Rich Owens on Abandoned Buildings and Wild Horses Of Fire (PPNL)

Poet-scholar Rich Owens has a thoughtful essay in the new Poetry Project Newsletter addressing Sean Bonney's Abandoned Buildings and Wild Horses Of Fire in terms of devaluation, distributed authorship, and the limits of digital commoning.

You can also read a PDF of the essay at Michael Cross's The Disinhibitor and at the Poetry Project's website.

And here I sense the vehicle that delivers Bonney’s poems and Donovan’s criticism embodies almost precisely the same contradictions each confront in their thinking—that is, the very instrument that allows each to circulate their work to the widest possible audience also shackles and mediates it, distorts and compromises it, generating a tension that challenges the potential efficacy of the work. But the risk Bonney and Donovan court in addressing the commons by way of a fundamentally compromised and widely devalued digital publishing service alerts us to the rigid material limits we—as poets, artists and critics—are forced to work within and through.
--Rich Owens, "PRISON-HOUSE OF COMMONS: SEAN BONNEY VIS-A-VIS THOM DONOVAN"

5 Questions with Carin Kuoni (at Art21)

My second post at Art21 blog for my column "5 Questions (for Contemporary Practice)" features Carin Kuoni of New School University's Vera List Center for Art and Politics:

Something unique about the VLC – and Kuoni’s approach as a curator (as you will see below) – is the extent to which she has thought through the ramifications of her programming and the VLC’s relationship both within the larger institution of The New School as well as the institutions and communities with which it has worked. I particularly admire that the VLC’s events tend to relate and build upon one another and reflect a curatorial ethos. I also admire very much the evolution of the VLC from strictly organizing programs and events towards more recently producing curricular documents (textbooks, anthologies) and creating a fellowship program intended to bring scholars, teachers, and artists to the university to participate in programs and curriculum.