A writer, researcher and curator born in Kowloon, Hong Kong, and spent her formative years in and around Edmonton on Treaty 6 Territory. Her writing has been published and commissioned by national and international publications, galleries, museums, festivals, and journals since 2007. Her multifarious curatorial projects have spanned exhibitions, cinematic and live presentations, as well as discursive events across Canada and abroad. “Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being” is her first book.
Maria Fusco’s most recent book is With A Bao A Qu Reading When Attitudes Become Form (Los Angeles / Vancouver: New Documents, 2013), a collection of short stories The Mechanical Copula (Berlin / New York: Sternberg Press, 2011), published in French as Copulation Mécanique (Paris: éditions ère, 2012). She is also the founder/editorial director of The Happy Hypocrite a semi-annual journal for and about experimental art writing and is currently a Chancellor’s Fellow at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh and was Director of Art Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Eileen Myles, a poet best known for merging avant-garde poetics with working-class vernacular has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces since 1974. The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art was awarded the Andy Warhol/Creative Capital art writers’ grant in 2007. The Foundation for Contemporary Art awarded her a grant for poetry in 2014; Her Inferno (a poet’s novel) is now available (in her own voice) on iTunes; in 2012 she received a Guggenheim fellowship. “Street Retreat,” her essay about living on the streets of New York City with a group of Buddhists and homeless activists will be included in this year’s Whitney Biennial.
Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and critic. Her most recent story collection, Someday This Will Be Funny, her fourth, was published in May 2011. Her fifth novel, American Genius, A Comedy, was published by Soft Skull Press. Other novels are Haunted Houses, Motion Sickness, Cast In Doubt, and No Lease On Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has written three nonfiction books, including The Velvet Years: Warhols Factory 1965-67. In April 2014, her second essay collection What Would Lynne Tillman Do? will be published by Richard Nash’s Red Lemonade Press. Currently, she is working on a novel, Men And Apparitions (an excerpt to be part of the Whitney Biennial 2014).
Jacob Wren makes literature, performances and exhibitions. His books include: Unrehearsed Beauty, Families Are Formed Through Copulation, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed and Polyamorous Love Song, a finalist for the 2013 Fence Modern Prize in Prose. As co-artistic director of Montreal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART he has co-created the performances: En français comme en anglais, it’s easy to criticize, the HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY series including Individualism Was A Mistake and The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information and Every Song I’ve Ever Written. He travels internationally with alarming frequency and frequently writes about contemporary art.
There are reasons for looking and feeling and thinking about things that are invisible: A two day event on New Narratives in Art Writing.
MARIA FUSCO, EILEEN MYLES, LYNNE TILLMAN, JACOB WREN
April 4–April 5, 2014
Building on the West Coast literary movement known as New Narrative, There are reasons for looking and feeling and thinking about things that are invisible brings together four writers at the edge of literary and contemporary art writing in the voices of Maria Fusco, Eileen Myles, Lynne Tillman, and Jacob Wren.
As a literary genre, New Narrative addresses the structure of narrative by experimenting in fragmentation, poetic strategies, and autobiographical allusions. As a formal conceit, New Narrative is an embodied form of writing, a type of creative non-fiction that relies on presence as much as memory.
As a weekend of readings and responses in Vancouver, British Columbia, There are reasons for looking and feeling and thinking about things that are invisible aims to re-contextualize the field of contemporary art writing as both a form and a labour of creative production. Developing alongside poetry, literary, and art histories, the field of art writing is in itself a spectrum of craft and praxis to be discussed and reflected upon critically.
Schedule:
April 4, 7–9 pm, Eileen Myles and Jacob Wren
April 5, 2–5 pm, Lynne Tillman and Maria Fusco
At the Western Front Grand Luxe Hall
Doors will open half an hour prior. First come first serve seating. No latecomers.
Co-presented by 221A, Artspeak, and Western Front. Organized by Amy Fung.
The title for this event is a line from an Eileen Myles text on Martha Diamond.