Before it closes, anyone around or passing through New York City should check out Oliver Ressler’s and Gregory Sholette’s exhibit at the Austrian Cultural Forum, “It's the Political Economy, Stupid.” Here is how the curators describe the show:
Today, the very idea of the modern nation state is in jeopardy as the deterritorialized flow of finance capital melts down all that was once solid into raw material for market speculation. This exhibition represents one response to this crisis. It derives its title from candidate Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid,” modified here by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.
It’s the Political Economy, Stupid brings together an international group of artists who use their work to critique 30 years of neoliberal globalization, privatization, flexible work schedules, deregulated markets, all of which have driven most of the world’s governments to wholly or partly abandon their previous role as arbitrators between the security of the majority and the profiteering of the corporate sector.
Nothing can quite prepare readers for The Book of a Thousand Eyes, just out from Omnidawn. This is Hejinian’s largest scale book – yet it reflects the kind of intimacy – and affective and affecting charm – I associate with all her work. One key frame of the book is dreams – and there are many poems that have the quality of dreams – whether made-up or created in sleep – whose to say the difference? – Hejinian seems to say over and again. She also alludes to the Arabian Nights, as she has done before – tales that lead to more tales without closure. There is a great range of thinking in these poems; many topics are taken up, poetics figures significantly. The book is as much a primer in the possibilities of the imagination as an enactment of the imagination. Nonetheless, the poems are tightly formed, impeccably constructed, with a tonal precision and continuity that remains one of Hejinian’s hallmarks. I will be reading this book for years to come.
Working with our PennSound audio files, Jhave Johnston has created a prototype mashup machine that enables on overlay of poets’ sounds, with an option to turn on WEAVE, which senses silence (e.g. between lines or stanzas in a performance) and automatically intercuts from one short file segment to another, creating a flow of shifting voices. “I always figured,” says Charles Bernstein, my co-director at PennSound, “that once we had a substantial archive of sound files, the next phase would be for people to use them in novel ways.” “Reminds me,” says Michael S. Hennessey, PennSound’s editor, “of one of my favorite things to do with the site before we switched to the current streaming codec, which doesn't allow for simultaneous play: pull up a few author pages — best of all Christian Bök — and start layering tracks over his cyborg opera beatboxing.” Jhave adds: “My motivation for building it is similar to Michael's: a joy in listening to things overlap.”
Rob Fitterman's 'Holocaust Museum,' Heimrad Backer's 'Transcript,' Christian Boltanski's 'To be a Jew in Paris in 1939,' and the documentary poetics of Raul Hilberg
Robert Fitterman's Holocaust Museum (Veer Books, 2011) is composed of sets of captions from photographs in The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The absence of the images has a powerful effect, evoking the erasure of a people and a culture through the Systematic Extermination Process. Over the course of Fitterman's book, lists become litanies, with intricate and horrific repetitions rippling through what simultaneously seems like dryasdust clippings. Fitterman's work is exemplary in its apparently inexpressive, understated approach. Page after page of catalog entries without photographs, names without faces, deeds without doers creates a work more chilling than the original installation, from which the captions are derived. Loss – erasure and absence – is made palpable by the marked suppression of the missing photographs.
The problems with representations "after Auschwitz" are well-rehearsed, hovering, like an angry hornet, around the crisis for representation posed by this particular series of catastrophic events and processes. Images, no matter how disfigured, mask the unseen, unspoken, and inexplicable but always -- here's the hardest part -- imaginable, reality: imaginable in consequence of being real. Imaginable yet ungraspable. Imaginable yet apparently out images' reach. Imaginable because we have no choice but to imagine, no matter how resistant our imaginations may be to the task. Imgined, in other words, through the not that Adorno called negative dialectics.
An appropriated form for spectacular action
flo6x8 in 'It's the Political Economy, Stupid'
Before it closes, anyone around or passing through New York City should check out Oliver Ressler’s and Gregory Sholette’s exhibit at the Austrian Cultural Forum, “It's the Political Economy, Stupid.” Here is how the curators describe the show:
Today, the very idea of the modern nation state is in jeopardy as the deterritorialized flow of finance capital melts down all that was once solid into raw material for market speculation. This exhibition represents one response to this crisis. It derives its title from candidate Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid,” modified here by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.
It’s the Political Economy, Stupid brings together an international group of artists who use their work to critique 30 years of neoliberal globalization, privatization, flexible work schedules, deregulated markets, all of which have driven most of the world’s governments to wholly or partly abandon their previous role as arbitrators between the security of the majority and the profiteering of the corporate sector.
Stefan Mönke, "Charles Bernstein’s Response to the Postmodern Condition"
M.A. dissertation, Univeristy of Coimbra (Portugal), May 2011
pdf of dissertation
Lyn Hejinian's The Book of a Thousand Eyes
Nothing can quite prepare readers for The Book of a Thousand Eyes, just out from Omnidawn. This is Hejinian’s largest scale book – yet it reflects the kind of intimacy – and affective and affecting charm – I associate with all her work. One key frame of the book is dreams – and there are many poems that have the quality of dreams – whether made-up or created in sleep – whose to say the difference? – Hejinian seems to say over and again. She also alludes to the Arabian Nights, as she has done before – tales that lead to more tales without closure. There is a great range of thinking in these poems; many topics are taken up, poetics figures significantly. The book is as much a primer in the possibilities of the imagination as an enactment of the imagination. Nonetheless, the poems are tightly formed, impeccably constructed, with a tonal precision and continuity that remains one of Hejinian’s hallmarks. I will be reading this book for years to come.
Jhave Johnston's PennSound mashup with WEAVE
Working with our PennSound audio files, Jhave Johnston has created a prototype mashup machine that enables on overlay of poets’ sounds, with an option to turn on WEAVE, which senses silence (e.g. between lines or stanzas in a performance) and automatically intercuts from one short file segment to another, creating a flow of shifting voices. “I always figured,” says Charles Bernstein, my co-director at PennSound, “that once we had a substantial archive of sound files, the next phase would be for people to use them in novel ways.” “Reminds me,” says Michael S. Hennessey, PennSound’s editor, “of one of my favorite things to do with the site before we switched to the current streaming codec, which doesn't allow for simultaneous play: pull up a few author pages — best of all Christian Bök — and start layering tracks over his cyborg opera beatboxing.” Jhave adds: “My motivation for building it is similar to Michael's: a joy in listening to things overlap.”
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Rob Fitterman's 'Holocaust Museum,' Heimrad Backer's 'Transcript,' Christian Boltanski's 'To be a Jew in Paris in 1939,' and the documentary poetics of Raul Hilberg
The problems with representations "after Auschwitz" are well-rehearsed, hovering, like an angry hornet, around the crisis for representation posed by this particular series of catastrophic events and processes. Images, no matter how disfigured, mask the unseen, unspoken, and inexplicable but always -- here's the hardest part -- imaginable, reality: imaginable in consequence of being real. Imaginable yet ungraspable. Imaginable yet apparently out images' reach. Imaginable because we have no choice but to imagine, no matter how resistant our imaginations may be to the task. Imgined, in other words, through the not that Adorno called negative dialectics.