Sidebrow & Les Figues invite you to a two-part, two-city reading tour celebrating writers from two innovative West Coast presses.
F I R S T L E G : S A N F R A N C I S C O : N O V . 1 4
Featured at the San Francisco half of the series will be Paul Hoover, Vanessa Place, & Teresa Carmody, on behalf of Les Figues, and James Wagner & HL Hazuka, on behalf of Sidebrow.
Saturday, November 14, 7:30 pm
The Green Arcade
1680 Market St. (@ Gough)
San Francisco
S E C O N D L E G : L O S A N G E L E S : N O V . 2 1
Featured at the Los Angeles half of the series will be Paul Hoover & Harold Abramowitz, on behalf of Les Figues, and Amina Cain & Anna Joy Springer, on behalf of Sidebrow.
Saturday, November 21, 7:30 pm
Beyond Baroque
681 Venice Blvd.
Venice, California
+ + + + + +
R E A D E R B I O S
Paul Hoover is author of eleven books of poetry including Sonnet 56, Edge and Fold, Winter, Rehearsal in Black, Totem and Shadow: New & Selected Poems, Viridian, and The Novel: A Poem. He is editor of Postmodern American Poetry (Norton) and, with Maxine Chernoff, New American Writing. His collection of essays is Fables of Representation (U. of Michigan).
Vanessa Place is a writer, a lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues Press. She is author of Dies: A Sentence (Les Figues Press, 2006), La Medusa (Fiction Collective 2, 2008), and Notes on Conceptualisms, co-authored with Robert Fitterman (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009). Her nonfiction book, The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and Law is forthcoming from Other Press. Information As Material will be publishing her trilogy: Statement of Facts, Statement of the Case, and Argument. Statement of Facts will also be published in France by éditions è®e, as Exposé des Faits.
Teresa Carmody is the author of Requiem (Les Figues Press, 2005), and two chapbooks: Eye Hole Adore (PS Books, 2008), and Your Spiritual Suit of Armor by Katherine Anne (Woodland Editions, 2009). Other work has appeared in Drunken Boat, American Book Review, Bombay Gin, Fold, and more. She lives in Los Angeles and is co-director of Les Figues Press.
James Wagner is the author of Work Book (Nothing Moments, Los Angeles, 2007), a collection of short stories, and two collections of poetry: Trilce (Calamari Press, New York, 2006) and the false sun recordings (3rd bed, Providence, 2003). His poetry, fiction, and criticism have appeared in such places as Abraham Lincoln, American Poetry Review, Antennae, BlazeVOX, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Fascicle, Fence, 5_Trope, Jubilat, McSweeney’s, Mississippi Review, 6X6, and Verse. Current work appears in Sidebrow and is forthcoming in trnsfr.
HL Hazuka's work has appeared in Transfer 81, Cipactli, Fourteen Hills (a 2006 Pushcart nominee), Five Fingers Review, and So to Speak: a feminist journal of language and art, in which she was a contest winner selected by Eileen Myles.
Harold Abramowitz’s books and chapbooks include Not Blessed (forthcoming Les Figues), Sin is to Celebration (collaboration with Amanda Ackerman, House), Dear Dearly Departed (Palm), Sunday, or A Summer’s Day (PS), and Three Column Table (Insert). Harold co-edits the short-form literary press eohippus labs.
Amina Cain is author of I Go To Some Hollow (Les Figues). Her work appears in 3rd Bed, Denver Quarterly, La Petite Zine, Sidebrow, and Wreckage of Reason: An Anthology of Contemporary Xxperimental Prose by Women Writers. She lives in Los Angeles.
Anna Joy Springer has toured the U.S. and Europe as a singer for punk bands and with the legendary Sister Spit. Her first novel is The Vicious Red Relic, Love.
October 31, 2009
October 11, 2009
Suzanne Stein
Hole in Space
OMG!
2009
Paperback
$4.00
Is Suzanne Stein herself and/or Suzanne Stein’s Hole in Space a re-enactment-of-one of the bi-coastal, exterior communicative sculpture/art installation Hole-in-Space, created in 1980 by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz? And/or is Stein’s Hole in Space also a re-enactment-of-one of the recently resituated, interior installation of Hole-in-Space as produced by Stein’s employer, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)?
In Galloway and Rabinowitz’s original installations one witnessed the exciting interactivity of technology possible when cameras and audio, people and spaces, came together. People in New York could see people in Los Angeles and vice versa, and they could talk to each other in public, as if they were right in front of one another, not separated by 2500 miles. Today, we don’t think anything of it, with the wide dispersal of webcams, but in 1980 it was a stunning technological and artistic achievement, and it is interesting to watch the crowds from both cities try to understand what is actually happening.
Stein is interested in what is happening in a place where people are asking what is happening. She is interested in the intermediacy of space and the positioning of space, and what space—that seemingly unacknowledged agent of art events/poetry readings, etc—does to what is happening in the art itself, how it positions itself as the art. Her art is also interested in creating various meta-stages along the way.
In Stein’s deconstructed version of the 1980 event, she is both the conduit of the art and the art (the human version of the earlier plate glass windows). Stein, a native Los Angelese now living in the Bay, gave a talk in New York (at the Poetry Project) on November 17, 2008, and then gave the transcribed New York talk, textually similar, if very minimally altered by pacing, some pacing words (like “um” and “uh”), and a few other words, at Canessa Park in San Francisco on January 17, 2009, exactly two months later. Stein inverses the bi-coastal audiovisual presence of Galloway and Rabinowitz’s original communicative sculpture and becomes that bi-coastal audiovisual presence herself, along with her text. The audiences at the readings become the text, become the center of the art, as well. Stein, in fact, adds another wrinkle to the piece by including the questions of the audience from a completely different performative piece of hers that occurred years previously at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. So, we have echoes upon echoes, insertions of various space-related texts, site-specific, repurposed, talking to other spaces.
Is Stein, though, simply undoing the technology of today in this piece? If webcams and web-conferencing are ever present, why go through the arduous process of physically being on both coasts to give a talk referencing the easier immediacy of the 1980 art project? Is this talk a sideways critique on the emptiness of webcams and their lack of intimacy even though we see and hear one another quite well? Is this an investigation into false intimacies? What does Stein’s physical presence do that the plate glass windows of Galloway and Rabinowitz’s do not do, apart from the obvious?
There are various formats that Stein’s Hole in Space existed and exist in. There were the live events of the readings, the physical spaces of the Poetry Project and Canessa Park, with real, live humans, which are now gone. There is the recorded event of the Canessa Park reading, which is the repurposing of the New York reading and a new reading all-in-one. There is now, also, the transcribed version of both of the talks, which is this chapbook from OMG! But none are the same.
The narrative of the text is wandering, funny, hesitating, theoretical, filled with pauses and speech breaks and diversions, anxious, productively reproductive, self-aware, exuberant, fearless, open, challenging, unknowing, transcribed, and engaged. It is purposively improvisational, and it is descriptive of her thinking about the Hole-in-Space installation at SFMOMA, her larger artistic concerns, her talking about the very talk that she’s giving, how she would go about it, her various feelings related to each of these things, the CCA audience questions, and much more.
Stein states in the text that she did not like the “quite cold” atmosphere of CCA and rather enjoys the warmth of seeing the audience, as at the Poetry Project, and having a nearer experience, by acknowledging the presence of the audience. She further states that she wanted to “top” the space and to submit to the audience—two dueling considerations, it would seem, or a multi-zoned, hierarchically ranging experience.
Is it a matter of wanting different things to occur simultaneously? Is it all an elaborately schemed wish for direct connectivity? Is this text simply an account of the art that has already passed on? Is it detritus? Was the art in the rooms? Is it all a test of a system—the system of expectations at a poetry reading, of writer and reader and room behavior/s?
Stein especially exposes the questions in the piece—and these here, for that matter—as being freighted with situated conclusions, with the hope of answers, of solidity in them, and so one wonders about many things and the answers one comes up with show not so much truth but the psychology of the answerer. The questions that Stein lists in the piece from the CCA reading are actually not re-answered—they are simply treated as a list of questions—a flurry of unknowing and quest and freedom. They exist apart from their answers, the answers no longer given, the answers that were once given and then forgotten.
Stein ultimately desires to question our thinking, our preconceptions, our receptions, if sometimes fiercely, if sometimes gently. Perhaps the questioning ultimately is her answering. Perhaps the certainty of answers is what she is examining with such exquisite abandon. Perhaps our answers are just holes in space.
Hole in Space
OMG!
2009
Paperback
$4.00
Is Suzanne Stein herself and/or Suzanne Stein’s Hole in Space a re-enactment-of-one of the bi-coastal, exterior communicative sculpture/art installation Hole-in-Space, created in 1980 by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz? And/or is Stein’s Hole in Space also a re-enactment-of-one of the recently resituated, interior installation of Hole-in-Space as produced by Stein’s employer, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)?
In Galloway and Rabinowitz’s original installations one witnessed the exciting interactivity of technology possible when cameras and audio, people and spaces, came together. People in New York could see people in Los Angeles and vice versa, and they could talk to each other in public, as if they were right in front of one another, not separated by 2500 miles. Today, we don’t think anything of it, with the wide dispersal of webcams, but in 1980 it was a stunning technological and artistic achievement, and it is interesting to watch the crowds from both cities try to understand what is actually happening.
Stein is interested in what is happening in a place where people are asking what is happening. She is interested in the intermediacy of space and the positioning of space, and what space—that seemingly unacknowledged agent of art events/poetry readings, etc—does to what is happening in the art itself, how it positions itself as the art. Her art is also interested in creating various meta-stages along the way.
In Stein’s deconstructed version of the 1980 event, she is both the conduit of the art and the art (the human version of the earlier plate glass windows). Stein, a native Los Angelese now living in the Bay, gave a talk in New York (at the Poetry Project) on November 17, 2008, and then gave the transcribed New York talk, textually similar, if very minimally altered by pacing, some pacing words (like “um” and “uh”), and a few other words, at Canessa Park in San Francisco on January 17, 2009, exactly two months later. Stein inverses the bi-coastal audiovisual presence of Galloway and Rabinowitz’s original communicative sculpture and becomes that bi-coastal audiovisual presence herself, along with her text. The audiences at the readings become the text, become the center of the art, as well. Stein, in fact, adds another wrinkle to the piece by including the questions of the audience from a completely different performative piece of hers that occurred years previously at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. So, we have echoes upon echoes, insertions of various space-related texts, site-specific, repurposed, talking to other spaces.
Is Stein, though, simply undoing the technology of today in this piece? If webcams and web-conferencing are ever present, why go through the arduous process of physically being on both coasts to give a talk referencing the easier immediacy of the 1980 art project? Is this talk a sideways critique on the emptiness of webcams and their lack of intimacy even though we see and hear one another quite well? Is this an investigation into false intimacies? What does Stein’s physical presence do that the plate glass windows of Galloway and Rabinowitz’s do not do, apart from the obvious?
There are various formats that Stein’s Hole in Space existed and exist in. There were the live events of the readings, the physical spaces of the Poetry Project and Canessa Park, with real, live humans, which are now gone. There is the recorded event of the Canessa Park reading, which is the repurposing of the New York reading and a new reading all-in-one. There is now, also, the transcribed version of both of the talks, which is this chapbook from OMG! But none are the same.
The narrative of the text is wandering, funny, hesitating, theoretical, filled with pauses and speech breaks and diversions, anxious, productively reproductive, self-aware, exuberant, fearless, open, challenging, unknowing, transcribed, and engaged. It is purposively improvisational, and it is descriptive of her thinking about the Hole-in-Space installation at SFMOMA, her larger artistic concerns, her talking about the very talk that she’s giving, how she would go about it, her various feelings related to each of these things, the CCA audience questions, and much more.
Stein states in the text that she did not like the “quite cold” atmosphere of CCA and rather enjoys the warmth of seeing the audience, as at the Poetry Project, and having a nearer experience, by acknowledging the presence of the audience. She further states that she wanted to “top” the space and to submit to the audience—two dueling considerations, it would seem, or a multi-zoned, hierarchically ranging experience.
Is it a matter of wanting different things to occur simultaneously? Is it all an elaborately schemed wish for direct connectivity? Is this text simply an account of the art that has already passed on? Is it detritus? Was the art in the rooms? Is it all a test of a system—the system of expectations at a poetry reading, of writer and reader and room behavior/s?
Stein especially exposes the questions in the piece—and these here, for that matter—as being freighted with situated conclusions, with the hope of answers, of solidity in them, and so one wonders about many things and the answers one comes up with show not so much truth but the psychology of the answerer. The questions that Stein lists in the piece from the CCA reading are actually not re-answered—they are simply treated as a list of questions—a flurry of unknowing and quest and freedom. They exist apart from their answers, the answers no longer given, the answers that were once given and then forgotten.
Stein ultimately desires to question our thinking, our preconceptions, our receptions, if sometimes fiercely, if sometimes gently. Perhaps the questioning ultimately is her answering. Perhaps the certainty of answers is what she is examining with such exquisite abandon. Perhaps our answers are just holes in space.
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