Vanessa Place

Vanessa Place autopsy report

“The play betrays the usual conversions: that monkeys become men, that men become gods, and that there is something to us other than the merely human.”

“Vanessa Place autopsy report” is an excerpt from the play Les Singes (The Monkeys) by Naomi Toth and Vanessa Place, set to a soundtrack by Estonian DJ Maria Minerva, and a video piece, “Traffic,” composed by Place. Les Singes was first performed in Silencio, David Lynch’s private club in Paris, a contemporary version of the eighteenth-century salon. Composed of three movements, Les Singes moves from carnival to monkey-mocking and -making to self-rendering to drinking to the poet’s demise.

Echo's echoes, or what to do with Vanessa Place

Above: a portion of Alexandre Cabanel’s ‘Echo,’ 1874, oil on canvas, 38 1/2 x 26 1/4" (97.8 x 66.7 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Echo repeats. Her practice, in eviscerating ecce, exposes the human. For her repetitions point to the obscene, that which we push off-scene, the refuse we refuse in order to make being — our human being — be. “Ergo, echo,” Vanessa Place has said of herself. But if, on the one hand, Echo adds to our artifacts, augmenting our understanding — Echo ergo sum — she does so through what she removes, withdraws, or lacks — Echo ergo subtract, so to speak. Echo’s repetitions become the paradoxical indicator of excess. 

I wrote about poetics of radical evil,[1] and there must be an art of the same kind. Art that is willing to be affirmatively evil, not immoral exactly, but as a work of malfeasance, not for the polemic or didactic turn, showing that certain things are bad, stupid, etc, that’s easy enough, and sadly it seems one is expected to say these things, which is another form of obscenity, but for a more primal acceptance. This too is our artefact, this too, too human.

Able and vexed

A review of Michael Gottlieb's 'What We Do'

This work on work, about work — the work poets do, the work they ought to do, the work they have to do on top of/instead of their “real” work — is by turns frustrating and frustrated.

                                         Poets
leap over death — was that COLERIDGE? If so,
did anyone see him do it and live?[1]

A fool for a lawyer or a client

On Christian Bök

Something like that. The point is that one should never defend oneself against one’s critics. One’s critics are always right. They may be knee-deep in it, but they are always right.

Witness Adrian Piper and Edgar Heap of Birds

Two lines taken

Edgar Heap of Birds, Native Hosts (2008)

In this commentary, I want to contrast two artists’ visual prosody. In previous commentaries I have paired an artist and a poet. In this case, both of the writers are artists and have practically never been called poets. Here I am interested in setting Adrian Piper and Hock-E-Aye-Vi Edgar Heap of Birds side by side, and as an heuristic, specifically, two pieces: Piper’s Concrete Infinity 6” Square (1968) and Heap of Birds’ Vacant (1995). My excuse for pairing these examples is not art- or literary-historical so much as it is guided by the motif of a “derelict void.”  

QED II, part two: Inchoate affinities

The second Q.E.D. II emphasized R. M. Schindler’s definition of “space architecture” as a way of thinking through questions of gender. Curator Kim Rosenfield associated the “radical flow” of the Schindler House with the way her work, and that of the panelists’, engages with these questions. Rosenfield chose Yedda Morrison and Vanessa Place as her fellow panelists, and Andrea Quaid moderated.

On drowning

A review of 'I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women'

A defining moment in the life cycle of any avant-garde movement is its declaration of aesthetic victory over the preceding team of textual innovators. These declarations of victory have proliferated over the twentieth century and into our own, ever since various modernist poets went to war against the previous century’s Romantic avant-garde’s elevation of ordinary vernaculars, “the real language of men” and “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, recollected in tranquility.”

Nada Gordon

'I Love Men,' the Flarf Poetry Festival at the Kelly Writers House, February 8, 2007

Nada Gordon at the Kelly Writers House, March 2013
Nada Gordon at the Kelly Writers House, March 2013

There are so many fantastic events catalogued on PennSound, but one that I find myself coming back to time and time again is the 2007 Flarf Poetry Festival at The Kelly Writers House. And I’m not the only one — PennSound Podcasts featured the event in an episode, and PoemTalk featured Sharon Mesmer's “I Accidentally Ate Some Chicken and Now I’m in Love with Harry Whittington” back in 2010.

Conceptualist Autopoiesis: A dialogue between Divya Victor (United States/India/Singapore), Swantje Lichtenstein (Germany), and Riccardo Boglione (Italy/Uruguay)

20 April 2013

The following is an occassional dialogue composed for this occassion. Divya Victor, Swantje Lichtenstein, and Riccardo Boglione may not have met apart from the artifice of this conversation.

Whose speech? Who speaks?

Vanessa Place's 'Miss Scarlett'

Protesters picket the movie 'Gone with the Wind'
Protesters picket the movie 'Gone with the Wind' (1940s), Scurlock Studio Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History

Over on the Poetry Foundation, The Harriet Blog has a write up of my recent post on Vanessa Place’s “White Out” of Gone with the Wind. The Harriet Blog also notes Place’s current retyping of the novel on Twitter, and Brian Reed’s discussion of Place’s “Miss Scarlett” (also an iteration of Gone with the Wind). In a recent talk (which you can watch here), I discussed the relationship between Place’s “White Out” and “Miss Scarlett.” I read “Miss Scarlett” somewhat differently from Reed, as I outline below.

In “Miss Scarlett,” Place appropriates Gone with the Wind in a more overtly discomforting way than in her “White Out”:

Dey’s fightin’ at Jonesboro, Miss Scarlett!

Dey say our gempmums is gittin’ beat.

Oh, Gawd, Miss Scarlett! Whut’ll happen ter

Maw an’ Poke? Oh, Gawd, Miss Scarlett! Whut’ll happen

ter us effen de Yankees gits hyah? Oh,

Gawd—Ah ain’ nebber seed him, Miss Scarlett.

No’m, he ain’ at de horsepittle.

Let’s note (with Brian Reed) that a poem like “Miss Scarlett” is written for our digital world of searchable copies. Because of these digital copies, readers can type a phrase into Google and quickly locate the source text: in this case, all the words spoken the maid Prissy in a section of Gone with the Wind.

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