came to three different portraits of me. I wanted to stay away from any kind of theatricality due to Cohen’s low-key reference but eventually I couldn’t…it was stronger than me.

VSK: I like the ending – a real punch line! Interesting to think of punch line as art writing strategy…

OHAD: I would like to suggest the figure of the philosopher/thinker here as perhaps an essential link in order to make the bridge and complete the ‘picture’.

More about Ohad’s work is here. See also Post 1 , Post 2, and Post 3 of his VSK residency.

The latest VSK e-book is SOME FAMOUS SIGNING EVENTS by Francis Raven, published on the occasion of US National Handwriting Day. The book begins with an epigraph from Jacques Derrida’s Signature Event Context:

readable even if the moment of its production is irrevocably lost and even if I do not know what its alleged author-scriptor intended to say at the moment he wrote it.

whilst according to the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association, who sponsor National Handwriting Day:

There’s something poetic about grasping a writing instrument and feeling it hit the paper as your thoughts flow through your fingers and pour into words… use a pen or a pencil to rekindle that creative feeling through a handwritten note, poem, letter or journal entry. Handwriting allows us to be artists and individuals… Throughout history, handwritten documents have sparked love affairs, started wars, established peace, freed slaves, created movements and declared independence.

As WIMA remind us, January 23rd is also the birthday of John Hancock who “was the first to sign the Declaration of Independence and is famous for his large, bold signature.”

For Raven this celebratory e-book is the latest outcome of several projects exploring the play between signature and significant,  including – after Pessoa,  “a great sad hope for me”  he writes – a group show of the self and  a signing of the “significant natures” of  Beuys, Goya, Picasso, Warhol and Rothko. Note the chronology.

Signatures copied, forged, repeated, photo shopped… In Raven’s projects a signature is both copy, forgery, image, and authentication. Aesthetic and philosophical questions, but artists’ estates, auction rooms and SOPA see it otherwise…

As Annette Messager writes in a short note published in her WORD FOR WORD monograph:

Many other collection albums are made throughout the day, for example, I try to find my best signature, the one that would best define me, I scribble my name hundreds of times with different handwriting on notepaper and then I classify them according to my preference.

SOME FAMOUS SIGNING EVENTS begins:

simile of
llie signature nf the general agent fit

*

on consignment, for
sum by

*

money, to more (discretion, with
out limit assigned, without object specified

*

in the chamber assigned to him, and with
the bonds of

*

enrolled bills signed by the presiding

Continue reading here. Please note that the special National Handwriting Day Book Launch has already happened:

More about Francis Raven’s work is here.

Work gathered here was originally part of the  I AM NOT A POET ASSEMBLING, distributed at Totalkunst Gallery, Edinburgh on Aug 21st 2011, at the conclusion of I AM NOT A POET, a two week festival exploring connections of language, writing and art practice, co-curated by VerySmallKitchen and Mirja Koponen.

Participants in the show – which took place from 7-21st August – were invited to contribute an A4 sheet to a loose leaf b/w printed assemblage, whatever they wished to appear under the title of I AM NOT A POET.

Here are jpeg versions of projects by (from top) Colin Herd,  Kim Walker and (below) seekers of lice, Peter Cant/ Alex Eisenberg and Tamarin Norwood.

The full ASSEMBLING is online here, with contributions from:

Magdalen Chua, Emma Cocker, Peter Cant & Alex Eisenberg,  Jennie Guy, Colin Herd, Mirja Koponen, Shandra Lamaute, Michelle Letowska, Jow Lindsay, nick-e melville, Iain Morrison,  Marit Muenzberg, Tamarin Norwood, Mary Paterson, seekers of lice, Gerry Smith, Kim Walker, and Samantha Walton.

]]> http://verysmallkitchen.com/2012/01/20/i-am-not-a-poet-assembling/feed/ 0 verysmallkitchen Edinburgh I am not a poet assembling_Page_10 Edinburgh I am not a poet assembling_Page_11 Edinburgh I am not a poet assembling_Page_30 Edinburgh I am not a poet assembling_Page_31 Edinburgh I am not a poet assembling_Page_26 Edinburgh I am not a poet assembling_Page_27 Edinburgh I am not a poet assembling_Page_08 Edinburgh I am not a poet assembling_Page_22 Edinburgh I am not a poet assembling_Page_23 http://verysmallkitchen.com/2012/01/17/new-publication-uh-duh-by-sarah-jacobs/ http://verysmallkitchen.com/2012/01/17/new-publication-uh-duh-by-sarah-jacobs/#comments Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:43:06 +0000 verysmallkitchen http://verysmallkitchen.wordpress.com/?p=4885 ]]>

VerySmallKitchen and LemonMelon are delighted to announce the first title in their collaborative book series: Uh Duh by Sarah Jacobs.  The author describes the book as follows:

The conversation between a poet and an artist at their first meeting was recorded. An extract from the transcription is presented:

‘So how would you where would you how would you describe what you what you do?’

According to Dr.Simon Morris:

This poet and artist are a slippery pair. The gaps left by their absent presence are clearly visible on the page as a space for the reader to interact with the text. The particularity of their laughter disturbs me…ha, ha, ha…heh, heh, heh. Like David Bowie’s laughing gnome I can’t quite catch them yet at the same time get left imagining a scary encounter over lunch in which the pair squirt caviar and honey at one another in a Paul McCarthyesque carnival of filth, whilst their transparent words collide in mid-air, smash into one another and leave us quite spent. Writing this tough is a car crash.

Uh Duh by Sarah Jacobs, LemonMelon & VerySmallKitchen 2012 | £8 | Softback | 30pp | 15 x 21 cm | ISBN 978 1 908260 11 6

The conversation continues:

Please join us for a performance reading of Uh Duh at X Marks the Bökship on Wednesday 25th January at 7pm.

X marks the Bökship,
210/Unit 3 Cambridge Heath Road
London
E2 9NQ

Uh Duh is also available for purchase here.

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Sandra Huber, from Sleep/ Writing/ Rooms, 2011

VSK PROJECT

Sandra Huber SLEEP/ WRITING/ ROOMS  part one, part two, and part three

Nathanaël, The Middle Notebookes [extract]

Aodán McCardle,  ‘abair’: ANARCHEOLOGY part one and part two

Paul Antony Carr, Excerpts: Tadeusz & Gregory

Tine Melzer, Language Games Part One: On Colours and    Part Two: On Games

Tamarin Norwood, The Locations of Six Domestic Figures

Maurice Carlin, Notes on The Self Publisher

Jill Magi, An extract from SLOT

Susan Thomson, THE AUTHOR OF UNUSUAL PAPERS

Matthew MacKisack, (A Comedy of) Danger

Stefan Riebel, somethings 07

Nico Vassilakis: Staring Appendix Part One

Neil Chapman, Memo Seven

Alison Ballance, Other Gardens – Version 12

CHAPBOOKS

from lilmp by seekers of lice, 2011

2011 began with two e-chapooks, lilmp by seekers of lice and  BULLETINS by Mary Yacoob. Later in the year came FOURTH THING by Fiona Templeton, as well as e-book versions of  Other Gardens -Version 12 by Alison Ballance and Memo Seven by Neil Chapman. The year concluded with  From the Occult Diary of Hosni Mubarak by Paolo Javier and Matt Jones.

from BULLETINS by Mary Yacoob, 2011

RESIDENCY

The first VSK Residency was Paul Antony Carr, who used the his time in the VerySmallKitchen to compose NATHANIEL’S PERPETUAL MOTION, a new narrative strand of his Excerpts project.

Paul Antony Carr from Nathaniel's Perpetual Motion, 2011

The image-text combinations were published in groups of three. See post one, post two, post three and post four.

Ohad Ben Shimon, from Post (2) 2 Dec 2011

Currently in residence is Ohad Ben Shimon. See (1) 14 November , (2) 2 December and (3) 20 December

I AM NOT A POET

Co-curated with Mirja Koponen, I AM NOT A POET took place at the Totalkunst Gallery, Edinburgh, 7-21 August. See here for the full program.

Jennie Guy’s Selected Crônicas

Tamarin Norwood These Are Not Poems

Magdalen Chua’s Passages of Silence: Justified Right, Flushed Left

Peter Cant and Alex Eisenberg, Instructions/Constructions

Mary Paterson, Memory Exchange

Emma Cocker’s Close Reading (C.O.P.V, 1950)

seekers of lice Creamy Language

.

THREE WINDOW PIECES and a HAIKUISATION WORKSHOP by Gerry Smith

“Failing to Work on So Many Levels” : Gerry Smith at I AM NOT A POET

Gerry Smith, Window Pieces, I AM NOT A POET, 2011

VerySmallKitchenSTUDIO

Recent talks, exhibitions and workshops have lead VerySmallKitchen to consider its relationships to teaching and pedagogy, how its explorations of writing, language and art practice can suggest and take place within a diverse array of learning situations…

This document is a draft that will be revised as appropriate over the coming months, as well as supplemented with other materials (book lists, essays, notes…).

The STUDIO project is also part of VerySmallKitchen’s residency at London’s X Marks the Bokship, which involves compiling an essay and bibliography on the use of scripts and scores in contemporary art writing, to be published in March 2012.

nick e-melville's EDITORIAL for I AM NOT A POET invited public alteration of the day's news...

DEMOTIC ARCHIVES OF ART WRITING

The Tropisms of Nathalie Sarraute

Dick Higgins: What Are Legends: A Clarification

Guy de Cointet’s  ACRCIT

Jerome Rothenberg curated a selection of poems and criticism on the influence of Robert Motherwell’s The Dada Painter and Poets anthology.

James Baldwin’s Stranger in the Village

Special Issue on the Occassion of the Richard Kostelanetz Bookstore  at Kunstverein in Amsterdam.

Guy de Cointet, from ACRCIT (1971)

OTHER

READING ENSEMBLE/ READING AS PUBLISHING a script for a collaboration with Jennie Guy that was performed at the Galway Arts Centre on January 22nd. This is Jennie’s pile of books:

KITCHEN ESSAYS include Small Ad Sweethearts of the Image Virus Do-Poetry, a survey of minimal poetries across writing and art practices, and Artists Talking at The Doubting Interface, on monologue, stand up, performance lecture and conversation in/as art practice.

A trip to Dublin to talk at the Art Criticism Now at The Lab, Dublin on 26th May was a great chance to begin to get a sense of  ART WRITING IN DUBLIN: PUBLICATIONS/ EXHIBITIONS/ PROJECTS  -  of which the first issue of ALLOTROPE (below) was one example.

Allotrope, Issue 1, 2011

Linda Short’s article I AM HIDING IN A ROSE: SWEENEY REED & CONCRETE POETRY explored the exhibition Born to Concrete: The Heide Collection. at the Heide Museum of Modern Art in Victoria.

At the Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh, Gerry Smith and nick e-melville curated THETEXTISTHETEXT, under the frame of “visual poetry vs text art exhibition match.”

nick e-melville, junk mail, 2011

FORTHCOMING

VerySmallKitchen starts 2012 with a new hard copy book series in collaboration with LemonMelon.  Our first title is Uh-Duh by Sarah Jacobs, which she describes as follows:

The conversation between a poet and an artist at their first meeting was recorded. An extract from the transcription is presented: ‘So how would you where would you how would you describe what you what you do?’

As well as the LemonMelon series, other hard copy projects include titles by seekers of lice and Paolo Javier.

In collaboration with Maintenant/3AM and Szépírók Társasága, VerySmallKitchen also will host a London visit by Márton Koppány from 28th March to April 1st 2012.  Details of publication, exhibition and performance to  follow. A dialogue with Márton is here.

Finally, VerySmallKitchen is excited to be part of A Pigeon, A Kichen and an Annexe: Alternative Sites of Publishing at Five Years Gallery in February, curated by Ladies of the Press, who have invited VerySmallKitchen, Pigeon and Annexe to work collaboratively on an exhibition. More info soon.

Thanks to everyone who was involved in these projects in 2011.  As Alison Ballance begins Other Gardens- Version 12:

Seeds were put into place to grow. Now they are sitting in a room above a garden with a radio on hum hum hum. An Eye sighs and cherry picks and gets lazy. A nudge please – I want to be lost please please carry on, look harder…

]]> http://verysmallkitchen.com/2012/01/02/2011-in-a-verysmallkitchen/feed/ 0 verysmallkitchen huber_s1_waves1 huber_s1_waves_words aodan language-games-part14 language-games-part15 language-games-part16 seekersoflicelilimp doodle_micropoetics_12sept_1157 pacarr_vsk_009web ohadresidency Install-days-times-mice-10001 Ins Cons - Assembling _Greyscale_Page_1 Ins Cons - Assembling _Greyscale_Page_2 creamylanguagewriting IANAP GERRY-2 IANAP GERRY-3 editorialnickemelville planetarium gdc_acrcit_page12 gdc_acrcit_page13 reading_ensemble allotrope-pagefrontw allotrope-backw snow-pake-on-junk-mail-2_nick-e-melville http://verysmallkitchen.com/2011/12/23/vsk-residency-ohad-ben-shimon-post3/ http://verysmallkitchen.com/2011/12/23/vsk-residency-ohad-ben-shimon-post3/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 17:53:57 +0000 verysmallkitchen http://verysmallkitchen.com/?p=4695 ]]>

Nare on Skype 22 December 2011

20.12.11 (for Nare)

There is a man standing next to me in the bar.

He is on his mobile phone.

“Let’s make the deal. Let’s make the deal,” he keeps repeating.

He says something about needing to bring the papers and something about a flight and staying for a week somewhere.

He is serious.
He is well dressed and wears a golden wedding ring.
He places his other hand on the bar while continuing to negotiate how many days he will spend somewhere.

“When do I go back?” he continues asking.
“I need to work whether you like it or not. It’s as simple as that. Without discussion.”

(He has a Dutch accent.)

“I cannot leave without the papers for two and a half weeks.”

Then he says ‘New York’, ‘January’ and something about a position he needs to take whether someone likes it or not.

Then come some more words like ‘Paper’, ‘Flight’, ‘Christmas’ and ‘New Year’.

I think to myself that this guy is retarded. Whether he likes it or not.

He gets more and more angry and says he can over-bridge a week but not two weeks.

I wonder to myself if this guy is maybe just talking to himself. Maybe there is nobody else on the other side of the line.

Maybe he is just pretending so that nobody thinks he is alone.

The conversation seems to reach an end. Both sides agree that the guy comes without the papers.

All this about some papers.

This guy means business. That’s for sure. He listens to the other guy a bit about the option of no papers and he points to Nare that is the bartender and hints for a new glass of beer.

This man is full of shit.

’Magazine’, ‘Mexico’ and ‘Television’ are the next words that he says.

He takes a sip from the beer and says “Anyway, I’m going to take the papers and two laptops.”

He has gel in his hair. His hair is pulled backwards.

“So the deal here is no papers and leave (sometime) in January or take the papers and leave (some other time I don’t hear).”

Then comes ‘New York’ and ‘Nairobi’.

“I need to be back in my office again on the 9th of January.”

…

Self Portrait, 23 December 2011. Illustration by Nare Eloyan.

…

I think to myself that I should just say to the guy: “Listen man. You cannot sit here on the bar and talk business the whole fucking time. Make the fucking deal and get on with your beer. Are you retarded? Are you seriously retarded or autistic? How can you be living like this man? This is sick. You are sick. Your life is sick. Your watch is sick. Your big fat white fingers are sick. Your mobile is sick. The way you talk is sick. Your whole fucking brain is sick.”

As his words come out of his mouth, I put words on the paper. Maybe my notebook pages are the papers he is talking about? Maybe I’m writing on the papers he needs in order to close the deal? Maybe I’m keeping him from signing the contract?

I look into his bright blue eyes.

His fine glasses are slightly tilted on his nose.

He looks sharp.
He looks like he knows what he is talking about.
He looks like everything is under control.

After about 15-20 minutes of talking on the phone he still hasn’t reached an agreement with the other person on the phone.

Then he says “Having said that,” and repeats the date 7th of january for the eleventh time.

His way of talking is abrupt, cut and with a bass tone.

Then he scratches his penis or balls and notices that I notice that.

“The bottom line is,” he says and then goes onto another round of negotiations with the guy.

He says “2 weeks..3 weeks..what?”

I decide to finish my beer and leave when I finish it.

I finish my beer and hear him say “You are talking a language I don’t understand.”

I decide to give up with this guy. Just stop paying attention to him.  I take out some money, pay my beers and leave.

…

Nare at Home 21 December 2011

*

More about Ohad’s work is here. See also Post 1 and Post 2 of his VSK residency.

At London’s National Portrait Gallery one evening in June, Will Holder got up on the lecture theatre stage and quickly whispered “‘Do Nothing’ by Simon Amstell.” Then he took the  microphone out of the stand and began walking around the space, for forty five minutes talking and moving in the manner of a stand up comic.

Holder’s confessional monologue was that of a young gay man, someone evidently younger than Holder himself, who seemed to have a different body shape (the monologue returned repeatedly to its speakers ultra-thinness). As these gaps appeared between spoken and speaker, Holder began fiddling with an ear piece. Was the monologue being spoken into his ear? In one moment, Holder held the microphone at arms length away from his mouth and continued to talk. The volume of sound remained the same.

The performance encouraged an (at least) double response. The monologue is sometimes funny, and the audience laugh, so it functions like straight stand up comedy (perhaps for some, wandering in as part of the National Portrait Gallery late night opening, that’s what it was). For those familiar with Holder’s work as writer, editor and designer, such laughs get moderated by a meta level where the artist explores form, voice, and persona. The tangle of all this, in Holder’s performance and beyond, is what this essay explores.

Before artists doing stand up, there was the lecture performance. “Lecture performance” was the framework of Characters, Figures & Signs, a 2009 conference at Tate Modern; and the title of a 2009-10 exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein and MoCA Belgrade. It attained further prominence via Mark Leckey’s Cinema in the Round, part of his 2007 Turner prize installation, and had oft-cited historical precedents, including Robert Morris 1964 lecture piece 21.3.

Robert Morris, script for 21.3 (1964)

In such work, artists adapted to their own ends the format of the academic lecture, a template providing both particular performance techniques and a pedagogical function concerned with the transmission of information to an audience expectantly (or not) waiting to be filled with knowledge.

Morris, for example, read aloud an essay by the art historian Erwin Panofsky, whilst Leckey’s associative bricolage highlighted the associative and electic methodology often characterizing the form.

Stills from Falke Pisano, A Sculpture turning into a conversation

As with Holder, questions about how such talks work as knowledge are foregrounded. The artist Falke Pisano suggests “the act of speaking about something or someone, in the cultural field as much as in other fields, necessarily involves reflection on one’s own position  and consequently on the conditions in which the utterance is made.” [1]

Pisano unfolds this idea in her 2010 artists book Figures of Speech, whose title proposes a structural model for the artists lecture as mixing talk, sculpture, illustration, crowd, grammar, drawing, diagram… The ambiguity this produces is evident in Pisano’s Sculpture Turning into A Conversation, which (in its written form in the book as a progression of numbered points) I experience via multiple and contradictory logics of poem, proof, proposition, experiment and short story.  If the title suggests a process with a definite conclusion, this compounding of logics foregrounds uncertainty and repetition.

Such dexterity is maybe one reason why performance-lectures are often framed through the framework of dance, as in, for example, Xavier Le Roy’s  Product of Circumstances (1999) and Jérôme Bel’s The Last Performance – A Lecture (2004). Such framing foregrounds the body, and a view of both talking and thinking as (physical) gestures in space, to be shaped and arranged as (bodily) forms. This context of dance is useful for proposing the lecture performance as a way to confound expectations, with “dance” consisting of someone talking, sitting, or giving a power point presentation.

Will Holder’s (not) stand up – and aspects of other performances in electra’s Dirty Literature season by Tony White, Sue Tompkins and Francesco Pedraglio – suggests the academic lecture is now a less important paradigm than the stand up comic, particular as it intersects with storytelling and art history through the monologues of, say, Spalding Gray, John Cage and Laurie Anderson.

Unlike art practice, stand up has a highly clear criteria for success and failure (it’s funny I’m laughing/ it isn’t funny get off), which is a provocative intervention to the more muddied social dynamics of an art event. As Holder demonstrated, the single figure, holding a microphone, pacing the stage, producing casual seeming (fake) spontaneity through a crafted and memorised routine, is its dominant mode. What is it acceptable to say in a particular situation? A history of comedians such as Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor propose anything is permissable as subject, as long as it is funny.

Other models for talking have a more specialist feel, such as Carey Young’s Speechcraft, a series of events using the formats of the Toastmasters, an American organisation promoting arts of public speaking, principally designed for businessmen. Again, Young’s attraction to the toastmasters is its fixed forms where speakers talking on set topics are immediately evaluated by further speakers who also follow strict time and content limitations.

Carey Young, Speechcraft (2007) as staged in New York by Creative Time (2008). Photographs copyright Sam Horine.

If talking as dance focusses on the body, then viewing the lecture as a form of poetry enables a focus upon its language, whilst the format of the poetry reading offers new perspectives on the art and experience of the artist talking.

One example here is the work of David Antin, who began in 1972 to present “verbal improvisations that spun narratives out of arguments and arguments out of narratives. I had been looking for a poetry of thinking and what I found was a poetry of talking, because talking was as close as I could come to thinking.” [2] Antin’s attitudes to such talks can be seen in the format he adopted for their transcriptions, rejecting left and right margins and block capitals, with white spaces between words an alternative system of punctuation.

Antin’s printed texts begin by stating location and context, and any “improvisation” is always within such determinants. As Antin wrote after a 1976 performance: “I knew what I wanted to address quite well; I had some notion of the terms I was going to address it in, and what I was looking for was the way”. [3]

In Antin’s recent Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature 1966-2005, several talk poems appear amongst conventional critical essays and interviews. Such juxtaposition suggests oral and written as co-existent poetic strategies, in contrast to traditional poetic histories that have viewed  the later as replacing and developing out of the former.

Antin’s focus is usefully viewed alongside Steve Benson, who, in the texts gathered in Open Clothes adopts a number of procedures for producing “poems” from improvised speaking. [4] This applies to both public and private performance, speaking aloud and acts of writing, with methods including speaking into hand-held tape recorders during road trips and improvising poems/talks with the rule that he will speak only questions. In a Q&A following one such performance, Benson observes:

… So there’s the quality of closure and of openness that occurs at every point, at least potentially. And so when you say this was a this kind of move or a that kind of move, I’m never sure until it’s all over what seems to be the dominant modality that would be registered for a certain move. It might appear to one person to be primarily a theme move or to another person to be a musical move or to another person to be a philosophical unhinging of the question, or whatever. [5]

Both Benson and Antin highlight what is also true of the stand up’s restless pacing of the stage: how talking connects to a particular quality and rhythm of the mind, which Leslie Scalapino describes as a mode of being where “The attention of the mind (of either the speaker’s, or the reader’s, or listener’s) in reading the text or during the performance, is neither in nor outside that experience.” [6]

Developing this further, a recent talk by London based artist Patrick Coyle sees the artist attempt to repeat a lecture by Allen Ginsberg that Coyle has sought to memorise.  In performances such as Alphabetes, Coyle has worked previously with attempts at remembering, cultivating the improvisatory creativity and humor that often comes from such intentional failure.

His Ginsberg talk, which can be viewed below, has a different emphasis through Coyle’s attempted fidelity to the original. This produces large amounts of silence that can’t be redeemed by any on the spot inventiveness, provocatively posing the talking artist as a failed mnemonic rather than a skilled proponent of (improvisatory) verbal facility.

Talk, of course, should not and cannot be confined to the particular variants which take place in galleries or lecture theatres. The attraction to talking is in part its garrulousness. Many of us talk to ourselves. As the recent Susan Hiller show at Tate Britain demonstrated, even the dead are busy chattering through the static of radio hiss and white noise.

That a certain philosophy of talk can permeate an artists life and work, the voice unfolding as a marker or guide, both through what it says and in its timbre, is something Joan Retallack observes, both of her own extensive conversations with John Cage and the role of speaking in Cage’s lectures and performances. [7]

The poet Chris Cheek, like Benson an improviser of poems, has also developed a practice where talking is site specific, open to the the ever changing environment, which shifts his own identity from source to channel or receiver, a complex of factors cheek describes as a “doubting interface” (191) that must take into consideration:

scale, perspective, contradiction, deliberate misunderstanding, anecdote, vernacular obsession, fictive quoting, imposed character, cartoon depiction, carnivalesque interpretation, historicising, demonising, sports commentary, theoretical exposition, emergences (and emergencies) of catchprase, listening to prerecorded texts or previous talks on headphones whilst talking (thereby mobilising conflict between listening and uttering), overhearing fragments of passing conversations… [8]

In the work of Tino Seghal the artist is himself physically absent from the work, but scoring conditions for speaking by others. In This situation (2007), for example, five hired interpreters engage in an intellectual discussion in the gallery space, turning to gallery visitors as they enter to ask “What do you think?”

As has by now (as he intended) become a staple of contemporary art (oral and written) folklore, Seghal refuses photographic documentation of his work, both enacting, documenting, and selling work through oral transactions. Unlike cheek, Seghal’s works function solely within controlled gallery conditions, depending upon their particular rules. In their after life, however, works are orally passed on in multiple locations, verbal descriptions and narratives, as here, rumours and tale telling of a varied and promiscuous speech life.

A series of talks at the Mandrake bar, Los Angeles in 2009, were organised under the banner of “Contra Mundum.” The phrase – translated as “against the world” – was taken from Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited. In the book of transcriptions from the series, the editors observe of their frame how each of the invited speakers “attempt, in various ways, to retrieve this vision of social (non)relation and to take it seriously as a subject position, particularly now, in our current moment of geopolitical uncertainty.” [9]

Frances Stark, The New Vision, 2008

At the Mandrake Bar this meant – as I imagine the event from publication alone – prioritising a straightforward sharing of information  and the creation of a particular social environment, with each speaker followed by a specially selected DJ set. Diverse themes operated against any false notion of commonality amongst the participants. Whilst none of the talks explored talks potential for destruction and cruelty, the notion of talk as contrary was key. In one Mandrake talk, Frances Stark suggests “Fuck the World” as a more appropriate translation.

In July this year, the South London Gallery hosted Performance as Publishing. If explorations like this essay can be over dependent on talks that attain some printed form, here was a curatorial frame (initiated by Nicole Bachmann and Ruth Beale) proposing to bring that act of publishing back into the moment of performance. In pieces by Annie Davey and Emma Kay this was matter of factly the case, with artists reading aloud texts printed on A4 paper, as if all the decisions, acts and costs of publishing became a matter for voice and site.

Francesco Pedraglio, Hanging Rock, 2011

Other works offered a less literal intepretation of “performance as publishing.” Francesco Pedraglio’s A few stories in the shape of abstract objects (2011) negotiated amongst both the absorptive, charismatic effects of a traditional storyteller and a set of elements chosen for their questioning of narrator and narrative coherence; whilst Jenny Moore’s Proposal for a Rock Opera- Act Two (2011) sketched out a musical based on an artist residency in Norway.

Moore used song and hand drawn acetates on an overhead projector to convey sample songs and plot. The deliberately amateur clumsiness of these techniques was balanced by her clear musical prowess and confidence as a performer. Like Holder’s talk at the National Portrait Gallery, both Moore and Pedraglio asked us to become involved (and be entertained) by what was presented, whilst highly self-aware and destabilising of the structures and procedures involved in its manufacture. Something I can’t articulate yet about how these different strategies combine is what engages and excites here.

Ruth Beale, Lindgren & Langlois: The Archive Paradox, 2011

This doubleness (at least) unfolded differently in Beale’s own Lindgren & Langlois: The Archive Paradox (2011), which saw two male actors facing each other across desks ten metres apart, reading aloud their correspondence as, respectively, first curator of the BFI’s National Film Archive and co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française.

Unlike some of the night’s other work, Beale deployed traditional theatrical notions of scenography and the trained actor. Unlike Moore, Pedraglio and Holder, Beale did not (this time) use humour and absurdist inventiveness. Instead, such theatrical artificiality created a quiet concentration that opened up a gap between audience and performers.

This gap was composed of questions. Why this subject and not any other? Why now? What are we to do with this information? How does its specificity play with an audience presumably not out for an evening on early histories of film preservation? If Beale wasn’t offering laughs, this wasn’t necessarily a tactic to be valued over others, but another element of what is at stake in an artist talking, the multiple ways of inhabiting that doubting interface.

NOTES

[1]Falke Pisano, Figures of Speech (JRP Ringier, 2010), 19.

[2]David Antin: Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature 1966-2005 (University of Chicago Press, 2011), 11.

[3]Stephen Vincent and Ellen Zweig eds. The Poetry Reading: A contemporary compendium on language & performance (San Francisco, Momo’s Press, 1981), 191.

[4]Steve Benson, Open Clothes (Berkeley, Atelos, 2005).

[5]Open Clothes, 116.

[6]Leslie Scalapino, How Phenomena Appear to Unfold (Litmus Press, 2011), 123.

[7]Joan Retallack inteviewed about John Cage by Thomas Trummer in Trummer, ed. Voice & Void (The Aldrich, 2007), 89-94.

[8]Chris Cheek, THE CHURCH- THE SCHOOL- THE BEER (Critical Documents, 2007), 191.

[9]CONTRA MUNDUM I-VIII (Los Angeles, Oslo Editions, 2010), v.

The latest VSK Chapbook is  FROM THE OCCULT DIARY OF HOSNI MUBARAK by Paolo Javier and Matt Jones.  It is available for PDF download here.

*

The authors provide the following information about themselves:

Paolo Javier is the current Queens Borough Poet Laureate. The recipient of grants from the Queens Council on the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts, he is the author of four chapbooks and three full-length poetry collections, including The Feeling Is Actual (Marsh Hawk Press, October 2011).

Matt Jones was born and raised in a suburb of Rochester, New York. He received his BFA in art from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2002.

He has had a half dozen solo shows and participated in numerous group shows over the last eight years. He lives and works in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He’s also read every book on UFOs, the paranormal, ancient astronaut theory, the Knights Templar, and quantum mechanics he can get ahold of.

Ghostbusters is his favorite movie.

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Paolo was previously artist in residence for VerySmallKitchen’s DEPARTMENT OF MICROPOETICS at the AC Institute in New York. Details of that project is here.

One starting point for collaboration here was Matt Jones Occult Drawings in 2nd Avenue.

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Read FROM THE OCCULT DIARY OF HOSNI MUBARAK here.

Read MEMO SEVEN as a VSK Chapbook here.  More on Neil’s work is here.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young poet, The Seventh Letter, May 14th , 1904, Rome)

“Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a  strong, simple ‘I must’, then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.”

(Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young poet, The First Letter, Feb 17th , 1903, Paris)

2.12.11

It is night-time.
It is winter.
It is cold.

It is difficult.
It is hard.
It is driving you crazy.

Nevertheless.

It is good.
It is for the good.
It is difficult for the good.
It is a difficult time for the good.

Nevertheless.

You will be fine.
You will.

As long as you keep your eyes open no harm will be done to you.

Be aware.
Be brave.
Be funny.
Be consistent.
Be around friends.
Be in big cities.
Be in the country side.

Be sexy.
Be aroused.
Be attracted and attractive.
Be horny.
Be flirty.
Be clever.
Be yourself and not yourself.
Be the different characters of yourself.

Be a literary hero.
Be a movie star.
Be famous.
Be famous.

Be emotional.
Be lost.
Be free.

Be reading books.
Be walking in the forest.
Be riding the bike.
Be and be not-be.

Be someone who cares.
Be honest.
Be a man.

Be a woman.
Be a child.
Be in equanimity.

This poem demands a final ‘Be’ standing alone at the end but I wont do that.

Be-cause,
this poem wants to
be
a
tree.

_

What has not been said?

There must be something that has not been said.

Postmortem.

How can we connect that to Postmodernism?

_

She is on her fours,

I am above her.

She is below me.

She is blowing me.

I am being blown.

I am being blown from below.

I am being blown from below by a beautiful blonde.

I am being blown from below by a beautiful blonde with big breasts.

b(e)-b(e)-b(e)-b(e)-b(e)-b(e)-b(e)-b(e)

Her breasts are dangling in front of me.

I look at them.

They are big.

They belong to a beautiful blonde with big breasts.

I take them in my mouth.

I suck on them.

She sucks on me.

We both suck each other.

We suck and suck and suck.

Then we fuck and go to sleep.

-

The following is a reconstruction of an email exchange between VerySmallKitchen and Ohad Ben Shimon in response to the above post, which took place Dec 3-4 2011.

OHAD: i have been wanting to write something erotic after reading bataille’ story of the eye for the first time. im aware that it doesnt quite pass by my usual subject matters or ‘style’.

what made the last section definite for me is that it is not at all about desire or the sexual act but only about the one long sentence where i felt like coming up with a lot of words starting with the letter ‘b’ – being blown by a beautiful blonde with big breasts and that that would echo somehow the verb/wish – ‘be’ from the first section, so to have some kind of ‘coded’ message. and in relation to poetry and photography…that they should also just be in the sense that a poem wants to be and a photograph/image wants to be..

i guess im ’building on’/trusting the contingency of language..in form and in essence in the sense that contingency is something applicable to propositions and i see art as a proposition. maybe that is the necessary link we need in order to come back to our original question – what is the relation between art practice and writing..

VerySmallKitchen: One characteristic of texts that position themselves between art practice and writing seems to be an immersion in the possibilities of a form or genre which is simultaneously a utilisation of its possibilities/effects and a commentary upon those -

Ohad: i do consider all of this discourse as one which is on a meta level yes definitely. i think the kind of poetry i am most interested in is ars poetics and i guess that im interested in connecting poetry as the highest form of literature to a possible highest form of visual art, perhaps that would be painting or some other form of image-language (beeld-taal in dutch)? so im dealing here with comparing these two systems, the system of language to the system of art via a meta connection, yes.

VerySmallKitchen: But these multiple levels of (self-) awareness are not necessarily shared or even identified by a reader.  Perhaps that explains texts that require performance or discussion to be “completed” in some way, either as “afters” or by inviting notions of script and conversation into their own page forms -

Ohad: (thinking out loud) is an incomplete text one that does not have con-text? do we need a text to have a ‘con’ in order to justify it or can it just be without having an antagonist to ‘fight’ against? a preposition (con) to complete the proposition? does a text need a context in order to be self-aware? does its self-awareness require a context in order to be comprehended? does a text need to be comprehended?

maybe this is a quality that we can borrow from visual art which does not necessarily require to be comprehended in order to be enjoyed..maybe such is the form of the ‘artistic’ text? maybe con-text as such is something we can start to imagine doing without. i mean this in the sense that everything is context. everything is going against the text. that is why it wants to be, to be on its own, to exist on its own terms (like the reference by rilke) to exist.

the text is the protagonist and the con-text is the antagonist. maybe that is the duel of literature..that is the pity i find in story of the eye by bataille.. it is followed by an unnecessary ( in my opinion) contemplation by roland barthes and susan sontag who will creep their way into whatever interesting text is out there..

… i think a good way to deal with this is indeed through performance, especially as regarding to voice, and the sound the text and reader make whilst reading it – indeed a more physical form. perhaps that is the reason for all the explicit physicality, stereo-typical sexual representation, i.e the politics of representation at the end. the politics of representation here is in fact a politics of repression in which the voice is being repressed by an all encompassing Über-con-text.

… some final thoughts about things standing on their own..perhaps we are attempting here a challenge to what is believed to be unachievable in contemporary art..an object standing on it own..a self contained object..

VerySmallKitchen: But despite all these processes/ideas the post still concludes with a stereotypical heterosexual male sexual fantasy/ porn image-

Ohad: what is a classic porn image/ male fantasy? im sure there are million different kinds of fantasies. why are we forced to think that there is one iconic, original, solid male fantasy. the nature of fantasy itself is in the multitude not the singular..dreams and fantasies are lucid. maybe we are dealing with challenging the classic definition of a male fantasy?

maybe the ‘pornographic’ section at the end is dealing with the deconstruction of the original/monolithic text/male fantasy as such? maybe that is where porn and poetry meet..? i guess you are right in pointing out that we do have some gender issue on our hands. how to deal with that? maybe in the next post?

VerySmallKitchen: Thinking about blog traffic I was considering the relations of our ideas on language and art practice to “beautiful blonde big breasts sucks” as google search terms… should this be part of our concern?

Ohad: the google search terms is part of our inquiry i believe. google is the all encompassing context which the texts we are dealing with today take their oxygen/raison de etre from.

Post 1 is here. More about Ohad’s work is here.