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Do you write or use language as part of your practice? From single words stenciled onto a canvas, or fragments of poetry collaged within an image; to long-form performance scripts, or narrative voice-overs for films - this workshop will help you develop and improve your writing. We will consider the multi-dimensional sites for writing through a series of writing workshops and discussions. We will look at ‘how’ artists ‘write’ within their work and what we can learn from our reading. Each session will encourage you be an author-producer, developing your writing from the page, to a site, to performance and installation, to digital platforms and networks.

We will explore, read, research and share writing ideas, prompts and exercises that takes us from writers block to hypergraphia. Call them schemas, scripts, cognitive maps, mental models, metaphors, or narratives, the scripts within our practices are how we explain the world to ourselves and share our worldview with others.

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“We lacked the equipment for a smoke machine that might be fitted with a text filter, through which legible typefaces could float out and dissipate in time. A self-eroding writing, a writing that dissolved when it was seen. But I didn’t need to make skywriting to know how we would react to it. With cotton balls I tufted up letters, glued them to cork. I acquired an LED board, rigged it to scroll words, to blink the scripts that I commanded. These light boards not only failed, they brought on new symptoms, triggering a palsy in our subjects, sometimes rendering them moribund, twitching on the testing-room floor until we unplugged the board. A writing might be made of air alone, I reasoned, colored air, the brittle air in zero-humidity climates, fur or animal hair that’s been pulverized by mortar or woven into strands, any kind of cloth, any kind of object, or ink alone, ink on paper, ink delivered by means of stylus. It was worrisome how bottomless my project was.” -

B. Marcus ‘The Flame Alphabet’ p. 185

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We begin by considering artists who concentrate on the material qualities of language—visual, aural, and beyond. The work that these artists create belongs to a distinguished history of poem-objects, and concrete language experiments.

We then trace the radical possibilities inherent in the relationship between art and language. Here, the letter, the word and the phrase are seen and experienced, and not necessarily meant to be read. Made physical, transcribed into sounds, symbols, pictures or patterns, scrambled, or negated, language is freed from the page as well as from its received meanings, received forms, and, in some cases, from the duties of communication altogether.

Working with language has also created an opportunity for artists to move more freely among disciplines. Like earlier experiments in this vein, many of these recent works have an abiding connection to poetry, which runs like a sub-theme, adding the ecstatic element to alphabetized forms.

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Women Concrete Poets Who Pushed Against the Limits of Language (and Patriarchy)

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Focusing on 50 artist-writers often overshadowed by their male contemporaries, Women in Concrete Poetry breaks from more traditional histories, much like the innovative figures featured.

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Tony Cokes
"Cokes repeatedly asks what is left out when we make an image of a movement, a cause, an event. His richly encoded, deftly mixed works are too groovy, too affective, to be reduced to iconoclasm. But in their discursive precision, he displays an acute sensitivity and a scepticism towards images’ power to connect, alienate, silence, empower and even exclude. I would go so far as to term Cokes’s practice ‘post-representational’ – a relief, in our age of simple representations and reductive identitarianism. You could call Cokes’s post-conceptual works appropriative, but I prefer the dusty rhetorical term prosopopeia. In Greek, this means to ‘put a face on’; to speak as someone who isn’t you, as a kind of channeling, drag or possession."

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Tony Cokes

Manifesto A (2001)

Running Time: 04:24 min

Manifesto A is the first in Cokes non-consecutively produced series of promotional tapes for his conceptual band SWIPE. 3#, subtitled Manifesto A Track #1, introduces Cokes concern with the ideological apparatus that underpins the music industry. The video takes up a song by Seth Price, which is itself the systematic recreation of an early electronic pop song by Kraftwerk.

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Steffani Jemison

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Zoe Leonard, I want a president, 1992

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"Capitalism is profoundly illiterate," observed Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. Since the mid-1980s, Tony Cokes has been composing multimedia installations that collage pop music, archival film footage, and critical theory. While demanding close reading from viewers, his work also suggests the stakes, and even hazards, of legibility. For one of two commissions in his survey at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) at the University of London, Cokes quotes from filmmaker and scholar Kodwo Eshun's 2018 Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture, which took place at the school around a year after Fisher's suicide. Both Cokes' and Fisher's practices focus partly on the relationship between sonic and visual representation, and what it might look like to implement Derrida's notion of ontology as a cultural strategy. "If UR Reading This It's 2 Late: Vol I" is on view at Goldsmiths CCA from September 29, 2019 through January 19, 2020 and will travel to Harvard University's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and Brussels's ARGOS centre for audiovisual arts next year.

I'M NOT TRYING TO BUILD A RATIONAL ARGUMENT as much as I'm attempting to set up a series of relations when putting together a new work or exhibition. Sometimes it can be really straightforward. For The Morrissey Problem, one of the new works in the Goldsmiths CCA show, I'm adapting the entirety of an article by Joshua Surtees, whereas I'm using maybe half of the text from Kodwo Eshun's lecture. Duration often determines what I use. With certain short pieces, I can adapt the whole thing and it makes sense to do that, while from longer texts I usually take a fragment, or I'll compose a work with excerpts from multiple sources. Often I'm acting as an editor; it all depends on what kinds of relations I can find in the material. Some sources just comport themselves best incomplete. The relation of a project's potential histories and futurities, the ways it might manifest and how it might be radically different in its ultimate articulation: That's what I'm interested in.

I'm not adapting one of Fisher's texts-although at some point I do plan to do that-but rather taking up a text about him, one I was drawn to for its form and rhythm. What I find particularly appealing in Eshun's lecture is his attention to the various contexts in which writing and reading might occur. If we're thinking about that in regard to ongoing discourses on identity today? Well, on one hand, people uphold stable conceptions and declarations of identity to represent certain positionalities, certain differences in experience. On the other hand, when people try to regulate these things in an absolute way, by over-stabilizing and over-identifying, it can become a trap for almost everyone concerned. The notion that there is an absolute identity with which one can only speak, or about which others cannot speak, has corners and limitations.

I'm particularly interested in how the will to disavow class divisions in this country has become more pronounced over the past forty to fifty years. In the official pronouncements of America, and in what people say they believe about their daily lives, there seems to be a compulsion toward an imaginary of equality, even as things become more and more unequal. I think it's both psychic and discursive; there's always an element of wishful thinking or fantasy with regard to these ideas. Many people remain convinced it's impossible to have a grounded critique of the life in which you are inscribed; it should be possible, but there are a lot of people who disavow even the possibility of doing that. Fisher wanted to draw attention to those unresolved and disturbing aspects of how we live and how we are represented or accounted for. For me that's crucial. So is his articulation of how there are always leftovers and possible projects in the things we thought we understood, thought we were done and over with.

This also relates to the way legibility has become, to many, an ideal in itself. And it's like, well, no. Things are always complex and a little confusing. When something is instantly legible or absorbable, what is that as an aesthetic, as an idea, as an approach to things? Reading is a process; it's not all in the text, and it's not just a question of trying to atomize or understand something in one dimension. If there weren't interferences or complications, we would live in a radically different world. But there are.

- As told to Hiji Nam

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"Capitalism is profoundly illiterate," observed Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. Since the mid-1980s, Tony Cokes has been composing multimedia installations that collage pop music, archival film footage, and critical theory. While demanding close reading from viewers, his work also suggests the stakes, and even hazards, of legibility.

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Zoe Leonard's oft-cited work, 'I want a president' was written by the artist in 1992 in response to poet Eileen Myles's presidential bid alongside George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot.

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YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES PRESENTS

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YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES PRESENTS

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YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES
PRESENTS

THE STRUGGLE C0NTINUES! (25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITI0N)
ACQUIRE THE NFT
CHARLIE CHAN AND THE YELL0W PERIL
MEET THE ARTISTS:
WHAT IS AN ART C0LLECTIVE? (TATE M0DERN / THE TURNER PRIZE C0MMISSI0N)
EVERYTHING WE'RE SAYING IS STUPID AND WR0NG --
S0 ST0P ASKING US T0 TALK AND ST0P LISTENING T0 US TALK
(F0R JANE AND L0UISE WILS0N / NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY)

LAS 10 MEJ0RES PERF0RMANCES DE T0D0S L0S TIEMP0S,
0 DESNUD0 SIN HACER NADA
(EXCEPT0 INSPIRAR ALGUNAS DE LAS MAY0RES MANIFESTACI0NES DEL ESPIRITU HUMAN0)
(F0R MARICEL ALVAREZ)

SAMSUNG MEANS REBIRTH
EPIS0DE 1: THE EXECUTIVE
EPIS0DE 2: THE SMARTPH0NE
EPIS0DE 3: THE SKIN SCRUBBER
EPIS0DE 4: THE PAPER CUP
EPIS0DE 5: THE NAPKIN
EPIS0DE 6: THE NEWSPAPER ARTICLE
EPIS0DE 7: THE RECEIPT

C0NCEPTUAL ART F0R THE PE0PLE (PRETTY PLEASE) -- 0R, HEY, M0M, I FLY (C0ACH) WITH THE JET SET
(ART BASEL 50TH ANNIVERSARY C0MMISSI0N)
75 MILLI0N AMERICANS HATE MY GUTS GUNS 'N' ASIANS I WANT T0 DIE SCREAMING UNCLEAR C.D.C. WARNS 0F AGGRESSIVE PE0PLE SEARCHING F0R F00D DURING SHUTD0WNS ART IS A LIE THAT JUST W0N'T DIEENGLISH MALAYALAM/ENGLISH (K0CHI BIENNALE VERSI0N)
S0, UH, K0CHI
(SUMMER EXHIBITI0N VERSI0N)
CUNNILINGUS IN N0RTH K0REA (TANG0 VERSI0N)
ARTIST STATEMENT N0. 45,730,944: THE PERFECT ARTISTIC WEB SITE (TAI KWUN CANT0NESE/ENGLISH VERSI0N)
SAMSUNG SAMSUNG SIGNIFICA ACABAR SAMSUNG SIGNIFICA M0RIR (VERSI0NS BUEN0S AIRES)

WANT T0 D0 G00D? KN0W H0W T0 SH00T A SEMIAUT0MATIC HANDGUN?
YHCHI G0ES T0 HARVARD (AND THE UNIVERSITY 0F T0KY0! M0M!):
IT'S A BEAUTIFUL AUTUMN DAY T0 RUN F0R Y0UR LIFE
I G0T WHACKED IN THE FACE WITH A BASEBALL BAT
(AND WHEN I CAME T0 SAW LE0NARD0'S LAST SUPPER 0N A VELVET PAINTING HUNG 0VER AN 0LD S0FA)
G0D DAMN Y0U, J0HN B0LT0N, F0R TRYING T0 KILL ME
PLEASE MISTAKE ME F0R N0B0DY
CUNNILINGUS EN C0REA DEL N0RTE (BUEN0S AIRES TANG0 VERSI0N)
S0 Y0U MADE IT. WHAT D0 Y0U KN0W. C0NGRATULATI0NS. AND WELC0ME! ENGLISH ESPAN0LA

LIFE IN THREE EASY VIDE0 TUT0RIALS:
ALL UNHAPPY FAMILIES ARE ALIKE ENGLISH K0REAN
SAMSUNG MEANS T0 DIE ENGLISH K0REAN
P0LITICIANS WH0 DYE THEIR HAIR -- WHAT ARE THEY HIDING? ENGLISH K0REAN

0PENING DAY -- 0R, WAY 0UT IN LEFT FIELD Y0U STUPID B0BBLEHEAD

SAMSUNG MEANS T0 C0ME, BEIJING VERSI0N
THE STRUGGLE C0NTINUES! (DANCE VERSI0N)
DAK0TA ENGLISH ESPAN0LA K0REAN P0RTUGUÊS
CUNNILINGUS IN N0RTH K0REA ENGLISH DEUTSCH FRANCAIS ESPAN0LA P0RTUGUÊS
L0TUS BL0SS0M ENGLISH K0REAN
THE STRUGGLE C0NTINUES ENGLISH K0REAN FRANCAIS MEXICAN0 P0RTUGUÊS JAPANESE
SAMSUNG ENGLISH K0REAN FRANCAIS DEUTSCH ESPAN0LA TANG0 VERSI0N
SAMSUNG MEANS T0 C0ME ENGLISH K0REAN FRANCAIS
ARTIST'S STATEMENT N0. 45,730,944: THE PERFECT ARTISTIC WEB SITE ENGLISH K0REAN FRANCAIS ESPAN0LA
0PERATI0N NUK0REA ENGLISH K0REAN
METABLAST
NIPP0N
THE SEA ENGLISH P0RTUGUÊS
RIVIERA ENGLISH CHINESE
BECKETT'S B0UNCE
ALL FALL D0WN
R0YAL CR0WN SUPER SAL0N
SUPER SMILE
0RIENT ENGLISH K0REAN JAPANESE
THE INLAND SEA
J0NGN0 ENGLISH K0REAN
SAUL
RAIN 0N THE SEA ENGLISH K0REAN ESPAN0LA
HALF BREED APACHE
BUST D0WN THE D00RS! ENGLISH DEUTSCH FRANCAIS
BUST D0WN THE D00R AGAIN! WITH DRUMS WITH STRINGS GATES 0F HELL-VICT0RIA VERSI0N
THE END ENGLISH K0REAN GALEG0
VICT0RIA DEFILED: PERFECT VICT0RIA VICT0RIA'S FIRE
SUBJECT: HELL0 ENGLISH ESPAN0LA
PA0! PA0! PA0! ENGLISH FRANCAIS RUSSIAN
WHAT N0W? ENGLISH SVENSKA ENGLISH/FRANCAIS
THE LAST DAY 0F BETTY NK0M0
J0E J0NES
TRAVELING T0 UT0PIA: WITH A BRIEF HIST0RY 0F THE TECHN0L0GY ENGLISH/K0REAN FRANCAIS/ENGLISH
S0, S0 S0ULFUL ENGLISH TURKISH JAPANESE
THE ART 0F SLEEP TURKISH
A0M0RI AM0RI
(0UT 0F THE INTERNET AND) INT0 THE NIGHT
M0RNING 0F THE M0NG0L0IDS DEUTSCH/ENGLISH P0RTUGUÊS/ENGLISH
THE M00D 0F THE M0MENT ENGLISH ITALIAN0
IT'S A W0MAN'S W0RLD (BUT IT W0ULDN'T BE N0THING WITH0UT A MAN 0R A B0Y)
L0VE AND KILL
MR. PRESIDENT ENGLISH GALEG0
END CREDITS JAPANESE ENGLISH/P0RTUGUES ENGLISH/SVENSKA 0LA PEHRS0N SEQUENCE ENGLISH/DEUTSCH
LAST TANG0 IN T0KY0 JAPANESE/ENGLISH
BACK IN THE R.0.K.
H0NEYM00N IN BEPPU
THE CULTURAL REV0LUTI0N: SMASH THE GANG 0F F0UR BILLI0N!
GALACTIC TIDES BY NIGHT
T0KY0 SHAD0WS
PLEASE C0ME PLAY WITH ME, BABY STRAIGHT VERSI0N FREE VERSI0N
PLEASE D0N'T THANK ME STRAIGHT VERSI0N FREE VERSI0N

P0RT0 ALEGRE SUITE:
NEGRITUDE AND S0LITUDE P0RTUGUÊS/ENGLISH
THE IMMIGRANT AS GE0P0ET PARTS I & II P0RTUGÊS/ENGLISH

EAST VANC0UVER TRIL0GY:
HI, M0M, WE'RE IN THE D0WNT0WN EASTSIDE, AKA DTES, AKA Y0U-D0N'T-WANT-T0-KN0W
0UR D0WNT0WN EASTSIDE JUNKET
N0TES 0N THE D0WNT0WN EASTSIDE

WARNING: F0R LAUGHS, N0 S0CIALLY REDEEMING VALUE
THE STRUGGLE C0NTINUES (UNCENS0RED PUBLIC ART FUND VERSI0N)
MY PRETTY PEACENIK
H0LLYW00D CENTRE
THE SLICKEST LITTLE K0REAN SCUMBAG D0WN UNDER: PART 1: SE0UL, THE TAXI DRIVER PART 2: SYDNEY, THE SCUMBAG
THE ART 0F SLEEP (INS0MNIAC VERSI0N)

YHCHI G0ES T0 C0LLEGE
C0LUMBIA: CULTURAL IDENTITY, N0THINGNESS, AND L0NELINESS
YALE: EXCERPT: WHAT IS AN INTELLECTUAL?
BR0WN: FIRST W0RKSH0P EVER
C0RNELL: GL0BAL KALEA
PENN: B0Z0 0N THE B00M B00M BADASS BEAT
K0REA WEB ART FESTIVAL 2001
C0LLAB0RATI0NS WITH TAKUJI K0G0 *CANDY FACT0RY PR0JECTS:
A L0VE SUPREME ENGLISH K0REAN/ENGLISH
P0ETRY READING: I JUST QUIT MY J0B T0DAY
KIMI KIM JALAN JALAN
KIMI KIM JALAN JALAN, EPIS0DE 2
ASMR MY DMZ: K0REAN/ENGLISH DUB JAPANESE/ENGLISH DUB
B00GIE-W00GIE W0NDERLAND
HALBEATH
Y0UR J0B W0N'T STAND A CHANCE
STATEMENTS: 0029: T0 MY G00D AND L0YAL SUBJECTS AND 0063: AFTER RECENT SURGERY 0N MY SCALP ENGLISH/JAPANESE UKRAINIAN/JAPANESE
DMZ BUS T0UR WITH BULG0GI LUNCH: IF I WERE Y0U I'LL G0 T0 THE PALACE WHAT'S Y0UR NATI0NALITY?

TATE 0NLINE: THE ART 0F SLEEP AND THE ART 0F SILENCE (INTERVIEW)
CENTRE P0MPID0U: LES AMANTS DE BEAUB0URG / THE L0VERS 0F BEAUB0URG

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YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES PRESENTS

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YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES PRESENTS THE STRUGGLE C0NTINUES! (25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITI0N) ACQUIRE THE NFT CHARLIE CHAN AND THE YELL0W PERIL MEET THE ARTISTS: WHAT IS AN ART C0LLECTIVE?

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Young-Hae Chang Heavy Indsutries

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Hannah Black

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Hannah Black: UCLA Department of Art Lecture

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Chisenhale Gallery presents a new commission and the first solo exhibition in a UK institution by Hannah Black.

Some Context is structured around 20,000 copies of The Situation, a book made up of transcribed, edited and censored conversations between the artist and friends about 'the situation'. This theme is interpreted differently in each conversation. The books provide the stuffing - in shredded form - for the 'transitional objects' also displayed in the space, and will be shredded at the end of the exhibition.

In this new body of work Black continues to develop her enquiry into the production of, and the gaps between, practices and theories of subjectivity and collectivity. Some Context gestures towards the various potential uses of art's uselessness - as comfort, as worship, as text and as archive.

As part of the commissioning process, a programme of has been devised in collaboration with Black. This includes a series of conversations in which participants have been invited to discuss a situation of their choice. Black, Bonaventure (Soraya Lutangu) and Ebba Fransén Waldhör also present Anxietina (The Situation), an iteration of their ongoing performance collaboration; incorporating installation, live music and spoken word.

Hannah Black (born 1981, Manchester) lives and works in New York. Most recently, Black's installation, performance and moving image works have explored the co-dependency of credit, debt and guilt, the use of analogy in biology, and the tension between biomedical and political understandings of trauma. Her works fuse dissonant materials through formal similarities: a drawn-out note in a song becomes the cry of a falling person, or the corporality of bodybuilders is conflated and contrasted with the speculative nature of finance capital as embodied in vacant luxury apartment buildings.

Previous solo exhibitions include Small Room, mumok, Vienna; Soc or Barb, Bodega, New York (all 2017); and Not You, Arcadia Missa, London (2015). Selected group exhibitions include In The Flesh (Part Two), Gallery Diet, Miami; and Welt Am Draht, Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (both 2016); The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Yarat Contemporary Art Centre, Baku; and Does Not Equal, W139, Amsterdam, (both 2015). In 2017 her performance OR LIFE OR was presented at PS1 MoMA, New York. Her writing has been published in Tank, The New Inquiry, Texte zur Kunst, Artforum and frieze d/e. Her book Dark Pool Party (Dominica/Arcadia Missa) was published in 2016 and Life (Walther König/mumok), written in collaboration with Juliana Huxtable, was published in 2017.

Lead Supporter: Shane Akeroyd.

Hannah Black's exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery is supported by Fabiana Marenghi Vaselli Bond; Julia Stoschek; The Elephant Trust; and Arts Council England Grants for the Arts. With additional support from the Hannah Black Supporters Circle.

Chisenhale Gallery's Commissions Programme 2017-19 is supported by the LUMA Foundation.

Chisenhale Gallery's Curatorial Trainee Programme 2016-18 is supported by Sirine and Ahmad Abu Ghazaleh.

Chisenhale Gallery's Talks & Events Programme 2017 is supported by Helen Thorpe.

Read More

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Chisenhale Gallery presents a new commission and the first solo exhibition in a UK institution by Hannah Black. Some Context is structured around 20,000 copies of The Situation, a book made up of transcribed, edited and censored conversations between the artist and friends about 'the situation'. This theme is interpreted differently in each conversation.

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D'Ette Nogle

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D'Ette Nogle
"Bleeding Canvas was a slip of the tongue. I was teaching my students about the period of time in the Kansas territory known as “Bleeding Kansas,” the bloody clash between pro-slavery and anti-slavery combatants. Instead of saying “Bleeding Kansas,” I said “bleeding canvas.” This has happened three times in three years of teaching U.S. history.

What glitch was this? ...  I started to treat the slip as a point, a locale to get to, or a spot from where to start, or a place to rest (or wrest).

I thought about my experiences as a learner, teacher, artist, worker, and consumer. I thought about missteps that reinforce my position. I thought about my finances. I thought about mal-distribution. I thought about big wealth. I thought about our Gilded Age. I thought about going on strike. I thought about owners. I thought about workers. I thought about taxes. I thought about time spent. I thought about my job. I thought about my students. I thought about what does it look like to look at me in front of you. I thought about primary sources (evidence). I thought about John Brown and his transaction. I thought about how to be an ally. I thought about corrected behavior. I thought about active participants vs. passive consumers. I thought about being mal-adjusted. I thought about free reading. I thought about free listening. I thought about fast, free delivery. I thought about video streaming."

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A performance by Will Holder & Alex Waterman. 
Fondation Galeries Lafayette. 
10 March 2015.

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D'Ette Nogle, Bleeding Canvas: Five Ideals Video with John Brown

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D'Ette Nogle
Bleeding Canvas: Five Ideals Video with John Brown
Video projection, projector, media cart, speakers, projection screen, pocket chart stand
02:30 min

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Yes, but is it edible
"It is the multiplied voice of an ex-soldier who lost his legs in combat. We hear his thoughts and stories while he is under the influence of morphine. When Will Holder and Alex Waterman start declaiming different texts, answering each other, superimposing each other and catching up with each other, we are actually hearing the same person. Through the reading of these texts, we seem to find ourselves faced with something other than a simple collaboration between two artists who use different tools and forms of expression. Yes, But Is It Edible? is the result of a stronger operation: it is in fact a question of transmuting the voices of the typographic artist and the composer to the point of achieving a work that, though certainly polyphonic, originates in one breath."

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Amy Sillman 'Shapes' 2020

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Loretta Fahrenholz
'Story in Reverse', is a multi-part slide installation by Loretta Fahrenholz, based on Ilse Aichinger’s ‘Spiegelgeschichte’ / ‘Mirror Story’ (1949) - a linguistic experiment that narrates a young woman’s tragically failed life. In Aichinger’s text the beginning and the end of life merge, as the story of the woman starts at her grave and is then told backwards. Loretta Fahrenholz uses analogue slide projectors to display seven versions of the overlapping story. Commissioning illustrators via the freelance marketplace website Fiverr Fahrenholz asks each of them to transpose the story in its entirety into a graphic novel.  The different interpretations of Aichinger’s story are freely retold and illustrated through alternating styles and drawing. The result is a space in which images, stories and different temporal structures meld, and in which tragedy, virtuality and pop culture meet.

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Story in Reverse

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The lure of storytelling is strong, often troublesome, in the imaginative transformation of the world through fiction. A story’s power belongs to the speaking subject but also to the listening one, stuttering in the instantaneous rapport between them.

We tell ourselves stories about ourselves (identity), write about the world (perceptions), raise our voices to others (relationships), alongside the drama of our experiences (interpretation). At the same time we are attracted to seeing the world through another person’s eyes and listening to someone else’s voice.

Using fiction and embodied experience for knowledge and world-building, we ask -  how do artists write through social objects and images?  What do these stories signal? Who can credibly tell them and when? Can we produce alternative narratives and scripts? What kind of scripts do we produce about and through art, and for whom? What is the relationship between these voices and the realities of history, power, and systemic violence? Is there an efficacy of confessional, and emotional modes of writing, as they appear alongside their analytical, philosophical, and political others.

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Single-channel video, mannequins, black suit, white-collared shirt, hard hat, gas mask, umbrella, satin coat, t-shirt, jeans, blonde wig, TV, media cart, headphones

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“When someone pushes your bed out of the ward, when you see that the sky becomes green, and when you would spare the curate the funeral sermon, then it is time for you to get up, gently, as children get up, when the morning light shimmers through the curtains, secretly, so that the sister does not see it-and quickly!

But he has already begun it, the curate, you hear there his voice, young and eager and unstoppable, you hear there, he already speaks.  Let it happen!  Let his good words be submerged in the blinding rain.  Your grave is open.  Let his swift confidence first become helpless, that it may be helped.  When you leave him, he will no longer know in the end, if he has already begun.  And because he doesn’t know, he gives the pallbearers the sign.  And the pallbearers ask no more and take your coffin out again.  And they take the wreath from the lid and give it back to the young man, who is standing with bowed head at the edge of the grave.  The young man takes his wreath and rubs all the ribbons smooth, embarrassed, he lifts his face for a glance, and the rain dashes a few tears from his cheeks.  Then the procession moves itself back along the walls.  The candles in the small, ugly chapel are lit once again and the curate says the prayer for the dead, so that you can live.  He shakes the young man’s hand violently and, in his embarrassment, wishes him much luck.  It is his first funeral, and he blushes down to his collar.  And before he can correct himself, the young man is gone.   What remains to be done now?  Luck has been wished, there remains nothing for him to do, but to send the dead home again.

- Extract from Spiegelgeschichte (Mirror Story), Ilse Aichinger (1946)

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Turner Prize 2019 Nominee | Helen Cammock | Turner Contemporary

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Helen Cammock
Cammock explores history and storytelling through layered, fragmented narratives. Using video, photography, installation, print and performance, she interrogates the ways in which stories are told, and acknowledges those who are rendered invisible by the hierarchy of histories. Cammock’s work is prefaced by writing, borrowing the words of others to use alongside her own.

'There’s a Hole in the Sky Part II: Listening to James Baldwin' (2016) is set around an imagined conversation with writer James Baldwin. It considers migrations, forced or voluntary, by Black American writers and dancers who moved to Europe in search of work and wider recognition. The film layers multiple and varied experiences, exploring the dynamics of appropriation and power. The film explores spoken word, poetry and lyrical prose as sites of resistance and liberation, framing the way the voice can embody a space of both individual and collective agency.

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Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue (2013) uses the familiar setting of a computer desktop to narrate the origins of the universe, and to question how such narratives have been constructed. Set to a poem written by Henrot in collaboration with the poet Jacob Bromberg, the text is voiced by Ghanaian American multidisciplinary artist Akwetey Orraca Tetteh and scored by musician Joakim Bouaziz. Employing oral traditions instead of more official written histories, Grosse Fatigue draws from scientific theories and religious creation stories to denote the common human desire to explain our origins. These narratives diverge and converge in the poem throughout the video. A rapid-fire choreography of pop-up windows and images provides glimpses into Henrot’s research at the Smithsonian Museum.

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Deb Sokolow
Rocky and Adrian (and me) (2003)

An analytical scene-by-scene flowchart of the burgeoning love affair between fictional characters Rocky and Adrian from the movie, 'Rocky', turns subjective when the artist maps herself into the piece as an alternate love interest for Rocky.

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Deb Sokolow
"We decipher how much is true and to determine when, if ever, a narrator can be trusted. Sokolow’s interests in storytelling and unreliable narration take inspiration from contemporary politics and its competing narratives on events and individuals as well as the playfulness with form and humor found in postmodern literature and authors such as Jorge Borges, Thomas Pynchon, Helen Oyeyemi and Ali Smith.

Hand-drawn texts in graphite and erasure marks on the surface of each drawing function as a visual record of the narrator’s indecisive thought process in working to present each anecdote. The texts are paired with abstract shapes and diagrammatic visuals which reference the historically male-dominated movements of modern architecture, color field painting and minimalism."

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Sarah Cwynar

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Born 1985, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA
Education
2016
Master of Fine Arts, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
2010
Bachelor of Design, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
2006
Program in English Literature, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Solo Exhibitions
2020
Marilyn, The Approach, London, UK

2019
Gilded Age, organized by Amy Smith-Stewart, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT, USA (cat.)
Image Model Muse, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI, USA (touring)
Gilded Age II, curated by Jenn Jackson, The Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver, BC, Canada
Good Life, curated by Sara Dolfi Agostini, Blitz, Valleta, Malta (cat.)

2015
Presidential Index, Retrospective, Hudson, NY
Group Exhibitions

Forthcoming
Objects of Desire: Photography and the Language of Advertising, LACMA, Los Angeles, CA, USA

2020
New Visions: The Henie Onstad Triennial for Photography and New Media, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden, Norway
American Women, curated by Marie Maertens, La Patinoire Royale, Brussels, Belgium (cat.)
PHOTO 2020, International Festival of Photography, Melbourne, Australia

2019
Le Dandy des Gadoues, curated by Marc Bembekoff, Centre d'art Contemporain de Noisy- le-Sec, France (cat.)
Don't! Photography and the Art of Mistakes, SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA, USA
Glenn O'Brien: Center Stage, Off Paradise, New York, NY, USA
Age of You, curated by Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto, Canada
Last Night I Wore A Costume, LX, New York, NY, USA

2018
You Are Looking at Something That Never Occurred: From The Zabludowicz Collection. Curated by Paul Luckraft, MAMM: Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, Russia
To Our Parents, curated by Alejandro Cesarco, 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil
Mademoiselle, curated by Tara Londi. Centre Régional d'Art Contemporain d'Occitane, Sète, France
La Complainte du progrès, Commissarit: Sandra Patron. Musée régional d'art contemporain Occitanie / Pyrénées-Méditerranée, Sérignan, France
Screenscapes, curated by Vik Muniz, Barney Kulok and Lucas Blalock, Galeria Nara Roesler São Paulo, Brazil
MAST Foundation for Photography Grant on Industry and Work, curated by Urs Stahel, Mast Foundation, Bologna, Italy

2017
Strange Attractors: The Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Art: Vol. 1 Life on Earth, organized by Bob Nickas, Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA
Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie - Farewell Photography, Mannheim, Germany.
Culture Industry, curated by Suzanne L'Heureux, Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA
My curiosities are not your curios, Art Gallery of Guelph, Guelph, ON
Through the Lens - Platform for Photography, Deweer Gallery, Otegem, Belgium
Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, curated by Ami Barak, Montreal, QC
Hard to Picture: A Tribute to Ad Reinhardt. Curated by Diana Baldon and Marie-Noëlle Farcy, Mudam, Luxembourg
Subjektiv. Curated by the editorial board of OBJEKTIV - consisting of Lucas Blalock, Ida Kierulf, Brian Sholis, Susanne Ø. Sæther and editor Nina Strand. Kunstnernes Hus (KH), Oslo, Norway
Screen Memory. Simon Lee Gallery, London, UK
AS IF FROM WERE SOME PITCHER. Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, OR
You Are Looking at Something That Never Occurred. Curated by Paul Luckraft, Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK (cat.)
99 Cents or Less. Curated by Jens Hoffmann and Susanne Feld, Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, MI (cat.)
In Some Far Place. Curated by Mirielle Eagan, The Rooms, St John, NL
I am the Organizer of My Own Objects. Curated by cheyanne turions, Dazibao, Montréal, QC
Looking Back / The 11th White Columns Annual. Selected by Anne Doran, White Columns, New York, NY

2016
Tell Me What I Mean. To____Bridges____, Bronx, NY
We are the Center for Curatorial Studies (The Departmental Core.) Curated by Paul O'Neill, CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Bard, NY
L'Image Volée. Curated by Thomas Demand, Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy (cat.)
For Pete's Sake. Carl Kostyál, Stockholm, Sweden
We are the Center for Curatorial Studies. CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Hudson, NY
Arles 2016: Les Rencontres de la Photographie. Arles, France

2015
Greater New York. PS1 MoMA, New York, NY
If You Leave Me Can I Come Too? Curated by Arden Sherman, Hunter East Harlem Gallery, New York, NY
Continuous Surfaces. Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, NY
The Secret Life. Co-curated by Leidy Churchman, Murray Guy, New York, NY
Under Construction - New Positions in American Photography. Organized by Foam Fotografie museum, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY

2014
The Actual. Eleven Rivington, New York, NY
Surface (New Life). Curated by Sara Dolfi Agostini. Fluxia, Milan, Italy
The Thing Itself. Yancey Richardson, New York, NY
Soft Target. Organized by Phil Chang and Matthew Porter, M+B Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Big Pictures: Public Art Project. Billboards across Greater Cincinnati. Organized by Brian Sholis, Cincinnati Art Museum, OH
The New Beauty of Our Modern Life. Curated by Kate Steciw, Higher Pictures, New York, NY

2013
MODE. Foxy Production, New York, NY
MAD Library with Limited Time Only. Independent Curators International, New York, NY
What You Want. The Camera Club of New York, New York, NY
The Scenery Changes Three Times. Schema Projects, Brooklyn, NY

2011
Talk To Me; Design and the Communication Between People and Objects. MoMA, New York, NY. Group project.
I'm Not Here. Contact Photography Festival, Toronto, ON
Open Books. Royal College of Art, London, UK
This Place in Time. Show & Tell Gallery, Toronto, ON Neubacher Shor Contemporary, Toronto, ON
Hunter & Cook Auction. Diaz Contemporary, Toronto, ON

2010
The Fine Line. Openhouse Gallery, New York, NY
Where is Here: Canadian Exhibition. Flash Forward Festival. Organized by Magenta Foundation, Toronto, ON
Parts of a Hole. Xpace, Toronto, ON
Stacked. Paul Petro Special Projects, Toronto, ON Search Prone. Butcher Gallery, Toronto, ON
Commissions
2021
Public Art and Amenities Framework, Metrolinx, Toronto, ON, Canada

2019
Modern Art in Your Life commissioned by MoMA and streamed on the Museum's website and social media platforms
Projects
2012
Great Point. Back Yard Projects Benefit, Real Fine Arts, Brooklyn, NY

2011
Made in US (with Tibi Tibi Neuspiel). Creatures of Comfort Projects Space, New York, NY; and 107 Shaw Gallery, Toronto, ON
Selected Screenings
2018
Rose Gold and Soft Film, International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Netherlands

2017
Rose Gold, Toronto International Film Festival, ON, Canada
Monographs
2019
Cwynar, Sara and Amy Smith-Stewart. Sara Cwynar: Gilded Age. Ridgefield: The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2019.
Dolfi Agostini, Sara. Good Life, Sara Cwynar. Valletta: Blitz, 2019.

2014
Cwynar, Sara. Kitsch Encyclopedia. New York: Blonde Art Books, 2014.

Artist Publications

2016
Cwynar, Sara. Frieze No 81 Sept 2016 (cover image)
Cwynar, Sara. Canadian Art Fall 2016: 134-9

2011
Cwynar, Sara. "Noise Map." The New City Reader. New York: New Museum, 2011.
Cwynar, Sara. One Wall Zine. Toronto, ON: Self-published, edition of 20, for Art History, 2011.
Cwynar, Sara. Simulated Landscapes. Toronto, ON: Self-published, 2011.
Cwynar, Sara. " An Atlas." 01 Magazine. 2011.
Awards
2019
Kodak Film Prize, IV Moscow International Experimental Film Festival

2018
MAST Foundation for Photography Grant on Industry and Work
International Film Festival Rotterdam, Ammodo Tiger Short Prize

2016
The Baloise Art Prize, Statements, Art Basel 47

2013
Printed Matter Emerging Artist Publication Series Grant

2012
The Camera Club of New York, Darkroom Residency, Runner-up Award

2011
Print Magazine, 20 Under 30 New Visual Artist Award
Art Director's Club Young Guns Award

2009
Kondor Fine Arts Award

2008-2009
Dean's Prize for Excellence, Faculty of Fine Arts, York University
Collections
Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Museum of Modern Art, New York Guggenheim Museum, New York
MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt
SFMOMA, San Francisco
Centre Pompidou, Paris
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
Minneapolis Institute of Art
Dallas Museum of Art
Milwaukee Art Museum
Zabludowicz Collection, London
Baloise Art Collection, Basel, Switzerland
Fondazione Prada, Milan
Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco
Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City
FOAM Photography Museum, Amsterdam
Soho House, Toronto
TD Bank Canada Collection, Toronto

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Born 1985, Vancouver, BC, Canada Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA Education 2016 Master of Fine Arts, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA 2010 Bachelor of Design, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada 2006 Program in English Literature, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada Solo Exhibitions 2020 Marilyn, The Approach, London, UK 2019 Gilded Age, organized by Amy Smith-Stewart, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT, USA (cat.)

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NOVEL

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Rossella Biscotti
"I dreamt that you changed into a cat… gatto… ha ha ha", 2013

Biscotti developed a workshop as ‘oneiric laboratory'  as a platform to communicate with the prisoners in the all women prison in Guideca, Venice. Through the prisoner’s dreams Biscotti tried to analyze the institution and the way the imprisoned women figure in it. With no messages or materials permitted to leave the prison Biscotti used the compost waste produced in the prison, through the work that has been done in the kitchen, cleaning and the growing of vegetables.

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Rossella Biscotti, I dreamt that you changed into a cat... gatto... ha ha ha, 2013
sculptures in compost (variable dimensions),
sound installation, 60', subtitled in English
12 framed drawings, 34 x 34 cm (each), by Roberta Baseggio,
Female Prison of Giudecca Venice.
18 sketches
unique work
installation view: For the Mnemonist, S. , WIELS, Brussels (BE), 2014
photo: Sven Laurent.

In this work, Rossella Biscotti focuses on the human condition and circumstances in detention. The idea of 'total institution' is of great importance for I dreamt that you changed into a cat...gatto...ha ha ha. In such institutions, persons and their needs are under full bureaucratic control, and undergo forms of self-abasement by social and physical abuse. Biscotti involved herself in such system, namely, the women's prison on the Italian island Guidecca at the Venetian lagoon. A prison modeled according to a neoliberal society, which is to say not like the traditional prison where detainees are locked and unproductive; in this case, the prisoners spend the majority of their time working outside the prison, working for very low wages at for example the prison's vegetable garden, an industrial laundromat, sewing workshop or as cleaner. By creating a dream workshop, called 'oneiric laboratory', she made a platform to communicate with the prisoners on a different level than the organizational. Through the prisoner's dreams Biscotti has tried to analyze the institution and the way the prisoned individuals figure in it.

As all prison cells are open, Biscotti was given the opportunity to meet every prisoner. This gave her the idea for a project within this project, that the functioning of the institution symbolizes: a compost heap. Dirt and remnants symbolize the work that has been done in the kitchen, cleaning, the growing of vegetables and consumption. In every prison cel, Biscotti placed an extra dustbin in which the prisoners waste specific bins, which is transformed into compost. This compost is thereafter used for the creating of sculptures.

Rossella Biscotti, I dreamt that you changed into a cat... gatto... ha ha ha, 2013
sculptures in compost (variable dimensions),
sound installation, 60', subtitled in English
12 framed drawings, 34 x 34 cm (each), by Roberta Baseggio,
Female Prison of Giudecca Venice.
18 sketches
unique work
installation view: For the Mnemonist, S. , WIELS, Brussels (BE), 2014
photo: Sven Laurent.

Rossella Biscotti, I dreamt that you changed into a cat... gatto... ha ha ha, 2013
sculptures in compost (variable dimensions),
sound installation, 60', subtitled in English
12 framed drawings, 34 x 34 cm (each), by Roberta Baseggio,
Female Prison of Giudecca Venice.
18 sketches
unique work
installation view: For the Mnemonist, S. , WIELS, Brussels (BE), 2014
photo: Sven Laurent.

Rossella Biscotti, I dreamt that you changed into a cat... gatto... ha ha ha, 2013
sound installation, 60', subtitled in English,
11 framed drawings, 34 x 34 cm (each), by Roberta Baseggio,
Female Prison of Giudecca Venice.
18 sketches
installation view: The Side Room, Secession, Vienna (AT), 2013
photo: Oliver Ottenschlaeger

Rossella Biscotti, I dreamt that you changed into a cat... gatto... ha ha ha, 2013
sound installation, 60', subtitled in English,
11 framed drawings, 34 x 34 cm (each), by Roberta Baseggio,
Female Prison of Giudecca Venice.
18 sketches
installation view: The Side Room, Secession, Vienna (AT), 2013
photo: Oliver Ottenschlaeger

Rossella Biscotti, I dreamt that you changed into a cat... gatto... ha ha ha, 2013
sound installation, 60', subtitled in English,
11 framed drawings, 34 x 34 cm (each), by Roberta Baseggio,
Female Prison of Giudecca Venice.
18 sketches
installation view: The Side Room, Secession, Vienna (AT), 2013
photo: Oliver Ottenschlaeger

Rossella Biscotti
I dreamt that you changed into a cat... gatto... ha ha ha, 2013
inkjet print 60 x 80 cm
edition 4 + 2 A/P
photo of the dream workshop, Female Prison of Giudecca, Venezia

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I dreamt that you changed into a cat...gatto...ha ha ha, 2013 - Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam

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In this work, Rossella Biscotti focuses on the human condition and circumstances in detention. The idea of 'total institution' is of great importance for I dreamt that you changed into a cat...gatto...ha ha ha. In such institutions, persons and their needs are under full bureaucratic control, and undergo forms of self-abasement by social and physical ...

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"Artists working with the moving image analyze this separation embodied voice. Drawing on various approaches from sculpture, literature and practices from non-Western centers to technological advancement and object ontology, their works find expression beyond language, engaging in processes of perception and desire, rather than attempting to fix understanding. The voice-over no longer speaks solely from the head, but from the senses, from the body without organs and from non-human bodies too. With the shift from mass programming to the personal viewing space of laptops and mobile devices, the didactic exposition of the voice-over is overcome by the intimacy of one-to-one...

The image is no longer “of” something, instead it is contingent, observed for what it might do over time. Working within the limits of its flat representation, emotion is externalized through moments of formal synchronicity and dissonance between the image and sound, resounding in the physical space in which the viewer encounters the work."

Voiceover: Under the skin, Shama Khanna., Kaleidoscope no.5, 2013-14

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Studio for Propositional Cinema

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Ancient Knowledge Survival Kit

We have seen how the utilisation of tribal desire leads us towards an auto-instrumentalisation of our bodies and their gestures, moulding behaviours to instinctive reflexes and re-encoding societal agreements as codes without content (as contentless codes are answers not questions, they can only be edited by their encoders, whose will desires the endgame of their coding.)

We have watched the construction of things by individuals systematically delegitimised and the construction of things by universal consensus reshape our desires - from a world built by us to a world built for us, (1) making all building activities seem suspicious or made illicit, causing forgetting of the impulse and tools to construct our world according to our own interests.

Having already delegitimised images through an inoculating proliferation, numbing frequency, and by the de-articulation of our image-tools' functions, their social roles, and variegative potentials (having defused them by diffusion), can't we now, already, envision a world in which we seek our own imagelessness as a means to relieve our image-poverty? (2)

As we have ceded control of the songs that we make (having handed it over to representatives who have repurposed the social role of music from a form of communication to a vessel for the algorithmatisation of our dreams; (3) our identities constructed through alienating affinity), we've lost our means to sing, our means to hear, our desire to hear the unexpected.

By stretching the timeline within which we analyse how societies built the structures that structure our movements between each other from the scale of our skin to the scale of of border-lines, we can see, as from satellites, the self-contracting of our selves, our recoiling from our other, a regressive paralysis into collective alienation: a dance deadening, even from our eyes. (4)

We have already permitted our words to be voided of stable meanings, subjected to value-fluctuations that cause them to mean less instead of more (sanding away articulative means) (5); the logical end of the impulse of ideologies is to will worlds to what we want, not to want worlds that we need, transforming our transformative tools to tool-parts that gleam but don't function.

Given: homogenisation through a universal loss of control of the design and manufacture of goods; our inability to construct the tools to construct images we desire; our forgetting of our music; our refutation of dialogical possibilities, immersing ourselves in fictions built to house us: what is left to broadcast if there's nothing left to say? (6)

With our tools under threat of erasure, and knowing that a structure will always expel elements counter to its desires, the preservation of their mechanics, their logics, and their systems of logic is the responsibility of a scribe-like networks of articulators who may supplant an annihilative cultural field with a fertilised one, like mosses' growth after an earth-scorching.

As, in absence of light, it is only sounds that can guide us from desolation, despondence is only waylaid by the presence of the foghorns or sirens that guide us from and not towards disaster. Drawn towards our own latent desires, our survival will not be determined by those singing the guiding-songs we hear, but by our ability to re-tune the timbre of their songs to fit our ears: a siren-song guiding from the darkness.

1. MARKS OF DIFFERENCE: As the means of the production of the objects and tools of our daily lives, from survival needs to objects of pleasure and contemplation, have been taken from the hands of individuals and passed over to a system that has, in order to maximise our consumption of and reliance on them, altered our relationship to them by manipulating our own relationship to need, desire, and thought, we have lost control of our material world. Tactics like slowly delegitimising self-reliant gestures and small-production industry through a perceived lack of quality or social status tacitly distance us from the production of our own contentment and self-actualisation. This is the horizon of our automation. We can retain the possibility of building our own world by regaining control of the production of our desires and the production of the objects of those desires. This necessitates a dispersed but connected network of like-minded producers distributed within an economy that works for and not against us.

2. AFTER PHOTOGRAPHY: Once photography has fully left the analogue world, all image-making tools and the images they produce will not belong to us. If it's possible to imagine a device or service provider where certain subjects, locations, and image-types could deactivate a camera's functions and/or delete such images, we can just as easily imagine the technological potential of the deletion of all images and the deactivation of all image-making tools. This is the horizon of our blindness. We can retain the possibility of making our own images by regaining control of the apparatus of image-making, keeping production recipes and knowledge open-source and available, and building and maintaining networks for their distribution, like how illicit knowledge was retained and passed along in the so-called Dark Ages.

3. FEAR OF MUSIC: For a moment, the free and borderless distribution of music seemed to hold new potential of access for both producer and consumer, with the ability to connect subcultural communities across geographies, giving musicians the ability to side-step industry structures through direct access to listeners. In a fever-dream of this utopia, we quickly dispensed of our real-life subcultural communities, equalised our attention between corporately constructed music products and their opposite in the name of inclusiveness, and constructed an identical industry which, because we did not want to continue to pay to consume the products of this newly dematerialised form, became even more tenuous for any musician not backed by corporate imperatives. This is directly analogous to an art market which quickly dispensed of institutional autonomy by making public funding temporarily redundant before gradually withdrawing once these institutions became market dependent, naturally making unviable artistic positions not aligned with the fictional market imperative of unlimited growth. This is the horizon of our muteness. We can regain control over the means in which our work is recorded and distributed by rebuilding these medieval networks in shapes that trace our own contours. This involves restoring dignity and urgency to underground and hypothetical positions and scepticism and redundancy to entertainment positions.

4. NO DANCING: The most impressive achievement of historical and current ruling classes has been their ability to convince people to work actively and voraciously against their own interests. This is currently most evident in the mass cultural action against social, economic, and geographical mobility. Porousness grows dialogue, and dialogue is emancipatory. Societies are building physical and metaphorical walls between each other based on fear of otherness and fear of bodily autonomy. This means a movement towards tighter borders between both nations and individuals, increasingly withdrawing us to tighter, apparently safer, more insular communities of exchange. In the interest of safety we are building panic rooms for our self-confinement. This is the horizon of our immobility. It is a sick culture that ceases to dance. We can counteract our auto-insulation by eschewing the market-driven romanticisation of the lone (male) genius producer and working more collectively, with drastically reduced reliance on the mirage of online social networks. Gated communities are prisons in reverse. Without a contingency plan for a screenless world, without leaving our apartments and studios and restoring underground distribution networks and meeting spots (bars, exhibition spaces, reading rooms, concert venues, playgrounds, caves, as needed), our connections to each other are held at the tenuous mercy of circuit breakers.

5. LIBRARY OF BABEL: The delegitimisation of writing has been symbiotically coupled with its decreased economic viability, parallel to the relegation of academics, artists, and scientists to the cultural fringe. This push has been assisted by the pushed, as we have allowed our cultural spheres to become hermetic, wearing this relegation as a badge or proof-of-concept, while insulting the intelligence of those outside, further alienating them and ourselves. In this move we have created a mutual excommunication, pre-empting access and translation on both sides. As a result, we've lost control of our own language, ceding its to third-parties with their own agendas. This is the horizon of our illiteracy. We must create space to study our language and how it is used, how it is manipulable, and how it is used to manipulate. This means untangling it from the mechanisms of ideology and freeing it through serious play. We need to listen more closely and speak more clearly, while simultaneously reclaiming control over our words and their meanings; we must voraciously translate and transpose, to and from, while also inventing new languages.

6. RADIO SILENCE: We have been complicit in ceding the control of our methods of self-publishing and self-distribution for the sake of convenience. Our broadcasting formats have been stunted, mitigated, and deleted, often as the result of our own myopic desires. Errors of judgement beget errors of judgement: even our mistakes are guided by the manipulative internal design of these platforms and their programmers. As a result, the nets of our broadcastings have shrunk and continue to do so. Instead of expanding our reach, we are now alienated on a global scale. This is the horizon of estrangement. It is clear that we have been put and have put ourselves on a course in which all forms and tools of communication can and will be systematically ceded from our control. If we are to survive through this and retain spaces of freedom from which to act and in which to live, we must retain what we know now and build a survival kit for the future.

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Ancient Knowledge Survival Kit : STUDIO FOR PROPOSITIONAL CINEMA

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Ancient Knowledge Survival Kit We have seen how the utilisation of tribal desire leads us towards an auto-instrumentalisation of our bodies and their gestures, moulding behaviours to instinctive reflexes and re-encoding societal agreements as codes without content (as contentless codes are answers not questions, they can only be edited by their encoders, whose will desires the endgame of their coding.)

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The artistic polymath has pushed the limits of genre, exploring ideas about gender and politics in nearly every form imaginable.

The artist Juliana Huxtable photographed in her Berlin apartment. Credit... Florian Thoss

Juliana Huxtable is not one to sit idle. Since graduating from Bard College in 2010, she has leapt between various corners of the New York arts scene: as the host of Shock Value, a semiregular transgender-inclusive party; as a model; as a member of the arts collective House of Ladosha; and as a creator and performer who has both D.J.ed and shown work at major museums. Coming off her last art show - an array of off-kilter multimedia work titled " Interfertility Industrial Complex: Snatch the Calf Back " that opened at Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York this past fall - her plan was to focus for a bit on her music, traveling the world for D.J. and music gigs she'd lined up in cities ranging from Amsterdam to Novi Sad, Serbia.

Then the pandemic hit, forcing Huxtable, 32, to stay put in Berlin, where she's lived part time the last couple of years when not in New York or touring - and allowing her to double down (with interludes spent at local protests against racism and police brutality) on one of the more solitary aspects of her practice: writing. In addition to her second book of poetry, she's assembling what she describes as a part epistolary, mixed-form novel, which builds, she said over a recent Skype call from her Kreuzberg apartment, on the themes of her fall show: "interspecies and trans-species discourse, epigenetics and how that influences identity," particularly with respect to racial trauma and food. (For inspiration, she's been reading Leila Taylor's 2019 book " Darkly: Black History and America's Gothic Soul. ") "I'm thankful I have writing to turn to, because it requires so little but can do so much."

Huxtable learned music production in order to incorporate it into her work. Credit... Florian Thoss

The artist is working on her second book of poetry and her debut novel, which is partially inspired by her most recent art exhibition, "Interfertility Industrial Complex: Snatch the Calf Back." Credit... Florian Thoss

Huxtable started writing poetry around age 8 and, during high school, contributed poems and digital art to various early 2000s blogs. While at Bard, she felt alienated from wealthy classmates who had "a self-awareness about their relationship to art-making" and instead delved into philosophy, gender theory and literature, eventually sharing her latest ideas within the more diffuse realm of Tumblr, where she gained a following. "The distinction between being a cultural consumer and a cultural producer was more collapsible there," said Huxtable. "And there was slippage between that and generating a real practice." She believes that her interests in writing and internet subculture have given her an alternate space and shielded her from the powerful systems many artists have to work within - first "the art-school industrial complex," she said, and then the art world itself, even if she must still rely on the latter to execute her more complex projects.

Video

Huxtable's creative writing practice has flourished during quarantine. Credit Credit... By Florian Thoss

The common thread running through Huxtable's work, particularly her writing and artwork, which frequently combine in text-based inkjet prints, is a provocative if often cheeky exploration of layered identity and how it is and isn't moldable: What stories are told about us - or are written on our bodies - and which do we tell ourselves? She's perhaps best known for her self-portraits, rendered in photography, in which she appears as a creature-like avatar. In " Untitled in the Rage (Nibiru Cataclysm) " (2015), part of her "Universal Crop Tops for All the Self Canonized Saints of Becoming" series, Huxtable is seated on her heels, nude but for a delicate beaded anklet, her skin painted a turquoise green and her long braids a neon yellow. Her back is to the camera, but her body is tilted, as if confidently inviting the viewer to gaze upon her side profile. In the background is a dense cloud of blue smoke, and that viewer might be left wondering if Huxtable, who's knowingly adhering to notions of the feminine ideal even as she subverts them, has perhaps emerged from the sea or sky.

Fantasy, of course, can serve as a refuge for those cruelly pushed aside while also reminding us of the reality of certain injustices. Huxtable, who was born intersex and initially assigned as male, grew up in Bryan-College Station, Texas, where she experienced overt racism, homophobia, transphobia and misogyny. Given all that she faced, it feels both inevitable and miraculous that she had enough resolve to seek a creative life.

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With each new project, the artist aims to work in a different mode than the one before. Credit Credit... By Florian Thoss

Her breakout moment came in 2015 with the New Museum Triennial, at which she showed her "Universal Crop Tops" pictures and the artist Frank Benson showed his luminescent 3D-printed sculpture "Juliana," for which Huxtable was the model. That same year, Huxtable performed " There Are Certain Facts That Cannot Be Disputed " - a meditation, via monologues, graphic design and audiovisual production, on historical memory and the internet as archive for marginalized narratives - at the Museum of Modern Art.

Since then, Huxtable has looked at the aesthetics and language of political protests and newspaper headlines. It's worth noting that, after college, she worked for the A.C.L.U.'s racial justice program as a legal assistant. Her 2017 gallery show "A Split During Laughter at the Rally," which included a short film with footage of jaded L.G.B.T.Q. activists, slogan-printed buttons and posters ("Crossdressers 4 Christ," "The War on Proof") and documents positing various conspiracy theories, seemed to highlight the ridiculousness embedded in American politics. That it was difficult to parse a clear-cut message or feel-good takeaway only made it feel more timely. "I like a kind of unstable positioning," said Huxtable. "With a show, you're entering a world I've crafted, and one of the things that I aspire to as an artist is to create a world that can provoke a set of questions." Indeed, a panel from her last show depicts Huxtable as part bat, part woman, hovering opposite doctored tabloid covers proclaiming "Bats Bite Back" and "Face-Off: Genetically Modified Cow Woman Attacks Trans Activists 'I May Be Part Cow, But I Am a Biological Female!'"

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A book shelf in Huxtable's Berlin apartment holds some of her recent reading. Credit... Florian Thoss

She sees that 2017 show as a turning point in her practice. "Initially, I was coming from really raw emotional places, because I didn't allow myself the creative license or feeling of entitlement to just produce work out of curiosity," said Huxtable. "That was the initiation of a specific kind of formal and conceptual advancement, of intellectual and conceptual curiosity merged with emotional intensity." Sometimes, Huxtable has found herself frustrated by the cost of not being a more predictable artist or, as she puts it, "just fully giving into the thing and performing expectations." But she's remained true to herself and, ultimately, as her new book project is proving, her versatility and agile mind are assets. "There's a certain kind of historical novelty that is important for my personal development. That feeling of, 'Oh my God, I'm figuring out a new mode,'" Huxtable says. "I have that feeling with this."

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The artistic polymath has pushed the limits of genre, exploring ideas about gender and politics in nearly every form imaginable. Juliana Huxtable is not one to sit idle.

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Juliana Huxtable
'Mucus in My Pineal Gland' 2017

"Poetry. Art. If real power begins where secrecy begins, then, as we frantically search for dick pics of Justin Bieber or our next door neighbour who we're convinced posted the faceless Craigslist ad seeking an asian bottom, we're seduced into a beautiful distraction in which we are convinced, by virtue of our victorious toppling of the lives of others, that we indeed have nothing to hide.

Much of Mucus in My Pineal Gland uses devices recognisable from “confessional” literature: overtly direct affective statements, recollections of early sexual encounters as if they were the keys to understanding the adult author, general propositions about life filtered through the particulars of personal experience. These are wonderful and familiar devices: they facilitate both empathetic identification (“I can relate to that”) and empathetic alienation (“I can’t quite imagine the inside of that experience”).

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A Split During Laughter at the Rally

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The artist on taking a break from visual work to turn to writing, life changes under lockdown and her favourite audiobooks
The titles of Helen Marten's sculptures have long suggested a literary mind at work: Puddlefoot, digging, Limpet Apology (traffic tenses), Brood and Bitter Pass (all 2015). These portmanteaus and locational couplings stimulate the mind's tongue. The British artist approaches language as she does material: lining up familiar signifiers, end to end, until their meanings negate themselves. Images form, momentarily, but refuse to solidify. What remains is a series of sounds.

Marten is well known for her distinct vocabulary of objects, which oscillate between digital and handmade, sleek and unwieldy. Recently, she took a break from her visual work to write her first novel, The Boiled in Between (2020). Its form shares the multifarious aesthetic of her visuals, nesting intimate and corporeal moments within the cold chassis of some kind of reference manual. Its sentences explode the DNA of her titles into a swirling, unreal narrative, reminiscent of the Gordon Lish school of wordplay: 'I dream of sleeping inside a hollowed-out white loaf with lots of same self, same sex, heartless passion and headless chase'. Another: 'There were no ordinary espressos, just everything blown up big enough to keep caffeine and virtue in one breath'.

I interviewed Marten over several days of emails. Since the pandemic began, she had been away from her home in the UK and was living in Holland. In her emails, she gave small glimpses into her life there, with anecdotes about her morning walks and the animals she observed, including 'something long and red, low to the ground, like a hairy frankfurter with legs'. By the end of our exchange, the language of her fiction, correspondence and interview had conjoined to form a unified verbal world.

Ross Simonini What kind of process did you use for writing this novel? Did it unfold in a straight line or, as the structure suggests, through a kind of collage?

Helen Marten Well, there wasn't really a process! I took a year out of the studio, physically removed from it. Partly because I was besieged with a mouse infestation I was pathologically tormented by, partly because I'd had a relentless year with virtually no critical dialogue and I was frustrated. I needed a conceptual rearrange. The stubborn adhesive blobbing all the parts together in the work I make is often made from language, and I suppose I wanted a new, more visible relationship with it. I always write, but I've never fully given in to it before. Nothing I do is in a straight line! I like to find wandering concepts and beat them until something else inevitably falls out. The book was written in that strangely virtuous sitting-down-at-a-desk-all- day-every-day kind of way. Something just kind of burst, and I loved it. It was never about encountering a single empirical problem, but allowing ideas to multiply at great speed until their mutual rhymes of both image and language arrived and found me somewhere else. I would comb away at sentences, smoothing them down, and then blow them out of place again, rumple them, violate them! I always tackle writing like a plotting of a diagram - holding individual abstractions in mind together, exercising them together, adding and subtracting until there is something algorithmic at work and everything has a place. So yes, I suppose collage in a sense, but more staggering; something more like snooker - a knocking-on of things but done within an envelope of distinct logic.

RS What do you mean when you say a 'year with virtually no critical dialogue'?

HM Well, I had worked very intensely on several large exhibitions, and rather than feeling like I'd thrashed out conversations about everything I was doing, there was just a great vacuum of silence. Of course I talk relentlessly to myself, making notes, pushing pieces around, but it was sad that, for whatever reason, the dynamic existence of these works outside my own space was so fleeting.

RS Would you call it an indifferent response? Did it affect how you feel about your work?

HM I think indifference is wrong - there was great joy and satisfaction that unfolded with making the work public, sharing it with all the different people I work with. I just wanted something more hardcore! A critical response in the sense of unstitching or shredding - something volatile and elemental like finding the basic pattern, diagramming it, naming the parts, renaming the parts, making them feel uncomfortably scrutinised, all the better to understand why they are there. Of course you do this for yourself, and I don't really expect someone to shepherd me neatly along with congratulations and tender questioning! This year has done something similar, and the feeling is something like: now I know nothing, I can begin to learn again. Under every rock-bottom there is another infinitely long and dark descent!

RS How do you generally use language or narrative to support the visual work? At what point does language contribute to the process?

HM I love when material is enabled and then undone. Logical, graphical relationships are embedded in sculpture, because a large part of the enigma is right in front of you, visually evident. The more formal elements of colour or texture or balance are conditional, generative parts that have their own semantic grammar. Language is part of this circuitry, but more in the way that electricity enters a house - it is part of the muscular, driving engine, but its invisibility renders it a more speculative, conceptual element. Linguistic habit means we inherently understand many visual things without having to think too hard about them - they are learned or social or innate. And this is where the strange tautology of material opens up, precisely because the known qualities of it - the clayness of clay, brickness of bricks - is part of an ancient vocabulary. Suddenly the clay becomes extra clay-y and slips beyond tactile recognition; language both holds it in and emancipates it simultaneously.

It is compositional, rhythmic, like music or speech. It's a system of translation, and the wonderful thing about literature is that this twisting around in the mouth is how a picture emerges. You invent your own imagery and propel it forward. And I love that linguistic strategies can fiddle so much with idioms and certain turns of phrase that common objects or systems of emotion are brutally anthropomorphised: self-satisfied or political milk; an empathic orange; wind that caresses, snacks, gurgles, yawns, beats about the head. You have to pay such close attention, or another wriggling metamorphic cycle happens, and there you are off-piste again...

RS Were you making any work outside of the novel during this period?

HM I made some drawings and little sketches for bigger works, but other than that I made nothing else. And it was so liberating to momentarily extinguish the problems of logistics and gravity!

RS What are your reading habits?

HM Rabid and overambitious. My book-buying vs reading-capacity ratio is sorely uneven, so I'm surrounded by pressing stacks. I listen prolifically to audiobooks when I'm doing other things, and it feels like a miracle.

RS What audiobooks in particular have you enjoyed? Any trends or patterns in your listening?

HM This is difficult... most recently: Crime and Punishment! I spent a very hot week drawing despicably hairy animals and a clogged U-bend with very soft pencils in constant need of resharpening. Boiling sun mashing my head and eyes, and that incredible story of ethical paralysis and egotism drumming in. Some penance for my sins, I'm certain. I've just been on a Cormac McCarthy binge. Right now Elfriede Jelinek's Greed with some Diane Williams and Colson Whitehead alongside. Trends seem to be the dark triads of psychology: narcissism, manipulation and psychopathy! I also just love a winding story.

RS What was your writing practice like before the novel?

HM Nonfiction! I've always written about substance and material, about other artists' work, about 'concepts'. I love the long-form essay. I have two ongoing writing projects - one a grubby lexicon (rats, floor plans, shadows, blood) and another currently titled 'collage vs inlay'. One day perhaps they'll become something.

RS The history of novels is so weighty. I personally had some resistance to the term novel around my book but relented due to the publisher's request. What brought you to fiction? What about the form of a novel interested you?

HM There are narratives that project a careful language for their subjects, ones that proceed colloquially even lyrically with little difficulty. And then there are narratives gleefully heavy with their own dissonance. I would much rather fall on the dissonance side, because I worry that with all writing there is an inertia that comes by trying too hard to explain. I don't want to see too many flags hoisted that attempt to make you feel better as the reader by signalling out a more careful route through it all. I love the metaphorical struggle you might have with a gruesome text where you attempt and fail to peel away the glue keeping it all together and realise it is all over you - that image, language, all of it is stuck to you and you are part of the animation machine making it happen! How wonderful that potatoes or the current of a river might be more alive than the characters themselves. The novel can be a newly disembodied agent of narrative in so many ways - it has so many names, so many terms, so many alternating metrics of speed and storytelling that I suppose I feel unburdened by terminology. What I most love about a 'novel' is that it is a minute cosmos, and within that space is a loose scaffold upon which scraps of truth and imagination hang - you can choose to wallow in it, or chase it in another direction.

RS What novels have functioned this way for you?

HM A remarkable book is Ben Marcus's The Age of Wire and String (1995). It's a genius narrative built using a totally perverted set of technical terms for common taxonomical things: food, sleep, God, animals, society. It's somehow like a recycled handbook that understands how our world is one where image is the meta-event. It defies physics and language but keeps its reader close because it is built precisely from things that we intimately understand. The great dark comedy of this book is that we are served, in various guises, steaming thematic lessons for existing within a democracy of space. This book realises that nature, television, the supermarket, even an estate agent's 'for sale' sign offer macro templates for living.

RS For you, do language and material express different aspects of yourself? Or do you consider them translations of a similar fundamental impulse?

HM I think with both of them I have a compulsion to associate, to twist and wind things so obstinately and deliberately together that they have no choice but to become something else. As both producer and receiver, I feel like my only job is to turn on the tap and already that is a linguistically creative contribution! Perhaps you are filling, scrubbing, bathing, cleaning, rinsing, cooling - already that is so many different turns of translation for the water that is released. And then you only need to paddle a little further and suddenly you are thinking more theoretically about the greater system of economics and infrastructure to which tap-function is connected, the copper mined for plumbing, the problematic idea of even having a tap when considering the current drought in Zimbabwe or Southern Africa. And then there is the hyperbole of biblical rain. Or the surrealism of an architect suddenly explaining that there is a hidden swimming pool under your kitchen table. The translation impulse for both art and literature, for me, is very similar. And of course some things work and some don't. Although somehow both still tell the truth, albeit against their will.

RS Fiction is often a chronicle of passing time, which isn't so glaringly true of sculpture. How do you think about the movement of time when you write narrative?

HM Time and love share a great deal - their wide arc that is full of incomprehensibility, with horror and hallucination! Good stories deal in that, I think. If I imagine time, I'd group it also with wind and dust. They are corroborating motifs. Dust appears again and again as a gruesome object, as a material that flecks its antique glaze over everything, that coats the body - that is of the body - that pitilessly falls on all manner of material stuff and cannot be removed. Both are everything and nothing, a kind of luminous nonmatter. Time is something like a collection of little flags that mark the direction or journey of language, except in this instance the intricate patterns of behaviour and action move the narrative within a very limited space. Time really rubs your face in it when all that has been achieved is a melancholy soliloquy on self-loathing, on the odd joyousness of having nipples, or the morbidity of believing the mirror has poisoned the heart! Language protects and wounds. Time does just the same. And there are so many different kinds of time: the time of rain, the time of God, of family, of domestic content or political malaise. Time lures you in only to kick you in the mouth.

RS The book is largely concerned with architectural spaces of homes. How would you describe your home? What's its personality? What effect does it have on you?

HM I usually live in London, but for the last four-and-a-half months I've been in the Netherlands. I am by the sea, so that sense of everything gaping or luring you toward the coast is always there. This is the land of big sky, of cute cumulus clouds like merry dumplings, so domestic building seems almost secondary to that - houses are fashioned to accommodate light and sky in a way that London's carbon dankness never was. My London life literally stinks. Trains rattle, I can hear my neighbours piss or open a can. Everything in the book revolves around this metaphoric obsession with 'the home' - the objects of it are let loose, even abstract processes feel part of the plot. I work in bouts of fanatic tidiness and manic chaos, extremes that force me to deal with being a body in a predetermined space. I'm interested in this structural or physical violence that architecture performs on us, how it indexes or emancipates. I suppose that is the difference now, looking at my displacement: I've swapped a metropolitan somewhere for a verdant nowhere.

RS Do you feel that architecture is always a force of violence? Obviously, shelter is also a kind of luxury. Have you encountered buildings that manage to express antiviolence?

HM I suppose anything that toys with an inside and an outside harbours potential for violence. To be let in or shut out. Shelter, certainly, is a luxury. I suppose I mean violence as a kind of oppositional idea to protection - the moment of seeing through any camouflage and recognising a duality, that what keeps you dry and safe can also turn over and over in your mind to become something newly cold and unappealing. Something like letting the animal of language in through the back door and seeing suddenly how it renames everything! The beginning thoughts for the book were thinking of buildings as weapons or bodies, with all the same galvanic, liquid or atomic circuitry as a breathing figure.

RS In the book you mention an 'enlightened house'. What is that?

HM Haha! Perhaps the enlightened house is a parody of the conventions of any kind of heteronorm! That is to say, an enlightened house wears its shame on the outside and takes pride in its cracks.

RS Do you have any interest in working in the field of architecture?

HM Absolutely not! I will leave that to the kinder, more carefully processed citizens!

Helen Marten's debut novel, The Boiled in Between, was published in September by Prototype. A solo exhibition of new drawings is on view at Sadie Coles HQ, Kingly Street, London, through 17 October.
Ross Simonini is an artist and writer based in California

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'I Can Begin to Learn Again': Turner Prize-Winning Artist Helen Marten on Writing Her First Novel

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The artist on taking a break from visual work to turn to writing, life changes under lockdown and her favourite audiobooks The titles of Helen Marten's sculptures have long suggested a literary mind at work: Puddlefoot, digging, Limpet Apology (traffic tenses), Brood and Bitter Pass (all 2015).

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Ed Atkins

Death Mask II: The Scent (2010)

Atkins’ screenplays shrug off narrative development in favour of vivid and dense descriptive passages that escape the fantasy of literature and enter material existence. The screen play Death Mask II offers a ‘partial exegesis’ for some of the images within the film, focusing on descriptions of the durian fruit, infamous for its disgusting and indescribable smell reminiscent of a rotting corpse. The corpse, as articulated through French theorist Maurice Blanchot’s descriptions of cadavers as representations of living beings, is a recurrent theme in Atkins’s films, and one in which he finds affinities with the increasingly ‘realistic’ imagery produced by high definition digital technology.

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Martine Syms, Misdirected Kiss Notes, 2016 in NOVEL

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Draft Season

Thanks Chip :)

My New Favorite Band

Bill T. Jones AI

AND THAT'S IT

I hate your idea of heaven

"You have to treat an institution like a whore - and then you get something out of her." KL

But I want the blue one

Can someone in Paris go to Lafayette Anticipations shop and buy me the D'heygere Blue & White Sleeve Belt Bag. It was 50% off.

Cause I'm A Strong Black Woman

I WAS NAMED AFTER HER

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Thanks Chip :) "You have to treat an institution like a whore - and then you get something out of her." KL Can someone in Paris go to Lafayette Anticipations shop and buy me the D'heygere Blue & White Sleeve Belt Bag. It was 50% off.

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Martine Syms

Lori Waxman
In a solo exhibition, the artist takes back the screen.
Martine Syms: Incense Sweaters & Ice, the Graham Foundation, 4 West Burton Place, Chicago, through January 12, 2019

A funny thing happened while I was researching Martine Syms, whose solo exhibition, Incense Sweaters & Ice, is currently on view at the Graham Foundation in Chicago. The thirty-year-old artist, who lives in Los Angeles, is something of a hot ticket these days, with standout turns in big group exhibitions like the Hammer's Made in L.A. biennial and the FRONT International triennial in Cleveland. The odd thing was this: nearly all of the substantial press Syms has received over the past few years has been interviews. And in the educational video for her Projects 106 at the Museum of Modern Art in 2017, where much of the Graham work premiered, it's the artist herself who does the walkthrough.

Syms grew up in the LA suburb of Altadena, was partly homeschooled, and graduated at the precocious age of nineteen from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where I teach. Right before finishing school, she and a classmate opened Golden Age, a tiny and beloved artist bookstore, a type of space that otherwise did not exist in the city, and after closing up shop five years later, she moved back to LA and founded Dominica, a publishing company dedicated to exploring blackness in visual culture. Add to this brief biography the vital consciousness of Black Lives Matter and the incessant self-documentation of social media, plus a dash of celebrity culture, and a career of great timeliness emerges-one in which the artist has taken over the position of commentator. What's noteworthy is how the factors that have made it possible for Syms to set the terms of her art's reception dovetail so neatly with the artwork itself.

Incense Sweaters & Ice is first and foremost a nonlinear sixty-nine-minute film that follows Girl, a young black traveling nurse (played by artist-choreographer Katherine Simóne Reynolds), from LA through St. Louis to a job at a clinic in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Along the way there are quiet moments reading an experimental semi-autobiographical novella on a couch; a flirty first date with WB (White Boy) at a hip restaurant; a flea market full of old photos and clothing; goofy singing in a karaoke bar; a cozy and jovial family dinner; a visit to grandma's tchotchke-filled house; elaborate hair and body care in a generic hotel room. Making them feel even truer, these scenes of everyday realism are shot from multiple points of view, suggesting the plenitude of recording devices we live amid: surveillance cameras, iPhone cameras, head and body cams, even dashboard cams. The foil to all this realism is a series of meticulous shots of a bygone sound stage on which Mrs. Queen Esther Bernetta White, an indomitable middle-aged matriarch (performed by jazz singer Fay Victor), trills dated advice about self-presentation for aspirational black people.

Incense Sweaters & Ice is also a cinematic installation that expands beyond one screen, one surface, one room. The film is split up scene-by-scene, each segment shown sequentially on one of three monitors that cannot be viewed from a single vantage point. Watching the movie thus requires the viewer's near-constant movement, a situation that annoys not unlike the multitasking of contemporary life. It echoes Girl's geographical journey, itself a reversal of the Great Migration, when African Americans of the rural southern states moved to the cities of the north and west. But mostly the piece expands by way of the color purple-yes, as in Alice Walker's 1982 novel about the life of African American women in the south in the 1930s, where purple is independence and pleasure, but bruises too. At the Graham, purple replaces the black screen in between the film's scenes, paints the downstairs gallery walls and benches, tints the patterned window filters, and does up Queen's entire set and ensemble. If you don't get this color, perhaps try harder.

Upstairs, more purple: the walls are white but covered in seven-and-a-half-foot-tall purple letters spelling variations on "girl," as in "Hey, girl!" and Riot Grrrl and a few others in between. Across those words hang a dozen framed posters for films targeted to African Americans, with titles like Boyz n the Hood and Truck Turner overprinted to varying degrees of opacity with Syms's own photographs. When viewed through wyd rn?, a phone app created with her studiomate Brent David Freaney (who also acts as WB in the film), the compositions populate with various sorts of data. Syms's glamorously blurry image of a woman holding a mic comes alive when a soulful acapella tune sings out. Scrolling text conversations (including the eponymous acronym, which stands for "what you doing right now?") seem as if undertaken live by the woman pictured in a diner, engrossed by her phone. A series of overlapping GIFs of Tyra Banks and other black women celebrities perform gestures of power, ideals to be practiced in the mirror of Syms's photo of a messy bedroom. These are not 2-D works so much as miniature films. They're not miniature films so much as select encapsulations of the way life is lived and seen today: a screen view filled with potentially endless cultural references, family memories, abbreviated conversations, audio tracks, and behavioral memes.

The difference here, and it's a crucial one, is that Martine Syms is in control, having reclaimed the vast array of cameras, commentary, and references that vie for our selves, even while we think we are self-constructing them. That selfie? That track? That meme? That beauty regime? That pulling out of a phone to photograph an artwork? These are the tics of today, and they are changing our very constitutions, are erasing the differences between being and acting, between self and self-presentation. Syms's success is in taking these new habits as tools through which to re-present herself to us, her characters to us, and, by extension, ourselves to whoever or whatever it is in our tech-saturated world that's watching.

Lori Waxman is the Chicago Tribune 's primary freelance art critic. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has a PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts in New York. Her 60 wrd/min art critic performance has been exhibited in Documenta 13 and a dozen cities across the US. She is the author, most recently, of Keep Walking Intently (Sternberg Press, 2017).

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Martine Syms Lori Waxman In a solo exhibition, the artist takes back the screen. Martine Syms: Incense Sweaters & Ice, the Graham Foundation, 4 West Burton Place, Chicago, through January 12, 2019 A funny thing happened while I was researching Martine Syms, whose solo exhibition, Incense Sweaters & Ice, is currently on view at the Graham Foundation in Chicago.

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Martine Syms

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How do we translate performance onto the page? Words can explain, embellish, and distract, and they can transform matter into something else altogether. Among the recent emergence of performance publications, the most impactful ones remind us that we can, and indeed must, read performance. Whether in a live context or as a poetic reinvention for the page, words are more than mere explanations and stagehands of the body, the event, the spectacle.

A performance script, especially a poetic one, can also simply exist in this paginal solitude, like a closet drama, not necessarily intended for the stage but written as if, left to the solitary reader to imagine. While a photograph gives the illusion of reality, it comes from the past and is therefore, as Roland Barthes suggests in Camera Lucida, “magic, not an art.” Poetic language is always a step removed from reality and can refer by association or metaphor—indirectly but no less intimately. Who is a performance or documentation for?

That said, the word document, derives from the Latin docere—to show, point to, teach. Therefore, documentation itself can be more than indexical, and also pedagogical and imaginative. What these recent performance publications share is an interest in voice, specifically whose voice is heard and how. They also grapple with linear and non-linear narrative, textuality, the interplay between image and text, the line between poetry and performance, creative forms of documentation, and what constitutes a version versus an iteration, leaving a reader with imaginative work to do. Sometimes the page is the stage (cliche).

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Angharad Williams

"Back in 2013, the artist Angharad Williams performed her work Breezer in a South London gallery. She asked a member of the audience for their phone number – cue nervous side-eyes and awkward titters – then promptly left the gallery and called the mobile number of one of the audience members from the park outside. Having been left nonplussed by her departure at first, the group of us, maybe 15 strong, huddled around the device. As she walked around the park, Williams read a text about a teenage girl taking her first sip of Bacardi Breezer. Filtered by the iPhone’s tinny speaker, overlaid with buffeting sounds of wind and playing children, Williams’s voice sounded fragile and whispered, like a late-night answerphone message.

The phone’s sonic qualities, which emphasised the seductive sibilance of the artist’s delivery, felt doubly apt: a nostalgic evocation of the fumbling, desire-filled chats I used to have on brick phones when I was the same age as the girl in the piece. By requiring that the audience twist their necks and bend their ears towards it, the phone further subverted the expectation of spectacularism that attends so much performance art. The environment felt so close – so private – that I remember feeling mildly scandalised to be sharing the experience with other people. The phone, that technology of breathy answerphone messages, of whispered, late-night chats, of hearing the voices of loved ones and knowing they are safe, held the audience transfixed – until, abruptly, the artist hung up. The performance was all the more forceful for being so quiet: for drawing us into the paradoxical scope of a close but distant voice."

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Lucy Clout
Shrugging Offing (2013) Digital space that produces effects in the physical body: arousal, repulsion and sleep. Little deaths. Proxies for one’s own corpse (via green-screen in this case). Flatness and volume. A screaming desire to have your body addressed. Breaking the surface (emotionally and figuratively). POV camera work in pornography and ASMR. ’Shrugs’ and ‘cover-ups’ – opaque clothing designed to blur the surface of the aging woman. Offing as in killing. The performance of desire and the performance of satiation.

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30 second trailer for Shrugging Offing (2013).
Lucy Clout.

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Kameelah Janan Rahseed
In No New Theories Rasheed freely assembles her own writing, autocorrect algorithms, and Oulipian poems (short texts generated with the help of imposed constraints) alongside visuals drawn from her personal image archive, pop culture, zoological journals, quranic verses, and other sources. The work gathers these threads with an emphasis on the processes of revision and improvisation as she considers the entropic potential of meaning in place of fixed definitions.

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No New Theories builds on Kameelah Janan Rasheed's accretive and associative installation work, bringing together xerox abstractions, poetic text fragments, and found as well as original photography to explore learning and unlearning as a spiritual, socio-political, ecological, and cognitive process.

With No New Theories Rasheed freely assembles her own writing, autocorrect algorithms, and Oulipian poems (short texts generated with the help of imposed constraints) alongside visuals drawn from her personal image archive, pop culture, zoological journals, quranic verses, and other sources. The work gathers these threads with an emphasis on the processes of revision and improvisation as she considers the entropic potential of meaning in place of fixed definitions.

At the heart of No New Theories is an expansive interview between Rasheed and Jessica Lynne, co-founder of the art criticism journal ARTS.BLACK. The conversation attempts to document their intellectual partnership, constructed through a layering process by which the original exchange is reworked and expanded with annotations, citations, and excerpted texts from writers Samuel R. Delany, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Emily Dickinson, and others.

Rasheed and Lynne take on questions of epistemology and pedagogy, the nature of research, knowledge-acquisition, as well as patience and fatigue. Building on the notion of the 'organic archive' - both as a fictional organizing framework and as a score for possible experiences - the two consider various historical, sociological, and cultural facets of Americana, proposing a multi-directional discourse around the wide permutations of Black experience. The book's title - No New Theories - locates Blackness as a multivalent and porous experience that cannot and should not be neatly theorized.

No New Theories is published by Printed Matter, Inc. Produced in an edition of 1,000 copies, paperback, black & white, 256 p., 9x6 in., otabound, with a high gloss silkscreen cover, edge-printing, and suede-ink bookmark.

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inc. is the world's largest non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of publications made by artists - artists' books or artists' publications. founded as a for-profit alternative arts space in 1976 by artists and artworkers

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printed matter reincorporated in 1978 to become the independent non-profit organization that it is today. originally situated in tribeca

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printed matter moved to soho in 1989 where for twelve years the book displays and artists¹ projects in the large storefront windows contributed to the artistic and intellectual vibrancy of the neighborhood. in february 2001 printed matter relocated to its current space in chelsea

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where it continues to foreground the book as an alternative venue for artists¹ projects and ideas. recognized for years as an essential voice in the increasingly diversified art world conversations and debates

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printed matter is dedicated to the examination and interrogation of the changing role of artists¹ publications in the landscape of contemporary art.

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Kameelah Janan Rasheed - No New Theories - Printed Matter

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No New Theories_ builds on Kameelah Janan Rasheed's accretive and associative installation work, bringing together xerox abstractions, poetic text fragments, and found as well as original photography to explore learning and unlearning as a spiritual, socio-political, ecological, and cognitive pr...

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Leaky Sentences

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Triple Canopy - On Similitude by Steffani Jemison with Garrett Gray

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An artist and a mime ask how, without language, to speak and be heard; know and be known by the world; and pass information from body to body to body.

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When is a poem a picture? In his seminal theoretical text, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003), Fred Moten asks: ‘What are the internal relations within that experience between the intellection of the poem’s meaning and the sensing of its visuality and/or aurality? What are the relations between versions of or variations on the poem, manifestations of the eye and ear that raise the too deep question of the ontological status of the poem itself?’

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When is a poem a picture? In his seminal theoretical text, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003), Fred Moten asks: 'What are the internal relations within that experience between the intellection of the poem's meaning and the sensing of its visuality and/or aurality? What are the relations between versions of or variations on the poem, manifestations of the eye and ear that raise the too deep question of the ontological status of the poem itself?' Moten's own poems feel good on my tongue as I recite them and their rhythm is integral to their meaning. He argues that the gap or 'break' between a poem's meaning and its aesthetic effects can be fertile ground for radical politics, a space of emotional resonance that conventional language struggles to articulate.

A generation of artists inspired by Moten has seized on the poet and theorist's title as a proposition, breaking apart texts from literary and historical sources to build new forms out of the wreckage. Language, broadly speaking, has long been a central concern for many black contemporary artists - Glenn Ligon, Pope.L, Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems come to mind - but this younger generation draws inspiration directly from literary sources: the poetry of Amiri Baraka, Tisa Bryant, Moten, Harryette Mullen, Claudia Rankine and others. Unlike many of their artistic predecessors, they fracture sentences and split words, collaging them together in ways that often refuse coherence. Their work acknowledges that identity is complicated by the language we use to deﬁne and express it.

Adam Pendleton quotes diverse literary sources in prints and wallpapers, collaged text and scanned photographs that embrace this condition of illegibility. For 'shot him in the face', his 2017 show at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, which later toured to Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, Pendleton installed a vinyl wallpaper bearing the provocative opening line from Ron Silliman's 1981 poem 'Albany', enlarged in black block letters: 'If the function of writing is to "express the world".' Silliman's poem continues in a cycle of short, ﬂat sentences about race and class in Albany, California.

Pendleton, meanwhile, deploys a literal flatness to question art or writing's imperative to 'express the world'. at KW, black and white silkscreened images of work by Pablo Picasso, photographs of a dada dancer from 1916 and a dancing Congolese couple, as well as a page from a book of Chinese textiles were cropped and layered into a near-abstract pattern. Several other quotes from silliman appeared on the wall, fragmented and framed, such as the line: 'A woman on the train asks Angela Davis for an autograph,' from which only Davis's name, 'train' and 'woman' were discernible.

The breakdown of language is part of what Pendleton refers to as 'Black dada', a term he has used since 2009 for his most important and extensive series to date. The phrase is borrowed from Amiri Baraka's 1964 poem 'Black Dada Nihilismus', a seminal early text of the Black Arts Movement. Baraka invokes both the nihilism of dada and its dark depictions of the eroding social and political order in post-World War I Europe to voice the frustrations of black Americans of the Civil Rights movement fighting against systemic racism and violence during the Vietnam War.

In his 'Black Dada' paintings, Pendleton riffs on the famous refrain in Hugo Ball's 1916 'Dada Manifesto' - 'dada m'dada dada mhm' - to link different historical avant-gardes. The letters of 'dada' permutate alongside blown-up images of Sol LeWitt's 'Incomplete Open Cubes' (1974). Like LeWitt's modular geometry, language is a system open to endless reconfiguration and renewal. Reading Ball's manifesto as not only a nonsense poem, but a political treatise alongside Pendleton's own work, MoMA PS1 curator Jenny Schlenzka has argued that Pendleton 'recovers dada's tactical nonsense as a precursor weapon against a society that naturalizes racial identity in the service of oppression and exploitation'.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed, 'A Supple Perimeter', 2017, exhibition view at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Art Center at Governors Island, New York. Courtesy: the artist and LMCC, New York; photograph: Ornella Friggit © LMCC

Kameelah Janan Rasheed leverages that same 'tactical nonsense' in her architecturally scaled, fragmentary, text-based collages. A Supple Perimeter (2017), which was included in the 2017 exhibition 'Speech/Acts' at ICA Philadelphia, begs to be read, though its sentences fall apart as soon as they begin to form. Across two long, black walls, photocopied and excised words are pinned in loose clusters that hover near eye level, recalling poet Douglas Kearney's 'performative typography'. A framed image of a hand pressed against the glass of a scanner hangs at the fulcrum of this frieze, as if to block the advance of our gaze. 'Refuses to do that' is pasted over the palm, while an adjacent blank page bears the simple prepositional phrase: 'inside the offering of'. An offering and a refusal: Rasheed's words and gestures conflict because, her work argues, one's marginality is always a conflicted state. Nearby, the words 'and black?' in bold, Helvetica type have been slid across the surface of a live photocopier, creating a woozy distortion that sets even the nature of the question into doubt. 'And black?' What's black? Who's asking?

'I want to hear./the rhythm/of rupture,' one line reads. and elsewhere: 'a sentence is structured/TO-AND-FRO-MOVEMENTS/sentence and race through the words.' Rasheed's fragmentary collage engages in a sly mimesis: it pronounces the cause of its illegibility. 'Rupture' recalls what Moten once wrote of one of Baraka's favoured poetic devices: 'Montage renders inoperative any simple opposition of totality to singularity. It makes you linger in the cut between them, a generative space that fills and erases itself.' I linger in Rasheed's cut, looking for fugitive meaning, only for the work to refuse my reading.

Towards the end of the installation, hung low to the floor, a framed scan of fingertips, lined up like a policeman's record, serves as the artist's signature. Prints are evidence, but they also leave a more personal trace of daily life, like the grease stains on the pages of a well-thumbed novel. Here we find ourselves, perhaps, at the 'supple perimeter' of the work's title - a body or a text reclaimed as a margin fertile for political discourse.

The grain of a photocopy reminds me of the many texts on art history, theory and philosophy that I received as handouts in university classes. When scanned, books that are smaller than standard A4 paper leave a black frame of negative space around the blinding whiteness of the duplicated page. The stark, two-tone aesthetic of the photocopy is central to Pendleton's and Rasheed's practices, just as black and white dominates the work of many of their peers. 'Speech/Acts', which considered six artists of colour working with poetry and the black radical tradition, was virtually monochromatic. Setting aside the obvious racial metaphor, the clash of black and white offers a dialectical contrast that alludes to the many conflicted states of marginalized identity, and to conditions of visibility and invisibility.

Steffani Jemison, 'Plant You Now, Dig You Later', 2017, installation view. Courtesy: the artist and MASS MoCa, North Adams; photograph: David Dashiell

If the master's tools can never dismantle the master's house, neither can his tongue unravel his discourse. To that end, interrupted speech and written text can serve as critical poetic devices for artists to craft more inclusive, open-ended language. Steffani Jemison's work considers the way black Americans throughout history have invented languages, spoken and unspoken, to circumvent racist attempts to silence their expression. 'Plant You Now, Dig You Later', Jemison's sweeping show which opened in March 2017 at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, focuses on a series of 'hieroglyphic characters' that Nat Turner, the leader of an 1831 slave rebellion, claimed he saw in a corn field and took as divine inspiration. Enlarged on sheets of acetate mounted on the gallery walls and running onto the floor, the scrawled, snaking symbols have a runic quality, as if they predate the Latin alphabet. Other sheets bear the ideographic marks of Solresol, a language based on the Solfège system of musical notation, devised by composer François Sudre in 1827.

Sudre envisioned Solresol as a universal idiom; the symbols' unfamiliarity to the modern eye is a mark of their ultimate failure. Mixed in with Sudre's notation are letters from the Hamptonese alphabet - a cryptic language devised by the self-taught black artist James Hampton, from Washington D.C, who spent more than a decade building an elaborate golden throne and altar from salvaged materials in response to religious visions. Indecipherable but inspired: language in Jemison's work is as much a tool of communication as it is an expression of interiority. It's not clear how Hampton and Turner developed their runic systems, but their lack of clarity (to the white gaze?) seems to be the point. Here, poetry and its building blocks are a means of escape, of liberation, of utopic imagination.

Jemison is a writer and poet, too, and her use of the archive often results in more legible text-based works than those of Pendleton or Rasheed. You Completes Me (2013-ongoing), a poem composed of sentences lifted from self-published novels the artist bought at street-side bookstands in Harlem, arranges words typologically to form a non-narrative story. Clusters of adjectives (fat/juicy legs/fine as fuck) compete with brand-name signifiers (Escalade/Lexus/Charger). Street slang appears alongside questions of existential melodrama: 'Have you ever been wounded in your soul and paralyzed with grief?' This work acquires some of the rhythms of life in Harlem, from its intellectual and pulp histories to the daily chatter of its residents. While not all of the novellas function as portraits of the neighbourhood, Jemison's work uses language to draw our attention to issues of class, race and gender that dominate everyday life there.

Bethany Collins, America: A Hymnal, 2017, 100 laser-cut leaves, 15 × 23 × 2 cm. Courtesy: the artist, Patron Gallery and Candor Arts, Chicago; photograph: Timothy Johnson

Bethany Collins's America: A Hymnal (2017) employs a similar cut-and-paste technique, compiling scores for 100 different versions of the 19th-century ballad 'My Country, 'Tis of Thee' to tell a story of US history through popular music and nationalistic expression. The tune for the early, pre-revolutionary anthem was famously borrowed from 'God save the Queen'. Later in the century, it was adapted as a battle hymn by suffragettes and abolitionists, who used the song's title and opening line - 'My country 'tis of thee,/ sweet land of liberty' - as an ironic jab at the nation's hypocrisies. Collins's collage process recalls Robin Coste Lewis's 'Voyage of the Sable Venus' (2015), a multi-part poem composed entirely of titles of Western artworks that reference the black female figure. Lewis's devastating poem makes clear the extent to which women of colour have been treated as exotic objects throughout history. Collins's book, too, gives me the impression of an avid reader combing the archive of US history in search of something they can recognize, only to realize that that history was written to exclude them.

'Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word,' Rankine writes in her book Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), which has been a touchstone, since its publication, for many artists working with poetry. Citing an episode during the 2006 World Cup, in which a racist slur was directed at Zinedine Zidane - a french footballer of Algerian descent - Rankine notes that 'illustrations of this kind of racial prejudice can be multiplied indefinitely', the way a word can be repeated, on a tongue or across a chalkboard. It's what Kearney calls a 'stutter': we are forced to witness the same kind of racist violence over and over again, like a word lodged in the throat. I'm reminded of the psychoanalyst and philosopher Frantz Fanon's observation that the child who cries, 'Look Daddy! A Negro!' produces blackness by declaring and circumscribing difference. People turn. Fingers point. A crowd becomes a lynch mob.

In violently splitting apart the body of a text, these artists nevertheless refuse to picture the physical violence inflicted on the bodies of people of colour. Poetry's critical evasiveness thus offers a way to articulate the effects of oppression without reproducing them in echo. By trying to capture the essence of words, poetry at once fails to express the world - per Silliman and Pendleton - while also proving indispensable to our experience of it. If race is a social construct, then language plays a key role in perpetuating and legitimizing the terms of racial difference. For these artists, words are both a trap and an escape hatch. Racist epithets and laws use language to marginalize the black body, but poetry deconstructs syntax in ways that could set it free. It might be paradoxically 'in the break' that things - our words, our world - become unbroken.
Bethany Collins Steffani Jemison Adam Pendleton Kameelah Janan Rasheed Main image: Adam Pendleton, 'shot him in the face', 2017, exhibition view at Baltic Centre for Contemporary art, Gateshead. Courtesy: the artist is an artist and writer based in New York, USA. In May 2017, her solo exhibition 'A Supple Perimeter' opened at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Governors Island, New York. Also in 2017, she was included in group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, USA, Visitor Welcome Center, Los Angeles, USA, and Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Venice, Italy. is an artist based between Germantown and New York, USA. In 2017, he had solo exhibitions at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK, and the Baltimore Museum of Art, USA, and was included in group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA, and Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, USA. His solo show at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, USA, runs from 3 January until 11 February. is an artist and writer based in New York, USA. In 2017, she had solo exhibitions at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, USA, and Jeu de Paume, Paris, France, and was included in group exhibitions at Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, USA, Brennan & Griffin, New York, and Ulises, Philadelphia, USA. is an artist based in Chicago, USA. In 2017, she had solo exhibitions at Patron Gallery, Chicago, and 1708 Gallery, Richmond, and was featured in ten group exhibitions, including 'Another Country' at Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, Michigan, 'Gray Matters' at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, and 'Excerpt' at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (all USA).

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When is a poem a picture? In his seminal theoretical text, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003), Fred Moten asks: 'What are the internal relations within that experience between the intellection of the poem's meaning and the sensing of its visuality and/or aurality?

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Sarah Charlesworth, Verbs (1978)

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Uprisings: Hannah Black Interviewed - BOMB Magazine

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Uprisings: Hannah Black Interviewed - BOMB Magazine

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Hannah Black is an artist and writer at work in New York City. Black's latest book, Tuesday or September or the End (Capricious), is a novella written in the aftermath of the early months of the pandemic and the uprisings of summer 2020. If we experience daily life as "simulation or psychosis," Black shows us throughout this book that it is "probably something much more drab, like the slow death of a form of society." Black offers a chronicle centered on two characters, Bird and Dog, as they contend with rapidly changing political possibility and foreclosure during the pandemic while the run of Moley Salamanders (i.e., Bernie Sanders) concludes and aliens-who are real-come to earth. The book narrates what it is to let these beginnings and endings "scroll through you" and to participate in their coming about, both in the sense of the normal rhythms of capital and of riots.

The recent past was and is "a time of signs and wonders" in the most horrific sense, but Black tethers it to mundane continuity, an account of life in late-stage capital as time breaks down and goes "queasy and wrong" and all dates are "in retrospect, a monument." Via a propulsive consideration of how the riots of 2020 might have turned revolutionary, Black offers a meditation on collective life. This crucial novella is about how we might know who we are when our normal referents are muted, deleted, upended.

-Hannah Zeavin

Hannah Zeavin Congratulations on this latest book. In Tuesday or September or the End, you give us a chronicle that shows the impossibility of chronicling "The Event" as separate from a four- or four hundred- or thousand-year history.

Hannah Black I had a fantasy that I could write a book in a couple of months. I was on a residency on Fire Island and decided to spend the time writing a book really fast, the novel of 2020. I kept saying, "It's a fictionalized version of the first six months of 2020," as if you can fictionalize time itself. The temporality of writing was supposed to relate to the temporality of the book. Of course, that didn't happen; in the end it took over a year to write it. The form of the novel itself disciplined me.

Uprisings are the only time you ever learn anything new. Then you have months, or years, or decades of aftermath during which you have to keep drawing on the moment of rupture. Intellectual, social, and cultural leaps forward happen at these moments of maximum collectivity; and then we're just putting together the pieces, or singing praise songs, or wondering what exactly went down for a while after. I really wanted to be part of the attempt to try and understand what happened in 2020. The book is a contribution to that general effort.

HZ Yet, for a few reasons, it is not only a faithful chronicle of that time. First there are aliens; and in the world of the book, aliens seem to be deeply real. But so much like the real virus, or the uprisings, the aliens are an object of watching and witnessing at a distance.

HB It came to my attention at some point while I was working on the book that many people didn't want to watch or read works of fiction that in any way referenced the pandemic. People felt strongly that it was best that contemporary storytelling unfolded in a vague, parallel present where there were no masks, no social restrictions. So the aliens were partly a technique to try and inject some totally different therefore protective substance into a painful retelling.

Everyone knows what an alien invasion narrative is, in the same way that everyone knows what a love story is. They are sort of similar: you are new to each other and have something huge to learn. The aliens were also a pun on alienation. In the book they are alienation's opposite; they "erode the social base of fascism" and are "even further away from politics than love."

When I first read from the book in public, at a Segue reading that Kay Gabriel organized, I was so relieved by the alien parts. Whenever I started to worry that I was being pointlessly hurtful to my audience, there were the aliens. And that's what they do in the book too: they guarantee the possibility of something other than pain. But I'm still not sure if anyone actually wants to read a book about the first six months of 2020.

HZ Well, I did-

HB Okay, maybe a masochist. Or a sadomasochist.

HZ So, nearly everyone. Your book ends in that June where things felt more possible than they felt, say, even two months later. But in your book, the uprisings are successful: "all prisoners were officially released, medical debt was cancelled, rent was abolished." I read the book just as the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict came back. It feels clear that we only had the barest shadow of these wins, for but a minute.

HB I started writing in September 2020 when the feeling of the uprising was still present. It strikes me that no one ever believes in revolution less than the year after one almost happened. If you look at all the uprising-related legal cases that are currently percolating through the courts-Rittenhouse, of course, and Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman here in New York City-the aftermath has been so sad, and it's hard to access the memory of the ecstasy of witnessing.

When things started happening in New York, I was still in London, and I would fall asleep listening to the New York City police scanner and wake up to it still on. The cops were totally run ragged at that point. At moments it looked like imminent revolution. That might have been all along a fantasy; we can't know anything about what didn't happen, which is why the subjunctive is so seductive. It's hard to reconstruct the feeling of revolution's plausibility at the time. There's this part in Mating by Norman Rush where the protagonist says that in a situation in which there are several outcomes, usually the least interesting one will happen, and that was true for the uprising. My book is basically asking: What if something interesting could happen? I acknowledge that its mode of rebellion against facticity makes it an insane and minor book. For our insane and minor times.

In reality, the pacification was successful. It happened more through ideological rather than military instruments: Nancy Pelosi and the kente cloth, the influencers, the peaceful-protest obsessives, and so on.

HZ Quietly omnipresent throughout the book is the question of real and unreal, belief and disbelief, what is happening inside (an individual) and outside in a group. You write, "Shared illusion made new things real." Can you speak more about how you're thinking those oppositions?

HB My friend Max Fox showed me an email he wrote to a friend in 2020 about the intersubjectivity of the uprising, of the revolutionary crowd. As he observed, it releases you from not only the ghosts of the past politically, but from the problem of the family. You've been sprung from the trap of your past; you've been released into the collective, away from privatized individual pain. This gets missed when people talk about riots in terms of anger. Riots are about fun and joy and mutual appreciation.

The question of individual versus collective is super dialectical. Perhaps it's the dialectic. I've been trying and failing to write something recently about C. L. R. James, and there's a persistent strand in his work about how the individual is what introduces contingency into history, for better or worse. He's interested in leaders, but he's also interested in how leaders are only leaders insofar as they connect with the masses and channel popular will. The individual is an expression of social forces, an expression of history, and the individual is part of history and makes history. That's the wager of writing, I think; it's what makes writing interesting.

HZ And in the timeline when it went right, we have a culmination of the collective in a love story-that of Bird and Dog. What is the significance of love here, especially because it reprises the couple form just as you've successfully burned down so much?

HB A big part of the structure of the book, and the logic of its perverse attachment to the couple form, is the political difference between Bird and Dog. Bird is a left communist and Dog is a social democrat, a Keynesian. Bird is a woman and Dog is a man. Masculinity is more social-democratic/obsessional and femininity is more revolutionary/hysteric. At least, that's the case in the schema of the book, but I think in reality too. Women are generally more interested in total revolt because they're more interested in love.

You see Bird and Dog in dialogue about these things, and then they get separated by the pandemic. He goes off in search of social democracy, and his search is violently brought to a halt; he then falls in with a kind of abject mommy figure instead. That's the social democrats' problem: they can't break with the family. Bird goes off and has equally characteristic problems, i.e., she almost loses her mind. She can't go back to the family, although she tries, because her own family is a ruin. She literally has an infantile disorder (what Lenin said about left communists, famously), the infantile disorder: incest.

Bird and Dog's reunification at the end is maybe a somewhat sentimental rendering of the idea that in an actually revolutionary situation, you would have to fuse the two tendencies together. Both political tendencies would have to unify to produce a new society.

HZ How has the aftermath of these several Junes unfolded for you?

HB I feel like 2021 was a totally different texture. I'm really into astrology as a way of thinking about history as a history clock. The astrological signature of 2020 was the shock of the new; the astrological signature of 2021 was frustration and blockage. The year just ended, so maybe we have learned something about frustration, which is also a component of pleasure. But regarding May and June of 2020: anything that can happen once can happen again. That's what's still with us.

Tuesday or September or The End is available for purchase here.

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BOMB Magazine | Uprisings: Hannah Black Interviewed

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Hannah Black is an artist and writer at work in New York City. Black's latest book, Tuesday or September or the End (Capricious), is a novella written in the aftermath of the early months of the pandemic and the uprisings of summer 2020.

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Hannah Black’s Leftish Political Fable | Frieze

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Hannah Black’s Leftish Political Fable | Frieze