Permutations

PERMUTATIONS
W/ DANIEL EATOCK & ROB GIAMPIETRO

Opening reception/
Energy Yes!
Thursday, October 15
7–9 PM

W/————
141 Division Street
New York NY 10002
www.jiminie.org/WITH

So we’ll each make a work and place them together. Or side-by-side. Or within one another. I’d like to make a new work with glass clipframes. I’ll use the words then, clipframes and permutations. Maybe your poems in my frames? I like this idea of an accident waiting to happen. What if it’s more specific to the space itself? Because it’s quite small, it’s only a storefront. The show’s not up for long, so consider the duration. Roughness, too. And compression. Yours are modular in the same way as mine. They’re permutations, visual rhymes of each other. That’s what gives it meaning. It should be quite an empty gallery when you look at first. Yes, the gaps are what will fill it.

Brian’s bookings

Brian Sholis has shared his essential list of fall events on the New York cultural scene as an iCal calendar. Download it, cancel your other plans, and get crackin’. Many thanks to Brian for so generously sharing the wealth. High on my list next week: the book launch for Words Without Pictures, an anthology of essays on contemporary photography edited by Alex Klein and organized by Charlotte Cotton. It’s at the New School’s Tischman Auditorium starting at 7:00pm and will include Cotton and Klein along with artist Matt Keegan, designer David Reinfurt, Aperture editor Denise Wolff, artist Fia Backström, independent curator and blogger Laurel Ptak, and more.

New Museum this weekend

I’ll be speaking on a panel at the New Museum this weekend as part of The Generational, “Younger Than Jesus.” It’s Saturday at 3:00pm and we’d love to see you there (details here). Joining me is n+1 editor Marco Roth and Zizek! filmmaker Astra Taylor (who gave a nice interview to n+1 here). Keeping us on track will be moderator and man-about-town Brian Sholis, who’ll be sure to have some thoughts of his own about generations, the universe, and everything. Brian’s website was redesigned and relaunched recently and is brimming with good ideas and clever turns-of-phrase.

Anthony Burrill in NYC

Above: Anthony Burrill’s “Design Drawing One.”

The wonderful Mr Anthony Burill, illustrator of Case Da Abitare and recently a featured artist at Colette, will be in town from the UK to entertain and delight us this Thursday night for our the last AIGA/NY Small Talk of the season. Tickets are still available, details and registration here.

Justin Ouellette at Design Remixed

Justin Ouellette’s Design Remixed talk tonight was full of good things—like any good mixtape maker his slides were all eclectic, but each one was essential. Interspersed with projects he’s proud of (like the lovely website for The Normative Music Company), he imparted a few guiding principles (“I think minimalism may precede maximalism—look at the caves of Lascaux”), and, much to my delight, showed a few things he likes that other people have made. One of them was this video by Jake Schreier for the band Francis and the Lights. Shot in a single take on a bare stage backdrop, it’s sort of like Alexander Sokurov meets Derek Jarman with music by Prince. (Or something like that.)

For more on Justin, check out this Q&A with the New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones.

Oulipo in NYC

I’ve been a fan of the Oulipo—a literary group founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais—since high school, so I was thrilled when Prem alerted me to the group’s reading at the New School a few weeks ago. Yale French Professor Jean-Jacques Poucel’s introduction stressed that the Oulipian model depended not only on constraints but on their verifiability:

Like any formal rule, a constraint must be verifiable, tested against the work’s “user’s manual,” while also evoking some notion of beauty, perhaps related to shape, economy or force — or, potentially, a surprising mixture of yet other features. As such, writing under constraint is not a virtual or imaginary game, but a set of concrete methods playfully developed in a real forum that values proven and intellectually satisfying results.

Readings included Ian Monk’s lipogrammatical bit of exotica, “Iris”; Anne F. Garréta’s lengthy but nonetheless fulfilling exegesis “On Bookshelves”; Hervé Le Tellier’s lovely, cryptic, “All our thoughts,”; Jacques Roubaud’s hilarious “Correspondence” from McSweeney’s 22; Harry Mathews’s hilarious “35 Variations On A Theme From Shakespeare”; and more. (For those new to the Oulipo, the works of Georges Perec and the Oulipo Compendium are both highly recommended.)

Update: Michael Silverblatt’s Bookworm podcast has a nearly identical program. Listen here.

Posts by Post at the New Museum

I’m excited to announce that my Posts by Post project has been included in the New Museum’s “Live Archive,” a publication room on the fifth floor of the new Generational show, Younger than Jesus, which opened with a spirited gala last week.

I’ll also be taking part in a panel discussion on 13 June as part of the Generational’s event series. Both the event series and the Live Archive are curated by my friend Brian Sholis. The Generational show is already drawing strong reviews, but let me add my own to the mix: I throughly enjoyed last week’s preview, and I’m eager to go back for a closer look. Highlights from the show: Mohamed Bourouissa, Liu Chuang, Haris Epaminonda, Cory Arcangel, Tauba Auerbach, Elad Lassry, and Katerina Seda’s social drawing project with her grandmother (shown on the back wall here). The Live Archive acts as a reading room and timeline of the last few decades, and it’s a great place to sit and browse some great projects published and/or distributed by Golden Age, Ooga Booga, Bökship, Arcangel, and more.

Mr Muxtape

Mr Muxtape himself, Justin Ouellette, will be joining us in April for AIGA/NY’s Design Remixed. Details here.