chicago
TESTIMONY AND TESTIMONIUM
Lin Hixon and Matthew Goulish, co-founders of the performance collective “Every house has a door” will be discussing their work-in-progress, “Testimonium” in the Logan Arts Center, room 801 Tuesday, February 5, from 4:20-5:50 pm as special guests of Jennifer Scappettone’s Documentary Across the Genres course, through the support of the UChicago Arts Council (Please note [...]
SISYPHUS, OUTDONE.
Sisyphus, Outdone. Theatres of the Catastrophal, by Nathanaël, was launched into the world at the Corpse Space on Milwaukee Avenue last Wednesday evening, in the presence of the author and Daniel Borzutsky (my discussants in open conversation), and a sizeable yet intimate crowd. This is one of a score of books recently issued by Nathanaël, [...]
THE RIVER A CHECKOUT COUNTER
My mobile talk through Cathy Wilkes’s devastating installation “I Give you All My Money” at the Renaissance Society in Chicago on February 11, 2012, titled “The Nurse in the Marketplace.” With thanks to Wilkes for having generously shared her as-yet unpublished writings, which turn the languages of both criticism and commodification inside out.
IT CASTS A SHADOW
The book as thing in grayscale stands out against the images that presided over its pixels for the past twelvemonth. The anxiety of the thing—it’s not a book, Randy says, until it’s fixed and open to errancy….
WILL YOU EAT YOUR STOCKS AND BONDS?
Was a refrain of the magnificent 3-hour study in labor and the stars, digitality and dust, pre- and re-cession at the Defibrillator Gallery by Judd Morrissey and Mark Jeffery earlier this week.
FIRST FIGS
And the seasons begin to cycle as each day brings another spur for vulnerability, another adieu and another resolution to self vis-a-vis composer Paul of the bidirectionality of time in circles.
EGGS, BASKETS, CLAWS, LAURELS
On the lovely Jana Vandergoot’s counsel, reading George Hersey’s The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture, and now much better equipped to see the melee encased in so-called classical building conventions: eggs and doveclaws in moldings, in Doric columns marches of nude warriors, or in colossal figures, columns; in Ionic volutes locks of hair, below their [...]
ANNUM/HUMILITY/BOOM
In the face of vertiginous green borrowed from the eye of the precious twin (“we’re switching memories” as a matter of fact) in the costly sincere triangulous plaza alive, incommensurate kimidori, shinryoku, pattern wild & alive even in our bodies around this table, this weave of discourse genial and unakin against stultifying digits, discussing the [...]
MIES/CHRYSALIS
In the new wing of MACRO, Mies Van der Rohe’s Illinois house of modernism blanched of the paraphernalia of habitation, mechanically reproduced, becomes an aviary for butterflies laying claim to gaudery of flora faux and non, including the writer’s smoking jacket, chrysalis. “Here the purity of the cage is undisturbed. Neither the steel columns from [...]
MI ‘MERICA (XENOGLOSSIA)
“Buy images!” The call come tunneling down in uncanny clarity out of Giovanni Pascoli’s tri (& more) lingual 1904 poemetto, “Italy,” otherwise riddled with languages’ half-meetings, in space and in time: “Images,” too-meta translation of “figure,” the figurines in gesso made and hawked cheap by Tuscan migrants in Amsterdam, New York, Buenos Aires out of [...]
LURE
The experience of this quadrant of hilltop begins with all-over incredulity punctured by moments of cognitive synesthesia, Bulb after Bulb. Disorientation of both ratio and sense that resists being placed definitively within or without the person. In talk it is shared—tamed? Christopher Celenza suggests in our first chat that the source text of translation is [...]
RAPTERY
After rapturous reading of “hiccups,” a new talk piece by David Antin, back in the land where time is elastic, where a stranger hailing from several places at once will walk with one for six hours through jetlag, errands and outlooks, having allocated no such appointment. Having abandoned her vespers in Arabic, volunteering down to [...]