Paul Buck, Library. A Suitable Case for Treatment

LIBRARY contains four essays and two interviews, with the pre-dominant concern of sexual questions: the subjects in art, film, and literature—the issues tied to Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse, Madonna’s sexual assault in Dangerous Game, Clunie Reid’s use of language, Richard Prince’s obsession with books, and Paul Mayersberg’s articulation about sex.

Riccardo Boglione, It is Foul Weather in Us All

Riccardo Boglione sent copies of Shakespeare’s The Tempest to twelve artists living in Europe and America, each copy in the language of the country of residence of the artists, asking them to leave the book outside to the weather for as long as they wanted. The pages from those mistreated volumes reconstruct a Frankensteinian version of the play. In an extension of the metaphor of the tempest, the author gathers a small collection of injured volumes, mimicking Prospero’s book. Simultaneously he produces a version of Shakespeare’s play that shakes notions of authority (who is the real author? The invited artists? The English Bard? Boglione? The translators? Bad weather? Time?) and aesthetics (the ‘work’ of rain, snow, wind, and sun transformed the text’s characteristics, giving it a sculptural dimension that obfuscates its literary one). At stake once again, the perpetual dualisms: objects and words, nature and culture, Old and New World.

Kreider & O’Leary, Field Poetics

Field Poetics explores five different places, each with a story to tell, each with a unique mode, form, and vocal register through which to tell it. The writing journeys through a sequence of Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘film images’, the multi-dimensional, interconnected space machine of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, maritime pockets on the edge of the city of Lisbon, a history of silence and surveillance in a derelict wing of the Cork City Gaol, and the transposition of a centuries-old landscape aesthetic through video, performance, and pop in fourteen locations across the Kansai region of Japan. Sometimes documentation, sometimes score, and sometimes the work of a poet and an architect engaging with these sites, Field Poetics spins, suspends, and extends a relation to place.

In THE GOOD READER series:

Michael Hampton, Beyond Walter Benjamin’s Paris & Kenneth Goldsmith’s New York

Why in our globalised twenty-first century the idea of a world capital city is passé. This essay examines the hypotheses promoted by Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Kenneth Goldsmith’s response Capital: New York, capital of the 20th century, that Paris was the unofficial world capital city of the twentieth century—a mantle inherited by New York—and declares the model unfit for purpose in the twenty-first. Despite an apparent recrudescence of the nation state, the capital city as power base looks increasingly like a tribal relic, as digital technology rewires humans and our shared fate is thrown into stark relief by one ecological disaster after another. With the inexorable spread of the urban, pockets of sustainable business practice and hipster lifestyles suggest global capitalism is mutating from the inside, lured by the promise of an acephalic future.

An attractive pamphlet:

 The Desire for Haiku

Emma Bolland, Helen Clarke, Louise Finney, Sharon Kivland, Debbie Michaels, Bernadette O’Toole, Rachel Smith

For two years we have been reading The Preparation of the Novel by Roland Barthes, the collection of the series of lectures he gave at the Collège de France between 1978 and 1980, completed shortly before his death in 1981. He declared his intention to write a novel, and in this pedagogical experiment, explores the trial of novel writing. This year we are reading his lectures on his favourite literary form, the haiku, a poem of seventeen syllables in three lines of five, seven, five, usually containing a seasonal reference.  He confronts the problem of how to pass from Notation (of the Present), ‘a short fragmented form’, to the Novel, ‘a long continuous form’. For Barthes, the haiku is an ‘exemplary form of the Notation of the Present’, ‘a minimal act of enunciation’ that ‘notes […] a tiny element of “real”, present, concomitant life’.Our haikus are Barthes’s haikus, or rather, our haikus are constructed only of his words, extracted from the chapter entitled ‘The Desire for Haiku’, one from (or even for) each page. It is an experiment in writing, if not a search for a form (for thatis given), drawn from our more or less monthly meetings during the academic year around a table to talk about writing, the trial of writing, one that may show the rhythm of our reading. 

A charming booklet:

Sharon Kivland, Le Bottier de la Jeunesse

The above is from a series collecting and reframing found images that casts a rather unsavoury, even sinister gaze on a representation of childhood.

MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE FROMhttp://lightsculpture.pagesperso-orange.fr/sharon/publications.html OR FROM ANAGRAMhttp://www.anagrambooks.com/

MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE will be at 

Miss Read, Haus der Kulteren der Welt, John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10,

10557 Berlin, from 4 to 6 May,

 and at OFF PRINT, Tate Modern, London, from 18 to 20 May