| TEXTUAL OPERATIONS Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat, 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. PROGRAM September 25 : Bruce Andrews "The Poetics of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E" ABSTRACTS The first evening of "Textual Operations" will feature Bruce Andrews, poet and composer, discussing 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 generetion 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 MassMOCA 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 Vienese 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.
In "Against Meaning", Craig Dworkin proposes a radically new way of reading—one that proceeds without regard to theme or content or referential meaning, and yet still retains the explanatory powers and pleasures we associate with reading. With examples from both experimental and conventional writing—from George Oppen and Guillaume Apollinaire to Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop—this talk will illustrate what we might call an 'applied paragrammatics': how to engage texts on their own terms while sidestepping the familiar lull of their normative grammars. Craig Dworkin is a writer and professor at Princeton University. He has recently published in October and Sagetrieb, and "Reading the Illegible", a critical study of artistic appropriation and misuse is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. "In late 1920, age thirty-five, nel mezzo del cammin, Pound found himself at a crisis point in his career: the Cantos were not progressing, he had just been fired from his position as the Athenaeum’s drama critic, his most recent volume of verse, Quia Pauper Amavi, had been poorly received, and for a brief period, he apparently even considered returning to America to take up the study of medicine in the footsteps of his friend William Carlos Williams." This is how Richard Sieburth, in his essay Dada Pound, characterizes Pound’s state of mind as he was about to meet Francis Picabia, "the dynamic behind Dada," in 1921. Sieburth sees in their meeting, enormous consequences to Pound’s elaboration of the section of the Cantos that were produced right after. The strategies of quotations and misquotations, of displacement and fragmentation—which were part of Dada’s overall attempt to disrupt the semantic function of the ideological sign system that made World War I possible—will eventually find way in Pound’s Cantos, together with explicit quotes from and references to Picabia. Richard Sieburth will revisit his text, which was originally published in The South Atlantic Quarterly, in 1984, by way of an informal conversation with A.S.Bessa. 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 neglected—his early experiments with poetry that he once refered 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 Cake Shops on the Nevsky: Ezra Pound as Nominalist." Perloff proposes a fresh look at Pound's highly idiosyncratic use of proper names, especially in the Pisan Cantos, arguing that Poundian aesthetic is not, as is so often claimed, Confucian or NeoPlatonic but inherently Nominalist; it is concerned less with large truths than with the discrimination of difference. Along the way, Perloff will show the relationship of Pound's nominalism to that of his exact contemporary and acquaintance, Marcel Duchamp. SOUNDZIMPOSSIBLE. No, this title s not a misprint. Everyone knows of Cecil Taylor as a great jazz pianist but few know that he also performs his own poetry. Ulla Dydo will speak about it as wordmusic. Like his music, it avoids notation and print. It is improvised and asks to be heard in his performance. Dydo comes from years of reading Gertrude Stein, following the movement of her language without looking for story, event, representation, meaning. She has edited A Stein Reader, and her book Stein: The Language That Rises-1923-1934 will be published by Northwestern University Press in the Fall 2002. It seemed the most natural step to move from Stein to Cecil Taylor. (soundzimpossible.com/ceciltaylor is his brand-new web site.) ABC--We print anything in Cards, by Carolee Schneemann, is a small, little-known masterpiece. Printed in individual sheets of different color paper, ABC--We print anything in Cards is the quintessential experimental book. It asks the reader not only to leaf through its pages but to perform it. Although its subject matter is quite simple—a love triangle—Schneemann weaves her narrative with many layers: the book is a compilation of sorts of personal journal, fragments of fiction, and a collection of friendly advices received in the midst of a personal crisis. Scheneemann will guide the audience throughone of the possible readings of her book. Pages of the book will be on display at the entrance of White Box.
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