September 2016 / issue no. 103
With issue 103, Texte zur Kunst takes “poetry” as its theme, examining a category of language that appears central to the recent shift toward affect and personal experience in contemporary critical writing. Aiming to understand why the “artist-poet” (once a somewhat marginal identity) has become a newly vital site for the intersection of politics, affect, and digitality, we consider this figure’s voice (her sound and her currency) from various perspectives, pro and con, across generations, analyzing the consequences of her rising influence and what factors might have engendered her recent success. Now that everyone, in their particular individual experience, is empowered to speak, it is not entirely surprising that the institutional authority that once arbitrated objective judgment could appear insufficient—even romantic. But in this move from “rational” thought to what one feels, what is lost in turn?
With a scope that includes populist poetry, anarchist poetry, post-millennial net-poetry, the poetry of surplus-language and social media, the art historical poetic/poet-turned-object, and shades of fading Poesie (lyrical poetry), this issue, which has been conceived with artist and writer John Kelsey and Isabelle Graw, explores how the seeming immediacy of #poetry and the suggestion of a hyper-personal voice correlates with the current economic necessity to claim visibility.
Main section (in English and German):
Tim Griffin
“What is Poetry?”
Joshua Clover
“Objective Voices: Remarks on Subjectivity and Poetry”
Isabelle Graw
“The Poet’s Seduction: Six Theses on Marcel Broodthaers’s Contemporary Relevance”
Liz Kotz
“Word Pieces, Event Scores, Compositions”
Monika Rinck
“The Promise of Poetic Language”
Ada O’Higgins
“If you don’t like the reflection. Don’t look in the mirror. I don’t care.”
Chris Kraus x Ariana Reines
“The feelings I fail to capitalize, I fail: On Auto-fiction and Biography”
Felix Bernstein
“The Irreproachable Essay: On the Amazon Discourse of Hybrid Literature”
Daniela Seel
“Immediacy, I meet with skepticism: 3 Questions for Daniela Seel”
Micaela Durand
“Devil Shit”
Karolin Meunier
“Hearing Voices: On the Reading and Performance of Poetry”
Dena Yago
“Empire Poetry”
Reviews (partial listing):
David Joselit and Hanna Magauer
on the 9th Berlin Biennale (English / German)
Johannes Paul Raether
on Honey-Suckle Company’s “spiritus” (German)
Christine Mehring
on Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s “Fomalism and Historicity: Models and Methods in Twentieth-Century Art” (English)
Vojin Saša Vokadinović
on Eva Meyers’s “Legende Sein” (German)
Trevor Stark
on Marcel Broodthaers at the Museum of Modern Art, NY (English)
Eva Geulen
on Giorgio Agamben’s “The Use of Bodies (Homo Sacer IV.2)” (German)
Harry Burke
on Dean Blunt at Arcadia Missa, London (English)
Gunter Reski
on Victor Man at MD72, Berlin (German)
Stephanie LaCava
on Lukas Duwenhögger at Artists Space, NY (English)
Deanna Havas
on Marc Kokopeli at Lomex, NY (English)
Obituaries:
Tony Conrad (1940–2016) in the words of Diedrich Diederichsen and Jay Sanders (German / English)
Plus artists’ editions by:
Martha Rosler
Amy Sillman
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