Interview With Charles Bernstein Part I (@ Harriet)

here
Thom Donovan: Making a selected is a time to be retrospective obviously. I was thinking of Zukofsky’s notion of a life-work, his Bottom weaving the strands of an organic whole. What emerges for you as the strands of the weave?

Charles Bernstein: I wanted to create a work that was refracted by changing forms, in changing parts (synchronic); the retrospective aspect gave me an additional diachronic scale to work with: works/themes/motifs changing over time, an old-time trope for sure. And one of the things that I’m interested in is seeing how far I can not follow that Zukofsky idea that everything is connected, to see to what degree everything is disconnected, or simply acknowledge that there is disconnection. I don’t think either is true or not true, by the way. Connection and disconnection, in the sense I mean here, are heuristic devices. When things seem to be disconnected on the surface that allows for other kinds of connections, elsewhere. So, in the end, I think that the relation of part to whole is unstable (or modular); still, shifting constellations emerge. … and that you discover what those constellations are not by trying to consciously make things that connect, but often by a poetics of aversion. In aversion we find unexpected connections (my own Emersonianism).

7CV Blurb

Here is the blurb I submitted for the Tan Lin 7CV EDIT event Wednesday night at UPenn:

Besides being a book framed by metadata--performing metadata as a dispersal of the book’s ‘substance’--7CV is a creative treatise anthropologizing current administered worlds. As such it exists where the utopian and the dystopian cleave, and where atopia (no place) posits The Open. What can (should?) be salvaged from the apparent judgment day of bar codes, pharmaceuticals, post-disco, Walmart-type 'superstores' and reality programs at the level of the concept and of material practices? 7CV makes us attend the most banal and transparent aspects of contemporary experience with renewed insight and interest. I’ll never view a Post-It note the same. Nor perhaps my experience of waiting at an airport during a flight delay.

Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior (@ Apex Art)

Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior
by Sreshta Premnath & Thom Donovan

Featuring interviews with artists, scholars, scientists, writers, and theoreticians.

Saturday, May 22: 4-6 pm
APEX ART
291 Church Street, NYC, 10013
t. 212 431 5270
www.apexart.org

Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior (@ Harriet)

here
I could not imagine a more auspicious person to collaborate on this project with than Premnath, who is currently working on an installation which deals with the ways that monuments project symbolic values and retroactive cultural narratives. Visiting Premnath’s studio a few weeks ago in Sunset Park, Bklyn, upon entering the studio I immediately encountered a statue in the center of the room, covered by packaging materials bound in rope and standing on a wooden crate. Around the center of the room were propped mirrored sign boards upon which images of rope and newspaper photographs were silkscreened. In other incarnations of Premnath’s “monument,” the staue is surrounded by blank sign-boards, as though a particular political content were erased (vanished? forgotten?) or more likely yet-to-be-inscribed. In Premnath’s work, one always moves among multiple durations, historical contexts, and memory circuits, all of which potentialize the present through aesthetic-critical encounter.