5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Ben Kinmont (@Art21)

Here is a feature I did for Art21 with Ben Kinmont, a visual artist who also trades in books and culinary marvels.

"At one point, in the late 1990s, I had to decide whether to continue participating in the art world or to become an antiquarian book dealer who devoted 100% of his time to working with rare books. I decided to continue as an artist and bookseller. I stayed in both worlds because I realized that I was from the art world, that its history was my point of reference, and that its community was something to which I felt responsible, even if I was disappointed in it somehow. But to try and go on, I had to focus on connections to things outside of the art world, whether they were notions of social responsibility or exchanges with other disciplines. I was trying to broaden the range of what could be considered art and to open it up to questions from new audiences and participants. The art world was not enough on its own."

Frank Sherlock's Love Letter November 15

Wonderful to receive this poem from Frank Sherlock last night. In response to the raid of Zuccotti Park.


Books

gone

Shelter

gone

I've been

screaming

out of key

all day

for you to

cover

the promise

hole

in the wall w/

a horizontal

picture or

something

that looks

like joy

I've been waiting

Ah this

sunrise

again on

a failed

paradigm

this stare

too far

into space

for too long

to remember

the name of

this city

Here is

a hammer

Here is

a bulb

A number

of things can

happen like

building in

light

killing in

darkness

or touching

each other

during

our magic

hour

I trade

news links

through

militarized

playspace

to keep

witnessing

fresh

to stay out

of the back

catalogue

while

looking to

not be

abandoned

Take a sip

of war

commodity

from my

bottle when

you get here

I know you

get thirsty

You might

taste traces

of blood but

this is what

I have

to offer

The sound

you might

hear is

quiet running

counter to

anticipations

seizing on

conservation

as if shorter

showers matter

Pardon

my reach

to be

respirited

filching a cup

of memory

as memory

Are you there

This company's

the worst

The trapdoor

spiders' prey

lines up

in the web

in perfect

single file

I hate them

& I'm not

talking about

the spiders

Feed on

a symbol if

it's helpful

This phone

has hit

the wall

It still

works as

a transmitter

Call me

Where does

the exile

end & the

life begin

Your now is

three hours

before my

now & your

now is six

hours after

my now &

where in

this hell is

our future

but so far

ahead it'll be

unrecognizable

upon arrival

Not to

get all

necrocentric

but there's no

contradiction

between

the love of

flowers &

hatred of

floral

wallpaper

This was

real this is

real since

nothing

can be

destroyed

even when

pushed

into fire

I take

the cremains

to the Risk &

Disaster

Studies

section to

Poetry

(of course)

to the bridge

between

the smart

side of

the river &

mine to

the cafe for

conversation

Part funeral

Part miracle

The miracle

can no longer

be buried

There is

a difference

between death

by despot &

natural death

but neither's

truly painless

Pretending

there is no

loss foretells

more loss

than I could

ever shoulder

I've waited so long

Living through

catastrophe due

to no fault

of our own we

feel around

in this blackout

for everything

unseen

Yes we're

engaged

No we never

dated I

swear it's

really not

that weird

Before I woke

I banged

piano out

in a field

the floodrotten

shed in

the distance

I composed

for you w/

ham & wire

It sounded

good at

the time so

what if it

came out

sloppy it was

Peace Be

With You

sang so far

away from

church

That was nice

but we are

awake now

captured

while viewers

haven't

discovered

that craters

seen from

a distance

render these

wounds less

than their

actual size

I despise

missionaries

& their boring

positions

I'm tired of

lying on my

back just so I

can be taken

This interest

rate this

jobless stat

this market

demographic

has gotten

up to stay

human

I have almost

died again

to prove I

am a person

The library

starts over

You are

what I've

waited for

& finally

we're here

Two paragraphs on "intense autobiography"

From the talk I gave at Regina Rex gallery last wkend:

Basically, I want to use intense autobiography to describe self-life-writing practices (the literal translation of auto-bio-graphy) that stray from the genre of autobiography, in which one provides the facts of their life, from birth until present, usually late in life. While intense autobiography exists in relation to these forms of self- or person- writing, it is different. And where it differs largely are in two respects: 1. That writing is not a transparent, narrative means of making self or person appear retroactively, but the very means through which the person/self comes into being in relation to a social milieu; 2. Through intense autobiography the “body”–that container demarcating human personhood and rights—becomes a site of experience and experimentation where the limits of the self are related, if not often contested, in relation to a public, community, and/or socius.

Intense autobiography can also refer to a series of practices upon the body, much as Foucault spoke of disciplinary practices in terms of a “technology” or “care” of the self. The body-self is a site where subjecthood is negotiated and contracted; where disciplinary boundaries and biological essences are tested; where the body as a territory is both mapped and deterritorialized, as in the many famous cases outlined by Deleuze and Guattari. What I want to talk about when I talk about intense autobiography is how self-life-writing demarcates social, biopolitical, and geocultural thresholds. Through forms, and not simply a received narrative writing which blandly insists on a continuous definition of self as a contained or enclosed interior, I believe writing and aesthetic forms may present the movement and passage of person/self/subject through a duration (where intensity refers to movements in time, and extension may relate movement in space). This writing is about becoming; it is about movement and undergoing; it is also about undertaking a radical empathy by which “self” and “other” and milieu and environment inform one another, as much of the most remarkable poetry and art of the 20th century has ventured. Form is necessary to the prospect of a radical autobiographical writing practice, because it is through the discovery and invention of forms that the subject becomes observable as a series a thresholds relating inter-subjective, psychosocial, and biopolitical exigency—the very urgencies that autobiography, as a genre, normally excludes.

N
E
W

Y
O
R
K

(A
P)

—

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w

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the law

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been available to anyone else.

Until time and justice are one
Or we are forgiven
Movement heals our wounds while
It opens a million more

While you opened, while
Your mouth opened, I heard
The throat do its thing.
I heard the song express

A million things about
What we are here for,
Thinking about the generations
We turn around them

While they turn around us,
To assemble those burdens
The dance called out,
Into the heat of air

That leavens, leaves us burned.

Chase Granoff's intuition is preceding over my understanding. (@ The Chocolate Factory)

intuition is preceding over my understanding.

by CHASE GRANOFF

Collaborators and contributors:

Megan Byrne
Jon Moniaci
F.P. Boué
Thom Donovan
Paul Mpagi Sepuya

November 16-19, 2011
8 o'clock pm
tickets $15

Chase Granoff’s intuition is preceding over my understanding. is a solo performance of a landscape exploring an expression of time and place, present and past. Interested in the movements of sustainability, slow and local and how they can be applicable to choreographic thought as expressed through improvisation and score, this choreographic exhibition will unfold through a multitude of expressions in hopes of offering various perspectives of the questions that created it - grounded in the honesty and transparency of the bread that will be offered.

Considering the Steve Paxton quote "researched the fiction of cultured dance and the 'truth' of improvisation" – is choreography an aesthetics of change? How is my interest in bread making part of a dance (life) practice? Is dance a politics? This solo has something to do with becoming a father. Re-becoming a dancer.

For tickets, please visit www.chocolatefactorytheater.org or call (212) 352-3101.

Post-show drink specials courtesy of Dominie's Hoek, El Ay Si, The Creek & Cave.

On Hannah Weiner and Intense Autobiography (at Regina Rex gallery)

Lectures by Thom Donovan and Melissa Scherrer
accompany the current exhibition DÉJÀ VU

Saturday, November 12 @ 1pm

Regina Rex
17-17 Troutman, #329, Queens, NY 11385
Hours Sat & Sun 12-6pm and by appointment
Contact: info@reginarex.org or 646.467.2232

IMAGES: (left) Hannah Weiner (photo c. Tom Ahern 1978), (right) The Predictive Almanac of 2009

Thom Donovan
Thom Donovan will discuss the concept of "intense autobiography" found in the work of poet Hannah Weiner (1928-1997) whose life and writings were so inextricably linked. Weiner perceived innovation as both performance and survival tool, and her embodied condition as clairvoyant journalist/schizophrenic led to some of the most personal and psychologically complex texts of her time. Donovan is a poet, essayist, art writer, curator, teacher, editor and archivist. He edits Wild Horses Of Fire weblog, ON Contemporary Practice, and writes regularly for Art21 and The Brooklyn Rail. His first book, The Hole, will be out later this fall with Displaced Press.

Melissa Scherrer
In 2008, Scherrer made an artist book with her artist/husband Mike Pare called the 2009 Predictive Almanac. Now out of print, the golden booklet was a self-help guide containing home remedies to deal with astrological predictions for the following year. Scherrer will tell us about this book and offer us predictions for 2012. The audience will also be invited to participate in an interactive personal development session. Scherrer resides in New Mexico with her husband and daughter, where she makes paintings, photographs and paintings on photographs and teaches at the University of New Mexico.


DÉJÀ VU includes artists Ivin Ballen, Tatiana Berg, Lisa Sigal, Frank Trankina and Selina Trepp. The exhibition is up until November 20th and was recently reviewed in WagMag.


-------------

Regina Rex is an artist-run exhibition space located at 1717 Troutman, in Ridgewood, Queens. We are open on Saturdays and Sundays, 12-6pm.

Directions: L train to Jefferson, exit, walking along Wyckoff to Troutman. Walk up (north) on Troutman two blocks, passing St. Nicholas and Cypress, to a large brick building on the left. Regina Rex is in suite #329.

If you would like more information, or an appointment outside of gallery hours, please email info@reginarex.org or call 646-467-2232.

Hannah Weiner and "intense autobiography"

Help me write a talk for next wkend, on Hannah Weiner and what I'm calling "intense autobiography." How does autobiography figure in your own writing and/or art practice? How specifically in ways that may be considered counterintuitive to or innovating upon the genre of autobiography? How, likewise, someone who you admire, or with whom you share affinities? Email me at wildhorsesoffire [at] gmail [dot] com.

Two Dances for Leavening

--for Chase Granoff

1.

Your mention of making bread
Makes me think of leavening
A leavening for change is a leaving
It takes time and is kneaded

And is needed this is a pre-
political thing, this is a post-
political thing, this is most of all
A political thing, this ingestion

Through the mouth or the hearth
That surrounds the mouth makes us
A domestic scene whose worth is
Measured by the public, floating

Upon the heat of the air, in this sense
Of seeing or being in the dance
For a polis we can partake of
We are down below, all, we are all

Animal down here, and this con-
sumption is too large to fit coffinlike
In the tomb our planet has become
Conviviality and nourishing substance

Must do their work that surrounds
That surrounds the mouth a res
Publica so-called this bread
Until it is held in common, until

Sense levels us we are left to leaven
The leave-taking of our senses
Must be plain, made by dance
So becoming becomes a heaven

Presupposing time and justice are one.

2.

The ingestion of one substance
We are making
That we are making
The world up as we are also
Movement and we are built
To move in waste our ways otherwise
Than being what you have to say
When breath becomes bread
And there seems no other way
But in this dance other forces sway us
We are persuaded like the world twists
The way it depends on bread
Everyday to sustain
The simplest things
It is the simplest things that are
Easiest to forget
If we ever remembered them at all
I am using the line as a continuous breath
Not a metaphor for things seen
Like we can breathe our way out of this immiseration
Pivot and pirouette our way out of debt
Out of the pollution of everything
To assert the fourth dimension
Betrays our sympathy
And not merely our power over, as Pound claimed,
Every being
To leaven this sense of awe again
The power of things over words, that would
Be bread
Making the world up as we move
These built lines of song
These step-like tones
When time and justice should be one.

Review of Rachid Ouramdane's Ordinary Witnesses (@ The Brooklyn Rail)

Here is a review I wrote of Rachid Ouramdane's incredible Ordinary Witnesses.

"In this place—zero or nil—the dancers move low to the floor. They are grounded—literally. And it is from the floor that they will rise, and writhe, and continually fall again. As if gravity itself were complicit with the violence committed against them. As if it were also a force of resistance embodying the harm that had been done to the violated and tortured. Gravity becomes an active and visible material through Ouramdane’s choreograph[y], propelling the body/subject (back) into being."