ON reading

Moe's Books on Wednesday, reading for a release of ON: Contemporary Practice's second issue. The mag offers writers writing about other writers; the first issue was a genuine pleasure, and I'm sure the second will be too, thought-provoking and lovely.

Reflecting

[Shout out to kewzoo's flickr stream for the photo!]

Ten reflections on Impersonal Space with Dana Motherfucking Gioia:


1) Became much more personal/mantra-like than I expected. Isolated, walking those streets. This felt like failing (for the same reasons as below, a worry over a recreation of personal/reflective lyric space, rather than exploded public), though it was interesting to experience.

2) Walked the same route, a loop between the CCA Writing Center and the ReBar installation (was that the name of that group…?). Most electricity/static/energy when encountering groups.

3) Decided, based on availability, to read Gioia’s book of essays, rather than poems. This also seemed appropriate given that I bought the book at the talk he gave where I first had the idea to do this performance. Started with “Can Poetry Matter?” expecting to read several essays (business and poetry, and notes on the new formalism).

4) The text stretched out—the single essay took the entire hour.

5) I found the switch to prose pretty fascinating. People would walk by and the looks on their faces suggested that the normative syntax of the essay seemed even more disorienting than poetry would have. The mad wanderers jabber in poetry; prose as a jeremiad is somehow out of place. This was excellent and generative for me.

6) The content of the essay worked pretty well—the call for a more public role for poetry made public and somehow shamed by being screeched at the streets. At times I couldn’t help bursting into laughter at some of the ridiculous claims, but this didn’t feel out of place. Some knowing laughter as I approached groups.

7) Given the context of the event, impersonal space invading was drained of its aggression. Not sure if this is good or bad; made it easier, in some ways.

8) Decided, spur of the moment/while in performance, to ‘leaflet’ car windows with the ‘business card’ I printed, which said:

Dana Motherfucking Gioia
Poetry CEO

Google me, Barbara!
dana.gioia@aspeninstitute.org

It’d be interesting to know what the afterlives of those scraps of paper might be.

9) The ‘impersonal space’ element would work much better when there’s more street traffic. A kind of tunnel vision ensues, reading and walking simultaneously, making it hard to ‘aim,’ as it were. With more traffic, one could bumble around side to side and still be a personal space invader. But catching the locations of individuals or small groups in my peripheral vision was hard to do. This is interesting to me—the movement/text/intervention into public were somehow not able to coexist as a trio. I worry that the effect was a kind of recreation of the lyric space, and felt like a failing of the piece. I’d like to try a similar project on a larger scale, in a more public public—something where a group of people read a variety of essays on poetics while walking circuits around some place, perhaps Union Square or some other shopping district. The overlapping ideas/voices and intersections between individuals and their experiences of the texts could be great—a kind of disembodied seminar.

10) The book burning was great. It didn’t feel monosyllabically political or aggressive, as I had worried. In some ways the most purely aesthetic moment of the entire process. Meditative in an unexpected way, too, watching the pages curl. Someone compared the new artifact to birch bark.

All in all, a fascinating and thoughtful afternoon. My only complaint was that I would’ve liked to see/participate in more of the performances…

I will be performing as Dana Motherfucking Gioia @...

Small Press Traffic's Poet's Theater 2010. Come Sunday. Get schooled.

Further notes on the relationship(s) between art and money

A recent NYTimes profile of graffiti artist BNE contains this gem:

“I don’t see other graffiti writers as my competition anymore,” B.N.E. said. “Now I’m going up against the Tommy Hilfigers, Starbucks, Pepsi. You have these billion-dollar companies, and I’ve got to look at their logos every day. Why can’t I put mine up?”

The answer to his question could be multiple: because he puts his 'logo' up illegally (as a coworker groused not all that long ago), rather than buying space in our lives to display it, as Pepsi and Starbucks very lawfully do; because he occasionally puts 'BNE' on products that the BNE does not describe or in other ways attach to, as in the above picture; because his logo has no product it is selling; or because the ostensible product, 'BNE' himself, seems to resist being sold.

In all of the above cases, but particularly the last three, the relationship between the art object and capital is problematized. Generally, the buying public prefers, say, the Thomas Kincaide approach, wherein art exists only for and in tandem with their consumption (and even formally adopts the glow of dollars as its organizing principle—the famous 'painter of light' moniker as easily could be 'painter of capital'). Even 'high art,' spins inexorably toward consumability, as in Gabriel Orozco's move from margin to center, visible in the move from empty shoe boxes to painting with gold leaf.

I would posit that this is more the source of my coworker's discomfort than the legal/illegal issue. When art forces us to think about the relationship between the aesthetic and capital, rather than simply accepting it as an unspoken and unexamined law of the world, it makes us uncomfortable. Because in pointing up that particular relationship, the art object also forces us to become aware of the patterning of our own existence, the way that dollars script our movements as directly as they do "Thomas Kincaide's" factory of paintbrushes. This is also the answer to BNE's question about his own logo. Ask Gabriel, BNE, what happens to the artists at the margins—the centripetal logic of capital will begin with gallery shows just like the one the Times (an organ of centrism if it is anything) is using as its raison d' profile.

When your own logo is a billion-dollar brand though, will you have won?

For earlier notes on this question, see 2008's "On the definition of art"

Today

1913

Just got word that a piece of mine ("The The Weather Project") responding to Olafur Eliasson's 2003-2004 Tate Modern installation "The Weather Project" will be included in 2010's issue 4 of 1913: a journal of forms.

Very exciting. 1913 is one of the most beautiful journals in existence. It's an honor to be part of the project.

Meanwhile, at other blogspots...

With + Stand puts out the call for its much-anticipated Lisa Robertson issue.

Dig it.