Announcing WIG 2

WIG 2
edited by Kristen Gallagher and Tim Shaner

Contributors: Steve Benson, Laynie Browne, Del Ray Cross, Thom Donovan, Patrick Durgin, William Fuller, Kristen Gallagher, Judith Goldman, Brandon Holmquest, Rodney Koeneke, Richard Kostelanetz, Bill Marsh, Tim Shaner, Sigmund Shen, and Carol Szymanski.

Wig is a low-budget magazine devoted to poetry and art that appropriates the job for its own artistic purposes. Not always “about” work, the wig-artist may employ his or her labor for poetic or artistic ends that implicitly critique the virtue of productivity through the act of poaching company time and/or materials. The wig-artist often “writes work” (Spahr) in relation to a “laboring society” (Arendt) that has little or no appreciation for the work of making art. The form of the work will often reflect compromised time and/or attention. The title of the magazine alludes to Michel de Certeau’s discussion of la perruque: “the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employers.”

“It was a typical entry level job. I tried during my job to do my other work, that without an economy, only to realize there was little hope. This was my attempt to get around the problem and write work. [...] I collected notes from my boss’s memos, things I had seen [or] over-heard. I collected them into one long stream of day/text and barely edited them.”
–Juliana Spahr, Live

“The limits imposed by work represent not simply an obstacle but an opportunity for writing—not least because the workplace is the site of common activity and therefore enables us to bear witness to our common experience.”
–Kit Robinson, “Time and Materials”

“There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning—that event which I may not have found, but on whose path I seek myself—is not earned by work.”
–André Breton, Nadja

To order a copy contact Tim Shaner @ twshaner [at] comcast [dot] net

And seeming
And a semblance
They flee
From us

The products leak
What one has been
Will be

Like a hole
In the transmissible
Air the sea
Is anarchy

Deregulating
Birds wings
Landing
Whole worlds

In imploding
Debt
Who gives
Their word?

Somatics mapped

She who has gift in common

“I am the kind of poet who rescinds
“these sheets of paper
“Just by being

“A place where the Me is dissociated
“a volume perpetually crumbling away

Reading "Paul Thek, Our Contemporary" at Kelly Writers House

Blood Noise*

Intestines in eyelids while still living
—Leslie Scalapino

Tears and excrement of wax scratched
By substance a distant idea of this

What's that in your mouth the failed
Absolute bird string or song like a field

We can't enter my heart can't hold
All this blood my hands are a mould

For no one distance is where we begin from
Mastering your ridinghood

Wounds the animus we are foregone
Stamps of simulacrum and death masks

All the animals started dying all we
Could do was continue plugged

With blood my heart can't hold
So far steeped in what’s left to fill.


*composed spring 2007-spring 2010, a version of the above was published in War and Peace 4 Vision and Text, ed. Judith Goldman and Leslie Scalapino. The title derives from a drawing by Kiki Smith, exhibited in Smith's 2006-2007 Whitney retrospective. "Intestines in eyelids while still living" is taken from a reading Scalapino gave at St. Mark's church around the same time.

Embodiment

"vessel soma slave fantasy the enfolding of sensation into a body schema boundary (s/m) mastery of temporal and spatial coordinates kinesthetic sphere that extends into universal desire an erotics of tissues lips speak opening tender touch phantasmatic identification with wholeness hole practices of emptying and filling language tracings on the inside of skins word clothes projections the agency of surface blood pulse grating bones a huddling in darkness, at night Open"
--Petra Kuppers at Nonsite Collective

For BB

My friend the future's not what it used to be
The survival of memory depends on speaking
Of trees jettisoned to space bunnies spills
In our prematurely dug graves not without futuristic
Corporate logos almost don't see the difference
Between sci fi and real life what with the people all "busy"
On Facebook over-connected not conjuncted
Is that how you would put it? Or is my luddite
Streak just sour grapes (space junk?) I want our
Present to be sweeter (more scrappy?) so soak
In the virtul past the ones we can't seem to be
Bring it up on this fantasy screen from you to me
Return from it like we were having a moment.

Mini Tour in July

In July I will be reading and presenting in LA, San Francisco, Oakland, and Boston at the following events:

LA
Poetic Research Bureau
July 11th, 4:30PM
w/ Steven Farmer
hosted by Joseph Mosconi

San Francisco
Commons and Art Practice (a discussion with Nonsite Collective)
Nicole Hollis Studios
935 Natoma St. SF
July 18th, 2PM
hosted by Michael Cross and Nonsite Collective

Oakland
The (New) Reading Series @ 21 Grand
July 18th
w/ Catherine Meng
hosted by Alli Warren, Michael Nicoloff, & Erika Staiti

Cambridge
A Boston Poet Tea Party poetry marathon
Pierre Menard Gallery
July 30th, 7PM
hosted by Jim Behrle, Michael Carr, David Kirschenbaum, John Mulrooney, and Aaron Tieger

Art, Criticism, and Its Markets (@ 16 Beaver)

Wednesday 06.16.10 -- Art, Criticism, and Its Markets

CONTENTS:
1. About this Wednesday
2. More on Isabelle Graw
3. Readings
4. Upcoming Readings

___________________________________________________
1. About this Wednesday

What: Reading Discussion
Where: 16Beaver Street, 4th Floor
When: Wednesday 06.16.10 at 7:15 pm
Who: Free and open to all

Over the last 20 or 30 years, there has been an increasing amount of criticism written which is directed at the economy or market of art. This growing interest on the part of critics has mirrored the burgeoning market around art. And even today, in the midst of a financial depression in many parts of the world, art is increasingly seen as an integral part of 'investment portfolios' and considered a 'safe haven' for nervous investors. Even 'well intentioned' efforts which attempt to protect the interests of artists, through funds or pension trusts, only seem to reinforce the ever increasing pace of the financialization or
securitization of art.

This Wednesday, we would like to invite those who might be interested in exploring the interrelations between art, money, and criticism to attend what will be the first meeting of a focused reading group on the subject.

The reading group is being organized by Anastasiya Osipova and Zac Dempster and they will use Isabelle Graw's book "High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture" as a point of reference and departure.

The book investigates what an art market does in relation to the artists who strategize within it. Graw begins by narrating through Gustave Courbert's exploits in prison and his heroic exclusion from Salon de Paris into collectors homes. Could this serve as precedent for contemporary artist in their criticisms of the institution while fortifying their cultural value? Some contemporary cases are those of the New York American Fine Arts, Co gallery, Andrea Fraser and Merlin Carpenter, Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Julien Schnabel, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Yves Klein…

Among key questions that will be addressed through these discussions is a position of criticism vis-à-vis art, which is already seen as both an epistemological object and an indexical expression of market value (not unlike money). Does this status of art reify critical texts as well?

If the so-called art-market is not to be described as a reservoir of phantasms, if the story we could tell of it is not to be a ghost mystery story, what genre would be appropriate?

It is our hope to meet the limitations of this self-reflexive text by an exegesis that will include artist press releases, gallery websites, Facebook pages, photographs, blog posts, art magazine and journal reviews, art auction details, etc. As though following on Twitter the question "to what degree can contemporary writers profit off the vocabulary this text offers? In what fields and by the use of what empty signifiers?"

Anastasiya and Zac will begin the evening by introducing how they arrived at the idea for this reading group, and then we will begin what will be the first of several sessions of readings and discussions.

___________________________________________________
2. More on Isabelle Graw

Isabelle Graw is Professor for Art Theory and Art History at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, where she co-founded the Institute of Art Criticism.

She is an art critic and co-founder of Texte zur Kunst in Berlin -- Sternberg Press's website. Graw now lives in Berlin, but was associated with a Cologne group of artists that circled around Martin Kippenberger.

___________________________________________________
3. Readings

For the introductory meeting we will look at the following texts:
Isabelle Graw, foreword to High Price
http://sduk.us/beaver/PDF/graw_innen_pt1.pdf

Michel Foucault “What is Critique?”
http://sduk.us/beaver/PDF/foucault_what_is_critique.pdf

Dietrich Dietrichson “On (Surplus) Value in Art”
http://sduk.us/beaver/PDF/dietrichson.pdf

Barbara Rose "The Auction is the Action"
http://sduk.us/beaver/PDF/rose_auction.pdf

and view a promotional video from Artprice, a French company that
serves as the largest database of the art sales records.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCyKRTX5bdg

___________________________________________________
4. Upcoming Readings

2nd meeting reading list:
Isabelle Graw, Chapter One of High Price

Jean-Joseph Goux “Figurative Standards: Gold and the Phallus” from
Symbolic Economies

Georges Bataille & numismatics (abstracts from Denis Hollier Against
Architecture: Writings of Georges Bataille)

“Art and its markets: a roundtable discussion” , Artforum, April 2008
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_8_46/ai_n31487375/

Seth Price “Dispersion”
http://www.distributedhistory.com/Dispersion2008.pdf

Pierre Bourdieu, abstracts from The Rules of Art.

“The History of Money” videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0IJCGuNtqk

(possibly: Georg Simmel The Philosophy of Money)

Cornered (Black Light)

What it would take
To name ourselves
Into unblind threat
To maintain this threat
And through it call
‘Self’ into being

Black light, black light
Of the light-skinned
Face cornered
In the room any
Place by your camera

Any name by the name
We would assume
How it would
Accuse an angle
And without alibi
Unworld.

Paul Chan and Tim Griffith in Conversation

Nonsite Collective summer events calendar

Elliot Anderson will present his project, The Monuments of Silicon Valley, David Wolach about Commoning and the Body, and I will present about Commoning and Aesthetic Practice.

http://www.nonsitecollective.org/

Thanks to Michael Cross and Taylor Brady for calendar design.

Who are called upon to leak
All barriers of the same
And what we are and when
We are not reconciled

The way the ground rose up
Spills our guts makes us, um,
Come clean—spreads the
Shittiness around at least

Endless streams of stars
Crossed by song unweaved
Recall what won’t be sung
Because no one is dreaming

It seems I can almost touch
The plume they cannot plug
Me up with currency and currents
Touch everything we’ll never be

Copulas of cant
Evacuate what’s left of place
Signify while real eyes watch
A wreck of belief.

Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior video now at Apexart

For those who missed the Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior at Apexart here is a link to a video download of interviews between myself and Matthew Buckingham, Sreshta Rit Premnath and Svetlana Boym:

http://apexart.org/events/bas_museo.htm

For Leslie Scalapino

Not even time to mourn it seems
The loss of me as you
The event and the time this event
Takes place within without name
Because you were moving with it
Interrupted by the social
Interrupted by how language
Mediates the social
There is still a horizon here
A rose rim for the real.

After Matushin

Some tankers and stars lapse
Some shade of resource
Always out-sourcing our lips leak
Silence laying sense to waste
Intuiting what other organs were here
Accomplice to apocalypse both art and its consequences
Are shapes you make in the dark
Non-images are for thinking
Feeling won't break the back or the bank
Sound waves lap like the mind is heard
A total proprioception as it turned.

composed 3/2007, revised 5/2010

We Are Leaves

I read this poem at the wedding of my friends Brandon and Jane nearly three years ago and have finally gotten around to transcribing it. I still think it is a perfect poem for a wedding...

We Are Leaves
By James Schuyler

There are leaves
there are trees
there is a tuba vine
“she”—a voice
she sings in other
words than what
disc grooves carry:
your name your face
our privacy in
hotel rooms with
cheap vodka cheap
quinine water our
nights are days
the morning comes
and goes and we
are pleased or
“who cares?” We
saw that view
of shimmering tall
offices. Today.
Today is muggy
gray—I don’t
mind: why care?
Today you see
another view
desk and win-
dow ledge, while
mine—my view
that is—is
window ledge
and desk. Do
I miss you?
You know, yes
and I know,
no, you are
so with me
when apart, I
think I under-
stand you and
you me: I’m
happy as a rained
on leaf or
lettuce in a
crisper. You
love me and I
reciprocate.
The leaves—
it’s almost
fall—look
to last for
ever—they will
come tumbling
down. I’m glad
we are not
leaves, or even
trees whose twigs
mesh. We are—
you are you,
I am I, and
we mesh. And
to ourselves
we speak our
thoughts and
touch and that
is love, isn’t
it? What Doc
called, Gen-
ital contact.
And lighter
than a zeppelin
the sense of
touched brushed
lightly one
against the other
we two, together
here among the leaves

ON Contemporary Practice 2 East Coast Launch

Please join us to celebrate the East Coast release of

ON Contemporary Practice 2

At Book Thug Nation bookstore in Williamsburg, Bklyn

Friday, June 4th at 8PM sharp

With readings by
CA Conrad
Robert Dewhurst
Brenda Iijima
Robert Kocik
Evelyn Reilly
Michelle Taransky and other special guests

hosted by Thom Donovan, coeditor of ON

Book Thug Nation is located at
100 N3rd St
Between Berry St and Wythe Ave
Williamsbug, Brooklyn.

For more information about ON check out:
http://www.oncontemporaries.org/

ON
Contemporary Practice 2
edited by Michael Cross, Thom Donovan & Kyle Schlesinger

Rosa Alcala, Stan Apps, Cara Benson, David Brazil, Laynie Brown, CA Conrad & Brenda Iijima, Corina Copp, Michael Cross, Robert Dewhurst, Thom Donovan, Patrick James Dunagan, Joel Felix, Robert Kocik, Chris Martin, C.J. Martin, Laura Moriarty, Rich Owens, Evelyn Reilly, Michelle Taransky, Dan Thomas-Glass, Robin Tremblay-McGaw, Brian Whitener, and Tyrone Williams

on Mónica de la Torre, Stephanie Young, Susana Gardner, Brandon Brown, Lee Ann Brown, CA Conrad & Brenda Iijima, Rodrigo Toscano & Poets Theater, Judith Goldman & Jennifer Scappettone, Dorothea Lasky, Bhanu Kapil, Edmund Berrigan/Jeff Karl Butler/John Coletti, William Fuller, Stacy Szymaszek, John Coletti, Rob Halpern, Conceptualisms, Flarf/Conceptual Writing, Rosmarie Waldrop & Contemporary Womens' Writing, Stacy Szymaszek, Jasper Bernes & Bay Area Publishing, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Dolores Dorantes, Erica Hunt.

COMMONING ON GOVERNORS ISLAND

June 5th and 6th 2010 - 11 AM to 6 PM

COMMONING ON GOVERNORS ISLAND
(a Prosodic Body* Event)
co-presented by Movement Research Festival 2010 HARDCORPS
and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council

Following their residencies with Movement Research and the LMCC Swing Space Grant Program Daria Fain and Robert Kocik will present works based on Commoning**. The presentation will include a performance by the Phoneme Choir, an exhibition, talks, and a screening by Iki Nakagawa.

June 5th -- 11AM to 6PM

11AM: door opens

Exhibition (on display all day): drawings and documentation concerning commoning and the Prosodic Body

1PM-3PM: Talks and Discussion with feminist activist, teacher, communalist historian Silvia Federici and the visionary socialist, writer, composer, bandleader, baritone saxophonist Fred Ho, moderated by Robert Kocik.

Silvia Federici: IN PRAISE OF THE DANCING BODY: while recapitulating the techniques capitalism has deployed to reduce the body to a machine, Federici will speak of practices by which we have resisted its mechanization, and the power of dance to articulate this resistance. More on Sylvia Federici

Fred Ho: FUTURE’S END: COMMUNISM AND ECOLOGY, REVOLUTION IS THE ONLY SOLUTION AND IT MUST BE LUDDITE! In this talk Fred Ho will ask: what is revolutionary socialist ludditism? Why is it the only solution? Why is it matriarchal (matri-centric) and indigenous-centric and why must these features be the foundation for a truly effectively revolutionary movement?

3PM-4PM: Performance of the Commons Choir (conceived and directed by Daria Fain and Robert Kocik). This piece is called Re-English—a re-tuning, an atoning for the fact that our current economic, climate and security crises are consequents of the sonic and connotative qualities of the English language—by means of phonemes as cosmogony; sound sequences as specific biochemical signaling, a reparation narrative, poetry as protection, and full recovery of the lost optative mood.

With Aretha Aoki, Margot Basset, Chung-chen Chang , Stephen Cooper, Levi Gonzalez, Hazuki Homma, Masumi Kishimota, Dora Koimtzi, Athena Kokoronis, Martin Lanz, Mina Nishimura, Peter Sciscioli, Kensaku Shinohara and Samita Sinha.

4PM-5PM: Screening of Collecting Collective Phase I: Filmic interpretations of commoning directed by Iki Nakagawa with contributions from Caterina Verde and Douglas Manson.

5PM: Q&A

June 6th -- 11 AM to 6 PM

11AM: Door opens——Commons Exhibition and continuous screening of Collecting Collective Phase I: Filmic interpretations of commoning directed by Iki Nakagawa with contributions from Caterina Verde and Douglas Manson.

2PM: Talk and discussion with poet Eric Gelsinger.

PERFECT MONEY: Eric Gelsinger will discuss the origins, history, and ontology of money, and explain its present determination by the U.S. Federal Reserve System. He will illuminate similarities between money and language, propose alternatives to the Fed's monopoly on our currency, and speculate on a "perfect money."

3PM-4PM: Performance of the Commons Choir (conceived and directed by Daria Fain and Robert Kocik) This piece is called Re-English—a re-tuning, an atoning for the fact that our current economic, climate and security crises are consequents of the sonic and connotative qualities of the English Language—by means of phonemes as cosmogony; sound sequences as specific biochemical signaling, a reparation narrative, poetry as protection, and full recovery of the lost optative mood.

With Aretha Aoki, Margot Basset, Chung-chen Chang , Stephen Cooper, Levi Gonzalez, Hazuki Homma, Masumi Kishimota, Dora Koimtzi, Athena Kokoronis, Martin Lanz, Mina Nishimura, Peter Sciscioli, Kensaku Shinohara and Samita Sinha.

5PM: Q&A

*Commoning is a group of poets, performers and persons working together toward the common good. Their foci: history of the enclosure of the commons leading directly to today's privateering, wage stagnation and material inequity; inner and somatic practices as the basis of fairness; the ways in which laws become the means for maintaining imbalance; hypertrophy of the financial sector; language as hegemonic force of globalization; and private determination of public space by 'business' that has always approached 'public' as inimical to its interests.

**The Prosodic Body is an aesthetic science that works with the sonic qualities of language as biochemical signaling; choreography; individual and social transformation; and cosmogony. This experiential field of research was begun by Daria Fain and Robert Kocik in 2006.

More information on HARDCOPRS

The ferry to Governors Island departs regularly from the Battery Maritime Building, Manhattan and Fulton Ferry, Brooklyn. LMCC space will be well-indicated at the ferry dock.

Eleni Stecopoulos' Armies of Compassion

Palm Press is pleased to announce the publication of Eleni Stecopoulos' first full-length collection of poems, Armies of Compassion

2010 | 108 pages | $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-9843099-0-0

This startling work brings something necessary to American poetry: a visceral poetics that transforms diagnosis into a performative linguistic probe in the service of the disturbed body. The body politic’s symptoms and signs are the foundation for Eleni Stecopoulos’s aversive lyrics, whose beauty lies not in the unbearing of a device but in the bearing of our discomfiture in the world and the potency of our imaginary realignments. Armies of Compassion is a talisman, antidote to what ails, spells woven against an engulfing night. — Charles Bernstein

The poems of Armies of Compassion are riveting, threnodic, deeply investigative of our "hieroglyphs of breath" and body. They cut to the marrow of kinetics and philology, our psyche’s doubt, our cellular breakdowns and theatricalities, our ironies and euphemisms, our endless war, pinning evocative Latin and Greek terms to greater mythic dimension and healing ritual. Eleni Stecopoulos is one of our deepest and most rigorous poets whose ethos and intelligence challenge and light up the mind. I am thrilled by out of what ruins and darkness and inspired lexical examination come these rare beauties. — Anne Waldman

"Philosophy never confesses / its delicate condition" writes Eleni Stecopoulos, as she takes on the inherently vulnerable role of investigative poet, asking whether the body, personal and politic, is irrevocably split off in its systemic afflictions. In this book Stecopoulos deploys the paradoxical force/fragility of poetry at all too familiar sites of our abjection. She does this with historically aware wisdom and humor. Can words help, not as palliative or consolation, but as source of transfiguring energy? "Levitating girls" hover over "lines gathering / all the intelligence" of an intellectually astute imagination steeped in, among many aesthetic legacies, that of ancient Greece, where the fact "that the god descends on creaking pulleys in no way undermines the apparition." This poet has the guts and strategy (persistent courage) of what she calls "choric goals…waiting in the echo / for a tone," subtending towards love. — Joan Retallack

Eleni Stecopoulos is among a constellation of contemporary U.S. poets effectively correlating somatics (the everyday practices and conditions of bodies) with geopolitics, through a radical and emergent lyricism. In Armies of Compassion, the poet's body becomes a site allegorizing disasters of "immunity": the principle disaster being the Hegelian-trap which over-identifies 'self' as 'other' and the other as potential outbreak. As the epigraph to “Autoimmunity,” from Antonin Artaud's Theater and Its Double, reads: "The Grand-Saint-Antoine did not bring the plague to Marseille. It was already there." Which is to say: what plagues us is not alterity, but the dangerous fiction that 'self' and 'other' are not in fact coconstitutive, and that identities rather than relationships persist. Discoursing with both ancient and contemporary healing practices, and calling into question the hegemony of modern Western medicine, Stecopoulos opens the field for what bodies can do liberated from the disciplinary triage of military, capital, and clinic. Like Artaud, Robert Duncan, and Hannah Weiner before her, language experiment follows from bodily necessity and contingency. Conditioned by despair, there is somehow hope in "guts." Having guts (courage), but also attending their literal fact (the innards determining how we act, thus will be). —Thom Donovan

Eleni Stecopoulos was born in New York, NY, and now lives in Berkeley, CA. She is the author of Autoimmunity (Taxt, 2006), and her poems and essays have appeared in journals including CHAIN, ECOPOETICS, Harvard Review, XCP:CROSS CULTURAL POETICS, The Capilano Review, and THE ENCYCLOPEDIA PROJECT. She received a Creative Work Fund grant to curate a program series around art and medicine for the SFSU Poetry Center and write a related book. Stecopoulos is a graduate of the University of Virginia MFA program and the Poetics Program at Buffalo. She teaches in the Language and Thinking program at Bard College and sometimes co-directs the Paros Translation Symposium in Greece.
This and other Palm Press titles are available from Small Press Distribution:
www.spdbooks.org

Please visit Palm Press' new website at www.palmpress.org for information about past titles and forthcoming projects including the long-awaited multi-author collection, Imaginary Syllabi and Tina Darragh's intermedia, interactive text, NO RIGHTS OBSERVED

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