Articles

On dakim's '34 Fragments'

One curious aspect of so-called Conceptualism is the form’s latent interplay of excess and insufficiency. If a given Conceptual work privileges dissolution, then what precisely is being dissolved? Is the text meant to serve as the deleterious excretion of a corrosive authorial edifice? Or is the authorial edifice also in on the decay, and so reified? And if dissolution is part of the game at all, then why is its published output so frequently beholden to relative girth and overload?

Messing with the beholder

Claudia Rankine's 'Citizen' and embedded Conceptualism

Reproduction of Adrian Piper's 'Calling Cards' (undated). http://www.spencerart.
Reproduction of Adrian Piper's 'Calling Cards' (undated), which Piper distributed when racially insensitive statements were made in her presence. Calling cards also addressed sexual harassment and other issues.

Dear Divya,

You conceived this forum in the midst of attacks on Conceptualism for being a pain machine wielded by and for white people. I wondered whether your goal was salvific: could Conceptualism’s reputation and potential be rescued, could its soil be aerated and fertilized, could histories, lineages, practices, and ideas not normally associated with the current branding of Conceptualism become part of our sense of it.

Angelo Suárez’s ‘Philippine English’ and the language of Conceptual writing

Pages from the opening chapter of 'Philippine English.' Courtesy J. Gordon Faylor.

I would like to consider Angelo V. Suárez’s Philippine English: A Novel (Gauss PDF, 2015) as a testing ground for the political work Conceptual writing can accomplish. This means historicizing before interpreting.

Stanisław Dróżdż

From Conceptual poem to concept-shape

In 1977 at the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw, the artist and poet Stanisław Dróżdż (1939–2009) exhibited an installation piece titled między (“between”). It consisted of a rectangular white box, roughly eleven feet tall, seventeen feet wide, and twenty-three feet long. Inside and out, this box was covered with the letters m, i, ę, d, z, and y, carefully distributed and arranged so that at no point could a viewer spell out the word między horizontally, vertically, or diagonally.