U.N.F.O. Projects #5 + 6

LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) | 6522 Hollywood Blvd.

It is understood by this time that everything is the same except explanation and time, explanation and the time of the explanation and the time in the explanation.

Explanation as Composition explores the ways in which texts—as narratives—operate within and around a gallery space.  How does the narrative of an experience affect that experience, and how are narratives “curated”—publicly and privately?  Explanation as Composition begins with a social writing event in which invited writer-participants will collaboratively create six narrative experiences of the gallery: story, geography, ekphrasis, provenance, nature, and confession. These narratives will be turned into audio tours of the current exhibition space; gallery visitors can choose which audio tour they would like to experience, complete with an accompanying brochure.  Select narratives continue beyond the space of the gallery through a series of online texts, curated by UNFO, and published on the Les Figues Press blog.

30 January 2011 | 1-4 p.m. | Collaborative Social Writing Event: Explanation as Composition began with a social writing event.  Fifteen writers used materials in and around LACE to draft source material for the audio tours, premiering Thursday, March 3.  Writers included: Amanda Ackerman, Harold Abramowitz, Kate Durbin, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum and Teresa Carmody, Aimee Bender, Allison Carter, Mark Z. Danielewski, Carribean Fragoza, Veronica Gonzalez, Janice Lee, Harryette Mullen, Janet Sarbanes, Anna Joy Springer, and Stephen Van Dyck.

3 March – 17 April 2011 | Explanation as Composition Audio Tours: Come into LACE during regular gallery hours and experience the Explanation as Composition audio tours.  The audio tours will run alongside the LACE exhibition On the Line, curated by Cody Trepte and the ongoing exhibition Painted Over/Under, by Kim Schoenstadt.

Regular Gallery Hours:
Wednesday – Sunday, noon – 6pm
Thursday, noon – 9pm

Listen to the audio tours:
Introduction (to all six tours)
[a tour in] Story
[a tour in] Geography
[a tour in] Ekphrasis
[a tour in] Provenance
[a tour in] Nature
[a tour in] Confession

4 March – 17 April 2011: Explanation as Composition Online: Select narratives will leave the gallery space and continue on the Les Figues blog.  Here, you’ll find audio tour source material generated during the collaborative social writing day, plus new writing, solicited from other writers we admire.

More about Explanation as Composition and UNFO

Explanation as Composition is an inversion of Stein’s essay “Composition as Explanation.”  Or as Stein says, “This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those who describe it make of it, it makes a composition, it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen.”

UNFO: Unauthorized Narrative Freedom Organization.  For the purpose of this project, U.N.F.O. includes an unofficial and temporary coalition of the following five (5) writers:

Harold Abramowitz is a writer and editor from Los Angeles. His recent publications include Not Blessed (Les Figues Press), House on a Hill, Part 3 (Slash Pine Press), and House on a Hill, Part 1 (Insert Press, Parrot Series #2). Harold co-edits the short-form literary press eohippus labs (www.eohippuslabs.com <http://www.eohippuslabs.com> ).  He also writes and edits as part of the collaborative projects SAM OR SAMANTHA YAMS and UNFO.

Amanda Ackerman lives in Los Angeles where she writes and teaches.  She is co-editor of the press eohippus labs.  She is also a member of UNFO (The Unauthorized Narrative Freedom Organization) and writes as part of SAM OR SAMANTHA YAMS.  Her publications include three chapbooks: Sin is to Celebration (co-author, House Press), the recently-released The Seasons Cemented (Hex Presse), and the forthcoming I Fell in Love with a Monster Truck (Insert Press).  Her work can also be found in the current edition of Little Red Leaves and The Encyclopedia Project: Volume F-K.

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is the author of two novels, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award and winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her fiction has appeared in several magazines and anthologies, including the New Yorker, Tin House, the Georgia Review, and the Best American Short Stories 2004 and 2009. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Fellowship, she directs the MFA program in writing at the University of California, San Diego. She lives in Los Angeles and was recently named one of “20 Under 40” fiction writers by the New Yorker.

Teresa Carmody is a writer and co-founding director of Les Figues Press.  Her works include Requiem (Les Figues), Eye Hole Adore (PS Books) and Your Spiritual Suit of Armor by Katherine Anne (Woodland Editions). The chapbook I Can Feel is forthcoming (Insert Press). Her work appeared in the 2009 &Now Awards: Best of Innovative Writing, and in several literary journals, including: Mandorla, Bombay Gin, Druken Boat, Luvina, emohippus greeting cards 1-4 and more.  She was one of the organizers of the original Ladyfest in Olympia, Washington, and co-organizer of Feminaissance, a colloquium on women, experiments and writing at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles-based writer and performance artist. She is the author of the poetry collections The Ravenous Audience (Akashic Books) and, with Amaranth Borsuk, Excess Exhibit, forthcoming from ZG Press. She has written several chapbooks including Fragments Found in a 1937 Aviator’s Boot (Dancing Girl Press), FASHIONWHORE (Legacy Pictures), The Polished You, as part of Vanessa Place’s Factory Series (oodpress, 2010), and Kept Women, forthcoming from Insert Press. She is founding editor of the journal Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writings and Art About Lady Gaga <http://www.gagajournal.blogspot.com/> . Her fashion / text project, Prices Upon Request, can be viewed at ZG Press <http://zgpress.com/> ‘s website. She writes about celebrity style for Hollywood.com <http://www.hollywood.com/> .

October 16-December 19.  The Field.

The field is a lot. It wants its life to be honest and true and surprising. But how. The field doesn’t know.

Visitors: What, or who, is the field?  How do you read it?

Martin Glaz Serup was born in 1978 and has published six children’s books, most recently an illustrated story entitled When granddad was a postman (2010), two chapbook-essays, as well as five collections of poetry, the most recent one being the long poem The Traffic Is Unreal (2007), which was also published in Finland (2010). His forthcoming booklength poem The Field (2010) will be published in both USA and Denmark.  Serup is the former founding editor of the Nordic web-magazine for literary critism Litlive.dk and the literary journal Apparatur and managing editor of the poetry magazine Hvedekorn. He has been teaching creative writing at The University of Southern Denmark and at the writer’s school for children’s literature at The University of Aarhus and is now a ph.d.-student at the University of Copenhagen. In 2006 Serup received the Michael Strunge Prize for poetry and in 2008 he received a Gold medal from The University of Copenhagen for his dissertation of Poetry and Relational Aesthetics. He is blogging at www.kornkammer.blogspot.com.

Writer’s Statement: In the FIELD, I take something very well known (in Denmark, but, I would think, worldwide, more or less), and let it become estranged.  A place where you can project the text—so to speak—or your reading of it. A place without a fixed age, a fixed sex, a fixed social situation or context.  And then again…one of the effects of the FIELD, I think, is that it sort of vibrates in the reading: in the beginning it’s strange, then, because of the repetition and predictability, the FIELD disappears, and in glimpses it breaks back into the reading and destabilizes it just a bit.  The FIELD simply becomes a name, but the name of everybody, everybody’s autobiography. I see THE FIELD as the big contemporary novel. Also I think ‘the field’ is a significant space of, and is associated with, the shift from an industrial to an information society in the West. Until recently agriculture was by far the biggest industry in Denmark and nothing is so Danish as the green or yellow fields in the wind etc. The FIELD is an installation and a book.  In the original book (and partly in the translation), there are many references to traditional Danish songs too (lullabies, harvest songs, etc.); I also think the field is a mental landscape, a general (and visual) metaphor for THE PEOPLE.

Bathroom Reading seeks to orchestrate, illustrate, and literalize some of the kinds of language that adhere around public lavatories. From the authoritative institutional language of signage to the chance encounter of reading materials to gossip and graffiti.

Visitors: Follow the instructions in the bathroom.  Pay attention.  Where are you?

Craig Dworkin is the author, most recently, of Parse (Atelos, 2008) and The Perverse Library (Information As Material, 2010) and the editor of Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci (MIT, 2006), The Consequence of Innovation: 21st-Century Poetics (Roof Books, 2008), The Sound of Poetry/ The Poetry of Sound (with Marjorie Perloff, U. Chicago Press, 2009), and Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (with Kenneth Goldsmith, Northwestern U. P., forthcoming 2010). He teaches across the Great Salt Lake from the Spiral Jetty at the University of Utah.

Writer’s Statement: This project consists of three separate elements.  First, a placard in one of the restrooms identifies the toilet as a (gender neutral) replica of Marcel Duchamp’s infamous 1917 Fountain: an inverted urinal placed in a gallery and inscribed “R. Mutt.” Where Duchamp defamiliarized a quotidian piece of plumbing by placing it in a gallery, Bathroom Reading brings the gallery back to the natural habitat of the installed fixture.

Part of Duchamp’s project was to challenge notions of originality and authorship by insisting that the artist need not fabricate the artwork — selection and reframing were sufficient. In Duchamp’s wake, appropriation is now simply an unremarkable and ubiquitous technique for artists and writers. The limits of authorship and appropriation in the early twenty-first century will be challenged elsewhere, and will likely fall on the capaciousness of the proper name itself and what can be placed — with willful impropriety — under its sign. The question today is not so much what writers can claim and counter-sign as their own, but whether they can claim works in the name of another.

Second, a number of quotations which take on distinctly new meanings in a new context are distributed by chance in the bathroom. Most publications encountered in the lavatory are ephemera — gaudy post-card advertisements, old magazine, discarded newspapers — but here the works are “news that stays news” (to take Ezra Pound’s definition of poetry).

Third, the ready-made materials of the restroom are turned into what Friedrich Kittler would call an inscriptive relay (Aufschreibesystem) to register and publish the private language of the public restroom — intimate conversations, illicit interactions, anonymous graffiti. The public is encouraged to participate, and to wash their hands.

September 3-30.  NI UNA MAS.

Ni Una Mas, Not One More! is the slogan used by activists to protest the mass slaughter of women in Juarez.  But it is not just women who are being killed.  As Charles Bowden, author of Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields says, Juarez kills everyone.  And the situation in Juarez is itself just the exemplar of a wider social phenomenon in which individuals (the|’Sones) are isolated and pitted against the many of the collective (themOthers).  In so far as we deny our being a part of a collective we all contribute to the denegration and disenfranchisement of the many, especially the many of the poor.  This project pays homage to themOthers, naming some, and asking our government to intervene on their, and ultimately our behalf.

Christine Wertheim is author of  “+|’me’S-pace” (Les Figues Press). She has edited “Feminaissance,” and with Matias Viegener co-edited “Séance” and “Noulipo,” and is currently an editor for Tarpaulin Sky. Recent critical work is published in “X-tra,” “Cabinet,” and “Issues”; recent poetry in “Drunken Boat,” “Tarpaulin Sky” and “Veer.” Works-in-progress include a poetic suite on Mothers and an exercise in style, How to Conceive a Poem.” She is Chair of the MFA Writing Program at Cal Arts.

Writer’s Statement: Language is not just a medium of poetry.  It is also, as a tongue, one of the organs through which we process data and make sense of the world.  Are the puns that abound in language simply funny slips of the tongue, or are they indices of something more important?

August 27-September 19.  INSECT COUNTRY C.

This work is an extension of an ongoing investigation and tutelage under the auspices of the universe as lived by insects, mostly that of the ant variety. Works produced, conducted, performed, committed, or documented thus far include around 100 poems, several performances, a collaborative book defacement, an open poetry studio, two chapbooks, the naming of a non-collective, and numerous other plans. This current incarnation will consist of several ant poems painted or installed on the walls, along with two related performance events.

Sawako Nakayasu was born in Japan and has lived mostly in the US since the age of six. Her books include Texture Notes (Letter Machine Editions, 2010), Hurry Home Honey (Burning Deck, 2009), Nothing fictional but the accuracy or arrangement (she, (Quale Press, 2005), and So we have been given time  Or, (Verse Press, 2004). Books of translations include Time of Sky//Castles in the Air by Ayane Kawata (Litmus Press, 2010) and For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut by Takashi Hiraide (New Directions, 2008) which won the 2009 Best Translated Book Award from Three Percent. She has received fellowships from the NEA and PEN, and her own work has been translated into Japanese, Swedish, Arabic, Chinese, and Vietnamese. More information can be found here:
http://www.sawakonakayasu.net/

August 27-September 19.  SPAM.

Since mid-February this year, violence related to drug trafficking has increased at an exponential rate in northeast Mexico. The impact of this phenomenon on daily life cannot be ignored. The dominant explanation (since there is no official communication from the local government) is that recent executions and mass murders are the result of an old alliance between the Gulf Cartel and the Zeta’s Cartel coming to an abrupt end. In spoken and written texts, the rumor of imminent attacks spreads and frightens citizens. Every aspect of daily life is saturated with the same information. From mass media to social networks on the Internet. From certain politician’s speeches to casual small talk between strangers on the streets. Talk about the weather is outdated. Public language throughout the northeast cities doesn’t mention anything besides this conflict and points to the same consequence: fear. SPAM will try to spread the word and bear witness to what is actually happening on ground zero, and will eventually attempt to create dialogue beyond borders and, more so, beyond the Internet, which has proved itself a traditional Institution on account of the very little help it offers amidst these tribulations.

Marco Antonio Huerta is the author of three poetry collections: La semana milagrosa (Conarte, 2006), Golden Boy (Editorial Letras de Pasto Verde, 2009), and Hay un jardín (Tierra Adentro, 2009). His work has been published in several periodicals and anthologies both in  Mexico and Spain. Born in Tampico, Tamaulipas, Mexico in 1978, where he currently teaches English, Literature, and Creative Writing. Bachelor of Communication, MA in Teaching. Member of Colectivo Perros de Agua, a group of writers and artists who promote reading among young people.

In “I am wordle,” Johanna Drucker substitues hand-drawn, typographic rendering of randomly captured language (from news, radio, street signs, overheard conversation and other sources in the immediate environment) for the computational processing used by the text visualization software to create “word clouds.” Her piece poses an ironic critique of the notion of observer independent processing, on the one hand, but also suggests that the linguistic “self” is constituted as a subject of ambient language streams that pass through us.

Johanna Drucker is an artist and writer who is known for her experimental typographic books and her critical writings on visual poetry, typographic history, and digital aesthetics. She teaches in the Information Studies Department at UCLA.

Darkness is my attempt at a linguistic excision of all things human from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a biocentric reworking of the original text. Over the course of the residency, the text of Heart of Darkness will be painted on the gallery wall. Volunteers will then erase the text based on each word’s relationship to imperialism and the so-called natural world. By linguistically and formally isolating and spotlighting “wilderness” on the landscape of the wall, volunteers will explore the possibilities of a biocentric narrativity while participating in the construction of “nature.”

Writer and visual artist Yedda Morrison was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her books include Girl Scout Nation (Displaced Press, 2008) and Crop (Kelsey Street Press, 2003). Darkness (A Biocentric Reading of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) is forthcoming from Make Now Press in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in numerous anthologies and collections, most recently in The Book of Practical Pussies with artist Michelle Rollman, and Collective Task, edited by poet Robert Fitterman. Morrison has exhibited her visual work in the US and Canada, and is currently represented by Republic Gallery in Vancouver, BC. She lives in San Francisco. www.yeddamorrison.com

In late spring 2007 as an irrational exuberance and promise of financial fortune hung in the air, mailboxes were filled with generous and gracefully worded offers of credit. Just over two years later, in midsummer 2009, the shape of the financial environment changed radically and mailboxes still filled up with statements of credit. Something had to change, offer turned to obligation.

Mathew Timmons’ installation, CREDIT, is based on his book of the same name. Published by Blanc Press in Los Angeles, CREDIT is an 800-page, large format, full color, hardbound book—the longest, most expensive book publishable through the online service lulu.com. Divided into two sections, Part A: Credit–26 parts (a-z) and Part 2: Debit–10 parts (1-10), CREDIT is a highly revealing and emotional work chronicling a personal tale of credit. During the course of this residency, Timmons will be reading and recording CREDIT in its entirety. He will then use a (not very good) software program to turn these sound recordings into a new text, which will be released at the end of the residency as the paperback version of the book.

Mathew Timmons is General Director of General Projects in Los Angeles. His works include CREDIT (Blanc Press) an 800 page full color, large-format, hardbound book, and Lip Service, a chapbook published by Slack Buddha Press. The New Poetics from Les Figues Press, Sound Noise from Little Red Leaves, The Archanoids an album of solo and collaborative sound poetries from Pleonasm Music, and his micro-book collaboration with Marcus Civin, a particular vocabulary from P S Books, are forthcoming. His work may be found in various journals including P-Queue, Holy Beep!, Flim Forum, The Physical Poets, Out of Nothing, Mammut, Area Sneaks, Try, Or, Emohippus and Luvina. His art writing may be found in Artweek, Artillery, ArtSlant, The Magazine and X-TRA. He is the editor of Insert Press and co-curates Late Night Snack (with Harold Abramowitz). More information can be found here:
http://generalprojects.blogspot.com/

Taking its name from the historic collaborative writing marathons led by Bernadette Mayer and others in NYC during 1972-73, Unnatural Acts will explore the themes of hunger, war, and desire through public acts of collaboration.  Beginning with two days of installation and performance by Amina Cain and Jennifer Karmin, a group of ten writers/artists will gather on the third day to write together over the course of eight hours.  In a daily ritual inaugurated on the fourth day, the outline of a new person’s body will be traced onto the bodies of text until the exhibit closes on August 11th.

Visitors: Do you have a body?  What does it get filled with?  Who does it belong to?

Amina Cain is the author of the short story collection I Go To Some Hollow (Les Figues Press, 2009), and a forthcoming chapbook, Tramps Everywhere (Insert Press/PARROT SERIES).  A recording of her story “Attached to a Self” was included in the group show A Diamond in the Mud at Literaturhaus Basel in Switzerland in 2008; other work has appeared in publications such as 3rd Bed, Action Yes, Denver Quarterly, onedit, Sidebrow, and Wreckage of Reason: Xxperimental Prose by Women Writers.  She lives in Los Angeles.
http://aminacain.com/

Jennifer Karmin’s text-sound epic, Aaaaaaaaaaalice, was published by Flim Forum Press in 2010. She curates the Red Rover Series and is co-founder of the public art group Anti Gravity Surprise.  Her multidisciplinary projects have been presented across the U.S., Japan, and Kenya. A proud member of the Dusie Kollektiv, she is the author of the Dusie chapbook Evacuated: Disembodying Katrina. Walking Poem, a collaborative street project, is featured online at How2. In Chicago, Jennifer teaches creative writing to immigrants at Truman College and works as a Poet-in-Residence for the public schools.
http://aaaaaaaaaaalice.blogspot.com/

All Events Open to the Public:
July 21: Installation (12-5) and Hunger Texts Read in the Dark performance (5-5:30pm) by Amina Cain

July 22: Installation (12-5) and 4000 Words 4000 Dead street performance (5-6pm) by Jennifer Karmin

July 23: Unnatural Acts, 8 hours of collaborative writing (12-8pm).  Collaborators include: Harold Abramowitz, Tisa Bryant, Amina Cain, Teresa Carmody, Saehee Cho, K. Lorraine Graham, Jennifer Karmin, Laida Lertxundi, India Radfar, and Mark Wallace.

July 24: Artists’ Talk (2-3pm).  Collaborative Reading (4-6pm).  Readers include: Harold Abramowitz, Tisa Bryant, Amina Cain, Teresa Carmody, K. Lorraine Graham, Jennifer Karmin, Laida Lertxundi, India Radfar, and Mark Wallace.

Collaborators:

Harold Abramowitz‘s recent publications include Not Blessed (Les Figues Press) and A House on a Hill {A House on a Hill, Part One} (Insert Press).  Harold writes collaboratively as part of SAM OR SAMANTHA YAMS and UNFO, and co-edits the short-form literary press eohippus labs.

Tisa Bryant is author of Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), co-editor, with Ernest Hardy, of the anthology War Diaries (AIDS Project Los Angeles, 2010), co-editor of The Encyclopedia Project’s Encyclopedia Vol. 2 F-K, due out Fall 2010, and has work forthcoming in Animal Shelter 2 and Mixed Blood.  Her creative process demands she write longhand, one of her favorite words is ‘autochthonous,’ and she teaches in the MFA Writing Program at CalArts.

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). She lives in Los Angeles and is
co-director of Les Figues Press.

Saehee Cho holds a BA in Literature/Writing from The University of California, San Diego and an MFA in Writing from Calarts.  She has just completed her first collection of short stories tentatively titled Form, Composite.  Her work has been featured in Shrapnel and Ex Nihilo.

K. Lorraine Graham is the author of Terminal Humming (Edge Books). Visual work appeared in the 2008 Zaoem International Poetry Exhibition at the Minardschouwburg, Gent, Belgium and the Infusoria visual poetry exhibition in Brussels and Ghent, 2009.

Laida Lertxundi, (Bilbao, Spain) works on film making non-stories with non-actors that play with diegetic space and a particular sound and image syntax to create moments of downtime, of a time between events. Her work has been shown at MoMa, Lacma, Viennale and the New York Film Festival views of the Avant Garde among other places.

India Radfar is the author of four books of poetry: India Poem (Pir Press), the desire to meet with the beautiful (Tender Buttons Press), Breathe (Shivastan Publications) and most recently, Position & Relation (Station Hill/Barrytown Books) and one chapbook, 12 Poems That Were Never Written (Mind Made Books). She has lived in Los Angeles for the past 6 years.

Mark Wallace is the author and editor of more than fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and essays. Most recently he has published a collection of tales, Walking Dreams, and a book of poems, Felonies of Illusion.