Edmonton’s Douglas Barbour has reviewed both How to Write and Fractal Economies on his Eclectic Ruckus blog.
The Poetry Foundation‘s Harriet blog has a quick mention of Local Colour (“the prettiest PDF you’ll look at all day”), but sadly demonstrates a lack of understanding about Canadian spelling…
My conceptual novel Local Colour (ntamo, 2008) is now available online at Craig Dworkin’s “eclipse” archive as a downloadable PDF.
Local Colour is a page-by-page interpretation of Paul Auster’s 72–page novella Ghosts. Ghosts concerns itself with Blue, a private detective hired by a mysterious character named White to transcribe the actions of Black, a denizen of Brooklyn Heights. As Blue reports his findings, the reader becomes more aware of the intricate relationship between Black and White, and a tactile awareness of the role of colour spreads through the narrative.
Local Colour removes the entirety of Auster’s text, leaving only chromatic words—proper nouns or not—spread across the page as dollops of paint on a palette. What remains is the written equivalent of ambient music—words which are meant to seen but not read. The colours, through repetition, build a suspense and crescendo which is loosened from traditional narrative into a more pixellated construction.
In addition to my reading at Gallery Vertigo (Vernon, BC), I will also be discussing conceptual writing in Jake Kennedy’s class at Okanagan College on January 28th…
I was at Calgary’s Grand Theatre Saturday night (to see Quebec City’s excellent L’Orchestre L’Homme-Orchestra perform the music of Tom Waits) where Eric Sauvé has two chandeliers installed in permanent exhibition. These pieces were commissioned in response to The New Gallery‘s exhibition of Sauvé’s Yield while i was Administrative Director of the gallery. I had forgotten about his work, but this seems a good opportunity to post my explanatory note written for his 2006 Yield exhibition:
**
From its origins in the medieval Catholic church, the chandelier has been a pointed marker of class & privilege. Through the 18th & 19th Centuries, with newer techniques of glass-making, the chandelier became increasingly aligned with the ruling & merchant classes, & continued to remain a classist signifier of wealth & power. The bourgeois decorated their houses—& found their way in the darkened rooms of their own homes—by the light of purchased, crafted, ornate, cut glass.
The chandelier, with the advent of electrical light, is increasingly an antiquated form of lighting, now even more associated with excess—even the very structure of classic chandeliers require reinforced (& higher) ceilings—necessitating specifically designed rooms to house these devices.
With Eric Sauvé’s Yield, we are no longer presented with a vision of privilege & safety; he has détourned the chandelier through a series of material & contextual interventions. Instead of finely cut glass shimmering safely above us, our heads are threatened by clusters of broken beer bottles emitting the vomitous-green glow of the evidence of an ideological bar-fight.
Hanging slightly too low for functionality & just above the height of injury, Yield disturbs the scale of the gallery space, making the viewer hideously aware of her own body; we move with a slight cringe through a space defined by the jagged edge of the proverbial glass-ceiling. Our own bodies betray our place as class interlopers—we do not belong around these structures. Their nauseous colouring belies the threatening fragility of emptied & shattered remains restructured as a momento mori—a reminder of the temporariness of celebration, uprising & insurrection.
These chandeliers reconfigure cultural & economic bottlenecks; for while the bottle’s necks themselves are intact, their bases are missing, no longer containing or restricting flow. The jagged edges of potential Molotov cocktails are hoisted to the ceiling in clusters hanging just beyond reach—suggesting both an ease of distribution, & a commemoration of the glassy-eyed stare of excess.
Sauvé gathers our refuse, our garbage—these broken beer bottles—& presents them as a threatening reminder of their previous function. Sauvé’s Yield is as much as a silent, illuminating symbol of the power of class as the traditional chandelier is. The reference here, however, is not to the hand that cut the fine crystal glass, but rather to the hand that gripped the bottle by the neck.
What once held ales, liquors — the very spirit of classist debauchery & celebration—are now raised to the ceiling (mimicking the bottles being raised in a toast) & hanged in a glorious, eerie revolt.
I’ll be reading at Vernon, BC’s GALLERY VERTIGO Friday January 28th at 7pm. Admission is free, and the event will be lovingly hosted by Jake Kennedy and kevin mcpherson eckhoff.
On display from 9 March – 4 June 2011
Niagara Artists Centre
354 St.Paul Street,
St. Catharines, ON, Canada
The Bird is the Word
derek beaulieu • bill bissett • Judith Copithorne • kevin mcpherson eckhoff • Travis Kirton • Steve McCaffery • a. rawlings • Laurel Woodcock •
Opening Reception Friday 11 March 7pm
Readings beginning at 8pm by derek beaulieu, bill bissett, a. rawlings & Steve McCaffrey & musical performance by Gary Barwin
This exhibit explores the territory where language and visual art intersect through the work of writers and artists. This common (play)ground has been covered by Concrete Poets, Cubists, Dadaists, Futurists, and Surrealists among others. Expanding semantic expression beyond the conventional structures of language includes the exploration of typography as imagery and engages philosophy, semiotics, and political and social commentary. The Bird is the Word will feature six poets and six visual artists from across Canada delving into the conceptual, spatial, and material presence of the written word. It showcases a multiplicity of media and disciplines including video projection, onsite installation, collage, sculpture, and micrography.
IV.
As for the novel’s words, they may themselves suggest many possible interpretations; they may, according to the preoccupations of each reader, accommodate all kinds of comment—psychological, psychiatric, religious or political—yet their indifference to these “potentialities” is apparent. Whereas the traditional text is constantly solicited, caught up, destroyed by these interpretations of the author’s, ceaselessly projected into an immaterial and unstable elsewhere, always more remote and blurred, the conceptual text remains, on the contrary, there. It is the commentaries that will be left elsewhere; in the face of this irrefutable presence, they will seem useless, superfluous, even improper.
Exhibit X in any detective story gives us, paradoxically, a clear image of this situation. The evidence gathered by the inspectors—an object left at the scene of the crime, a movement captured in a photograph, a sentence overheard by a witness—seem chiefly, at first, to require an explanation, to exist only in relation to their role in a context which overpowers them. And already the theories begin to take shape: the presiding magistrate attempts to establish a logical and presiding link between things; it appears that everything will be resolved in a banal bundle of causes and consequences, intentions and coincidences….
But the story begins to proliferate in a disturbing way: the witnesses contradict one another, the defendant offers several alibis, new evidence appears that had not been taken into account … And we keep going back to the recorded evidence: the exact position of a piece of furniture, the shape and frequency of a fingerprint, the word scribbled in a message. We have the mounting sense that nothing else is true. Though they may conceal a mystery, or betray it, these elements which make a mockery of systems have only one serious, obvious quality, which is to be there.
The same is true of the language around us. We had thought to control it by assigning it a meaning, and the entire art of the novel, in particular, seemed dedicated to this enterprise. But this was merely an illusory simplification; and far from becoming clearer and closer because of it, language has only, little by little, lost all its life. Since it is chiefly in its presence that the text’s reality resides, our task is now to create a literature which takes that presence into account.
Between January 7, 2011 and February 3, 2011 Calgary’s TRUCK Gallery is exhibiting PERMUTATIONS by Hyang Cho (Guelph, ON) and Roula Partheniou (Toronto (ON).
I was honoured that The TRUCK Gallery asked me to contribute to their explanatory leaflet for the exhibition:
**
Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel” describes a infinite honey-comb-like library filled an infinite number of books. Each book in Borges’s bibliophillic nightmare is minimally different from its neighbour—the library effectively contains all possible permutations of all possible books, obsessively arranged in a hive-like structure. Citizens in this phantasm are doomed to wander the library’s unending corridors in a vain search for meaning and enlightenment.
Artists—like Borges’s librarians—are now responsible for not only being arbiters of public taste (whereby their ouevre is built upon issues of selection) but also theorists of information consumption (whereby their ouevre is built upon matters of parsing).
Roula Partheniou uses Rubik’s Cubes to extend a discussion around logic, scale and language. Her 100 variations presents an exhaustive cataloguing of the arrangement of geometric objects in a way which points back to the oeuvre of Sol LeWitt. Using 6 × 6 × 4 stacks of the ubiquitous children’s toy reknowned for its combinatory nature, Partheniou playfully presents the permutation of these toys in a disorienting architectural display. Distanced from the viewer through photography, each piece becomes the 3-dimensional plan for an imposing Brutalist structure. The harsh lighting and shadows in Partheniou’s photography are illusionary. The shadows suggest an architecture built to reduce human involvement to mere ciphers within a beaucratic grid—but those shadows (much like the scale of the sculptures themselves) are structures built from our own terror. Partheniou has chosen to reject the Rubik’s Cube’s original chromatic array in favour of a minimalist scheme of white, black and a gun-metal gray. We are subjected to a playful uncertainty of scale, architecture and arrangement.
Much as Partheniou’s architectural structures impose a presence without entrance, Hyang Cho’s bookworks suggest a reading without reading. We expect our architecture to be transparent; that we can move from one space to another with the minimum amount of interferrence or trouble. We do not want to be overly aware of how our body occupies our living space. We expect the same from reading.
Cho’s bookworks trouble our literacy and our expectations around reading itself. The content of the book asserts itself in a way which makes reading (and writing) palpable. In each piece the narrative of the book-narrative asserts itself beyond the mechanics of the book-container into a new form. These new sculptural books allows the information to assert how it wants to be read, how it believes it is best received. No longer are the tales happy to be safely ensconced between covers, they want a new form, a form which places the text before the reader. Narratives are no longer clearly transmitted, they are locked, they struggle, they assert; they free themselves from the bounds of readerly expectation into some new.
Partheniou creates and photographs the barbicans and fortresses which loom over our dreams; each tower is constructed from the logic puzzles of our subconscious. Cho suggests that within each of these fortifications writhe our dream-narratives, struggling to assert their own shape.
No press is proud to announce the publication of ECHO by Vanessa Place
ECHO is an examination of the role of speech, response and gender is conceptual writing and how they are enacted in radical mimesis, the “very real representation of the Real.”
Published in a limited edition of 70 copies (35 of which are for sale) each of which is printed on fine paper, hand bound and includes a CD recording of Place performing “Echo.”
Copies are available for $15.00 each (including postage).
To order, please contact derek beaulieu.
derek beaulieu's blog 