Column

Karin Cope is a poet, sailor, photographer, videographer, writer, activist, blogger and Associate Professor at NSCAD University.

Anna Heywood Jones is currently completing an MFA degree at NSCAD University, involving material explorations into the complex relationships between human and botanical spheres.

Ryan Josey is an artist, writer and curator from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. His work focuses on issues in contemporary queer theory and contemporary Canadian culture.

What is a poem?  
Is it always and only made up of words?  
Or might it sometimes be a wordless thing, a space or gesture that, nevertheless, is not mute?  
Might a poem have not simply rhythm and extension, but spatially speaking, dimension?  
What if we were to identify a set of gestures and textures, specific interleavings of observation and experience, certain concrete traces of space and of the passage of time as poems as well?

Signal Jamming  
Suppose I were to describe to you a room where each corner holds a stone and a jar of water. Painted in gouache in the corner above each stone are certain coloured forms, which spell out, if anyone knows the signage of nautical flags, the names of nearby places: harbours, towns, waterfronts,  
spaces where the stones and the water in the jars have been gathered, and where events known only to the person who placed the stones, and certain select others, took place. Each stone is also painted, using a short series of nautical flags in gouache, with a verb that corresponds to the author’s memories or experiences of that particular place. After two weeks, each jar of water is used to wash its nearby stone, to erase the traces flagged there. The stones are then returned to their various watercourses and harbours. The jars are repurposed. The whole work disappears, save as memory traces. Is this poetry? And if it is not, why not?

This 2014 work, entitled _Catch; Cruise; Play; Pray_, Ryan Josey’s tongue-in-cheek queering of Elizabeth Gilbert’s infamous _Eat Love Pray_, first startled me into thinking about what I want to call Dimensional Poetry. I had been interested in what I called Visible Poetry – now a long-running experiment with the construction of poems from a mixture of photography, video and words – but with Josey’s instigation, I began to imagine poetry as something that might step off the page or screen and engage other disciplines than just these, particularly its nearest sibling and sometimes twin, music.

Indeed, in his artist statement for _Catch; Cruise; Play; Pray_, Josey argued that poems classically understood might be reconceived as “installations on the page;” accordingly, we might imagine certain installations as poems. To be sure, installations frequently demand of their viewers something like the concentration, slowness and tolerance for inaccessibility and structured silence that contemporary written poetry tends to demand of its readers. Perhaps more to the point, Josey suggests that every poem requires acts of translation, even those poems articulated in ostensibly familiar languages. As he puts it, “translation…is \[always\] a wall with two  
sides.” Both author/maker and reader/viewer bring their experiences and understandings of connotation to any given work, but if it is poetry, no one can hope for seamless passage through its thicket of signal and association. As Josey writes of his own experiment with the coding of signal flags: “It draws a line in the sand. You can cross it, but it doesn’t let you in that easily.” In other words, no poetry without (over)investment on all sides. As Josey says, “You give me time; I’ll give you poetry.”

Resistances  
Now consider another work, this time a textile by Anna Heywood Jones, hand woven with wool and silk and dyed with colour extracted from four plants common to Nova Scotia – Goldenrod, American Elm, Staghorn Sumac and Hammered Shield Lichen – all harvested from the former St. Joseph’s Church site on Gottingen Street, Halifax, in 2015, not long before a new condo construction project broke earth there. Hung from the gallery ceiling in a three-metre drop, the half-metre-wide weaving features vertical bands of subtle colour: greens, gold, creams and charcoals. The centre of the work, where those vertical bands of colour have been largely blanked out, seems at once luminous and empty. Given enough time, you may begin to see that this space of loss – the result of a resist selectively applied to the fibres in the dying process – is also a space for contemplation.

The title of the piece is long and poetic in form and tells us much about the relationships between construction, neglect and several of the life forms from which Heywood Jones made her dyes:

\_Filling spaces of temporary neglect,  
they follow the path of disturbance,  
rebuilding that which has been dismantled.  
Weeds of subversion.\_

\_Each speck of dirt scraped away,  
not a seed left behind.  
Such small deaths.  
Significant in their insignificance.\_

In her artist statement, Heywood Jones offers a brief history and explanation of the significance of a work that honours and emerges from the destruction of various forms of vegetal life:

\_During the period between the demolition of St. Joseph’s Church and the excavation of the site (2009–2015), plant life inserted itself actively within the space. The site became host to a variety of early successional, native, naturalized and invasive species, including the escaped babies of ornamental plants and trees.

These common “spaces of temporary neglect” speak of our current and historical circumstances of globalization, colonization and migration, as well as of the continual reverberations of capitalism – as vegetal life inevitably follows the path of human action, revitalizing spaces of disturbance and disregard.

The development of a single lot is a banal occurrence in our cities, an everyday thing. And yet, as I watched the excavators dig deep into the ground I was struck by the fact that these actions were revealing geological formations that have not seen light for thousands or perhaps millions of years. Each speck of dirt removed, all vestiges of vegetal life gone. Therefore, this work is in a sense a monument, or memorial, for the insignificant vegetal beings that share our urban spaces. And for the profound yet everyday interventions which humans enact upon the world. As the body of each plant is literally etched into the cloth, a textile impression of its being remains.\_

I ask you, are not such eloquent “textile impressions” resistances poetry?

Writer

Documentation

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Multi-disciplinary

Poetry

Installation

Memory

This article discusses the idea of considering poetry beyond its traditional textual constraints. Cope profiles two works: Catch; Cruise; Play; Pray by Ryan Josey; and Filling Spaces of Temporary Neglect by Anna Heywood Jones and discusses how they can be considered Dimensional Poetry which considers poems constructed in a diversity of media. 

On Writing: Given Time: Notes on Dimensional Poetry

**Richard William Hill** is an independent writer and curator, and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Studies at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver. First debted in _FUSE_ Magazine, Close Readings aims to offer honest assessments of exhibitions of contemporary Indigenous art.

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Criticism

Indigenous

Collections

This article reviews the travelling exhibition 7 Professional Native Indian Artists Inc. Hill’s discussion of the catalogue essays demonstrates that the show’s goal was to reify the accomplishments of PNAI and to use their work as an impetus to continue the current resurgence of interest in and production of indigenous art. Hill argues that this narrative is despite the substandard merit of the group’s work and lacks consideration of the practices and styles they borrowed from then-contemporary mainstream 1970s art 

Close Readings: 7: Professional Native Indian Artists Inc. Winnipeg Art Gallery, May 9 – Aug. 31, 2014 & McMichael Canadian Art Collection, May 10 – Sept. 7, 2015

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Documentary

Storytelling

Narrative

Representation

This article discusses multiple initially invisible dimensions a document elucidates for its subject. MIikkola briefly explores the idea of time travel implicit in documentation, the elevation of the document’s subject to icon through virtue of its documentation and the creation of alternate realities. 

Artefact: Relating To Things

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Art Museum Sep 1

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MOCA Toronto Sept

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Walter Phillips

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Editorial

As viewers, we often experience artworks through documents: by reading art magazines, by studying art history or by browsing the Internet. Websites like _Contemporary Art Daily_, for example, allow us to scroll through endless feeds of installation shots from selected galleries all over the world. Similarly, artist monographs allow writers and historians to write about artists without directly experiencing their work. When artworks are reduced to images that we may encounter for little more than a fraction of a second, this changes our reading of them, and provides a different context. This situation favours those practices that best communicate their significance and value through and as images, and privileges artists and institutions that are most adept at publicizing their work and exhibitions. To continue this line of thought, it is increasingly the case that these conditions in turn shape how art is made and exhibited, emphasizing its visual legibility and transmissibility.

Yet there are other ways of thinking about documentation: not just in terms of documentation _of_ artworks, but also in terms of documentation _in_ artworks. Many artists use documents as objects  
within their work. Or, they may address documentation as concept and practice; the transmission of experiences or ideas. In this issue, Barbara Clausen considers the restaging of historical performance art pieces and challenges the distinction between the live and the mediated event. And Jayne Wilkinson discusses the photographs of James Bridle, who sourced satellite images of American drone strikes in  
Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and then disseminated them on Instagram. Wilkinson argues that these images _become_ documentary through their presentation and recirculation, often subsequently used by journalists covering these events. In both of these essays, the writers allude to the “liveness” of the document, an idea that is latent throughout this issue and which has resonance in society at large. Much like documents of original performance art pieces can function as scores for their re-enactment, other kinds of documents, from photographs to popular recordings, also function as scores, mediating and shaping the conduct of daily life.

Overreliance on documentation can reduce practices that are complex, messy and indeterminate into familiar and limiting frames of reference, but the document can also expand and challenge how  
we see the world, opening up new possible horizons, as many of the writers and artists in this issue describe. Or the document might be negated altogether. In her artist project, Jennifer Rose Sciarrino  
evokes the possibility of evading visibility – and thus documentation – by presenting us with an invisibility cloak: a form that by both concealing and revealing, works as a perspective-shifting device that brings unseen spaces into view.

But more than anything else, this issue’s focus on documentation is about asking what it means to be present to the artwork and to be present for others, and how documents mediate those relationships.  
These questions are especially urgent in a world where speed of communication and access to information enable a dispersal of presence across space and time, with profound interpersonal, ethical and political consequences. Far from its earlier conceptions as mere record-keeper, the document now has unprecedented power to act upon the world, bringing voices from other times and places into the present, creating empathy and identification, and establishing value. Documentation shapes  
the very form of our complex, contemporary present – a present that often seems to be not just here and now, but everywhere at once.

Amish Morrell is Assistant Professor at OCAD University, where he teaches Criticism & Curatorial Practice, and Visual and Critical Studies.

Editor

Kari Cwynar is a curator, writer and editor based in Toronto, where she is Director of Kunstverein Toronto and Editorial Director of _C Magazine_. She writes on contemporary art for publications and catalogues, contributes regularly to _Frieze_ and _Metropolis M_.

Guest Editor

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Kari Cwynar and Amish Morrell introduce the theme of “documentation” for this issue. 

Editorial: Documentation

Feature

For a couple of years, I’ve felt the impulse to attempt a reading of the work of Will Holder – a person with whom I’ve had intermittent but at times extended conversations and opportunities to observe. This text is borne of these encounters, though Holder may be the MacGuffin in an essay querying how words and voices are reproduced in art. _What patterns of citation are established and to which groups are they addressed? What is our responsibility?_ At a time when images flow freely without words, and when biographies, press texts and artist statements are copied and pasted, condensed into consumable formats that almost always further market oriented ends, it feels more prescient than ever to consider a practice like Holder’s. Though his work primarily appears in and responds to situations of art, Holder is a typographer – a role that holds, at its core, the organization and reproduction of language. 

_What does it mean to work respectfully and generatively alongside other voices? And what about the language and material of one’s forebears? What happens when the original author is gone and only the document remains, with its coded meaning to be gleaned?_ Over the past few years, I’ve been asking these questions in relation to the writing of art history and its narrow lineages. At times, I’ve been thinking alongside and through Holder’s work. Holder “produces oral and printed publications, seeing conversation as model and tool for a mutual and improvised set of publishing conditions – whereby the usual roles of commissioner, author, subject, editor, printer and typographer are improvised and shared, as opposed to assigned and pre-determined.” While Holder works through the structures and methods of typography, and at times music, both of our avenues lead to inquiry around co-production, the language around art and the re-presentation of existing or past material. 

Recently, Holder and his frequent collaborator composer and artist Alex Waterman scored and type set part of experimental composer Robert Ashley’s oeuvre, proposing that “musicians and non-musicians might produce new versions of his operas, by way of typographical scores.” The resulting book of scores, titled _Yes, But Is It Edible?_, was something like seven years in the making. It presents two of Ashley’s many operas to be read aloud – collectively, since it’s scored for two or more voices. As well as being a tribute to and biography of Ashley, _Yes, But Is It Edible?_ is the fourth in a series of publications by Holder and Waterman exploring “a musicological perspective on scoring speech, and the role of printed matter in collective forms of reading and writing.” The latter statement – the role of printed matter in collective forms of reading and writing – prompts consideration of how one might apply the principles of the score and the liveness of reading to other forms of printed matter; to consider that the reader of a score must think through all of the document’s information and then use it as a prompt for a new situation in the future. A score offers instructions, or a structure, but cannot prescribe the outcome. No two readers will ever perform the same piece, nor will the same reader perform a piece the same way twice. A score is thus generous towards future and multiple enactments and voices. It does not demand sole authorship.

Holder’s work is rarely single-authored – perhaps this this stems from the habitual role as a typographer, used to producing another person’s work. He has many collaborators – appearing, for example, as Will Stuart together with Stuart Bailey for a number of projects, including their experimental art magazine _Tourette’s_ in the early 2000s. One issue of _Tourette’s_ took shape as a week-long series of events and it was here that Holder began “speaking through” others – later to include Robert Ashley, Silvia Federici, Bernadette Mayer and Alice Notley – thus acting as their proxies in an attempt to circulate their voices but without denying his implicit role. Holder is also editor of _F.R.DAVID_, a journal concerned with writing _alongside production_ (of all kinds), co-founded with Ann Demeester and Dieter Roelstraete and formerly published out of de Appel arts centre in Amsterdam. With _F.R.DAVID_, Holder compiles, commissions, edits and annotates existing and new texts; it is published in paperback format, more a poly-vocal and associative anthology than an art magazine.

When I first met Will Holder, in May 2012 – he was performing an issue of _F.R.DAVID_ at The Banff Centre. I remember the rhythm and the feeling in the room, his impeccably timed reading voice set against a backdrop of John Baldessari’s 1972 film T _eaching a Plant the Alphabet_, in which he repeats each letter of the alphabet to a houseplant, Baldessari’s _A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a a…. B-b-b-b-b-bb-b…_ acting as Holder’s metronome.

The second time I met Holder – in Amsterdam, January 2013 – he was launching a new issue of _F.R.DAVID_, titled _…for single mothers_, after one of his ongoing projects. He read Alice Notley’s 1980 lecture “Doctor Williams’ Heiresses” while pacing at the front of a cramped room. The lecture is Notley’s wicked re-calibration of the genealogy of her literary forebears, re imagining a gendered sphere of influence. With _…for single mothers_ Holder proposes an oral re-publishing the work of women writers. A line in his biography reads: “Since 2007 this heterosexual, white, European male has produced a predominantly oral series of publications …for single mothers, preferring to reproduce descriptions of relations typically formulated by women and queers.” Which is to say, for nearly ten years, Holder has dedicated a portion of his work to live (and sometimes print) readings and re-publishings of work by women and queer thinkers; a proposition – I think – that tries to acknowledge the position into which he was born, while reconciling his desire to bring the lives of others to the fore.

I find _…for single mothers_ to be a challenging proposal, but I keep returning to it. There was a disorienting uncanniness for me in hearing – later, at another _…for single mothers_ event – Holder read Silvia Federici’s “Development in Witch- Hunting” as if a proxy for her words; because, while there is authority in the solidity of the written word (Federici’s), there is also undeniable power in the reading voice (Holder’s). My gut told me that Holder, still, held the authorship and privilege in the situation of the reading, yet he chose to turn his invitation to read over to Federici’s text. Perhaps, as has been suggested to me, part of my reaction comes from being unused to seeing “unselfish” (to the extent that this is possible) reproductions of women’s work. Holder suggests it to be a simple choice: to put one life in front of another. My reaction comes in questioning the balance in outcomes for both reader and writer, a relationship that is re calibrated in an “oral publication.” That said, I am ultimately glad to have occasion for these thoughts, because so often it is not a conversation. It is also important to note that Holder does often invite women to read alongside him.

In writing this text, and in thinking about the shifting of past and present language and information, and the permissions of authorship, my mind kept returning to Métis anthropologist Zoe Todd’s questioning of Eurocentric, patriarchal ontology and citationism, where she asks why it is so challenging to give credit, to find thinkers who engage with Indigenous thought directly and respectfully, who work in conversation with Indigenous thinkers, rather than to cite those who have cited Indigenous work already. _What is it to work in conversation with someone? To be an author and agent who turns over the microphone?_

_…for single mothers_ is unquestionably a different situation than the one Todd is addressing. But I want to think about the perhaps imperfect possibility of reading the entirety of a Notley poem or a Federici essay as an act of displacing one’s position or one’s voice in service of another’s, of acknowledging that someone has said something important but they have not been asked to speak in this particular instance. It is an act of crediting, of acknowledging the implication of others in the words you circulate.

Regarding one’s implication in circulated words, in Banff, shortly before the Federici reading, Holder was invited by the Centre’s art department to give an artist talk. This talk extended over two hours-long reading sessions – one during a walk through the woods and the other around the campfire – during which Holder read the entirety of Franco Berardi’s book _The Uprising_ (2012). It was for him, a way of “short-circuiting the ‘ease’ of reproduction and distribution.” As is now the standard, talks at Banff are recorded and posted online. The duration of Holder’s talk interrupted, however subtly, a cycle of distribution that can so often – in exhibitions, criticism, public programs – become formulaic and unspecific. There is little more pleasurable than being read to in the forest, but the Berardi reading felt endless, as our attention spans now expect a one-hour artist talk. Nor was the audio-visual team prepared to record a two-day off-site talk for the website. The reading was a simple strategy in “ensuring that – actually – a lot of language is needed before such a thing \[the online posting and eventual consumption\] can or should happen.”

I like Will Holder’s work because he never claims to stand alone; his thinking and production is derived from the inevitable involvement of other ideas and bodies that are so often veiled in the service of individual authorship. I like the ongoing desire to re-present existing language as is, to put it into circulation anew. To decide not to place a premium on “newness” or “originality,” but instead to look at what is already there and to create new points of engagement with it. I once listened as Holder – off the cuff, and perhaps off the record – questioned the art world’s recent reliance on fictive, lyrical language – our fear of description and “information as such” – suggesting this reliance was a misguided reaction against the commodification of the art object. _Why not speak directly? If someone has already said it better, why produce more language?_

Around the time of the Notley reading, I took a seminar led by Holder. And  
from my notes, three statements have stayed with me:

\_1\. “We are constantly co-producing each others’ work.”  
2\. “How to make it clear that the language around the work is the work.”  
3\. “The permanent re-writing of both past and future: where does this stop?”\_

I began this text with the intention of thinking through Holder’s work as a way to nuance my consideration of how we currently produce and distribute information in relation to art. I wanted to think about the permissions we allow ourselves in re-publishing existing material, and in speaking with others, and how we might think about strategies for language that resist homogenization by the market. I wondered also if we could think about all existing documents as scores, with mutable, dialogical lives, much in the way Holder and Alex Waterman took interest in the notation of Robert Ashley’s operas, opening them up for future collective readings. A thread throughout this line of inquiry has to do with the face-to-face encounter with another, with the experience of live reading and listening, rather than the distanced consumption of “content” or talking points.

In the end, it is near impossible for me – maybe for anyone? – to write of Holder’s work with the precision with which he himself describes it. This text contains many moments of reproduction, in which I quote Holder’s biographies, snippets of project statements or bits of our exchanges. It thus bears the resulting slippages that come with putting one’s work – one’s language – into circulation. But I know Will Holder follows John Cage when he says: “I think conversation works best when the second thing that is said is not in the mind of the person who said the first thing.” Which is, to enter into the risk of conversation.

_Note:_ Holder writes: “In the series _…for single mothers_ my speaking body IS a publication. With the best form of ‘typesetting’ I can produce (orally), to document the work of another (gendered labour). As such there is NO DOCUMENTATION of _…for single mothers_, since this would deflect from that overlooked idea: that every one of us is a document.”

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Collective

Typography

History

Interpretation

This article explores how words and voices are reproduced in art. It employs the practice of typographer, and occasional musician, Will Holder as the medium through which varying issues in oral and textual artistic documentation are raised and discussed. The article focuses on the collaborative nature of documentation and suggests that the idea of conversation in the creation of extant works and the diversity of their reproduction. 

Authorship and the Reproduction of Language

Barbara Clausen is an independent curator and professor of performance theory and history in the art history department at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Clausen is co-editor of After the Act: _The (Re)presentation of Performance Art_ (Verlag Moderne Kunst, 2006). In 2012 she curated the first retrospective of Babette Mangolte at VOX: Centre de l’image contemporaine as well as the 2014 exhibition and performance series _STAGE SET STAGE: On Identity and Institutionalism_ at SBC Gallery in Montréal. She is currently working on Joan Jonas’ first Canadian retrospective, opening on April 26, 2016, as well as the conjoint performance series _Affinities_, Variations, and Scenarios, opening in May 2018, both at at DHC / Art in Montréal.

This text is based on a questionnaire, sent to me in 2013, which centered on the status of the documentation of performance art and the ongoing institutionalization of performance-based practices. The idea was to publish the responses in a publication series by De Appel called _The Shadowfiles_. The project never came to life and was forgotten – and most likely because of a change in directorship at De Appel – put into a file. Yet, this questionnaire has frequently popped back into my mind, specifically when I’ve thought about the ongoing significance of performance not only as a tool and a method of working, but also as a meta-genre that functions increasingly like an umbrella, framing interdisciplinary practices concerned with the idea of presence and immediacy in the visual arts. And so, over the last two years, I have continuously updated my responses, and am now finally allowing it to circulate here. For the purpose of its current publication, I have updated and changed some of the questions and answers.

There are many artists active today, in whose work performance or live actions are integral, so much so that in the past decade one can speak of a genuine revival of the genre. Do you think that there are reasons for this recent development?

**Barbara Clausen (BC)**: There are several interests, practices and currents that culminated in the late 1990s in a renewed and steadily growing interest in performance art’s diverse histories. This list is easily extendable and far from finished. The reasons will continuously change and reflect upon those who ask as well as those who decide to respond.

In the early to mid-1990s performance studies and art history started to ask if historical performances could be reenacted, for mostly educational purposes. This hermetic curiosity corresponded with artistic interests of the time, such as the reconsideration of practices engaged in institutional critique, the rise of relational aesthetics and installation-based art practices that tried to engage their audiences. These developments were absorbed by an increasing determination by curators to activate the exhibition space as a site of mediation and participation. All of the above were reflected and shaped by an increasing interest in artistic knowledge production and artistic research.

Another reason is the art markets’ discovery by the mid-1990s of the potential value of the numerous estates and archives of performance artists, documentary photographers, videographers and filmmakers. These archives – often without clearly defined authorial rights at the time – were quickly absorbed into private and public collections, gallery-run estates as well as publicly accessible archives. This has led not only to the historization but also institutionalization of performance art.

And last but certainly not least, was a shift in European and US politics towards the conservative and in some cases extreme right forms of government around the turn of the millennium. This development triggered a need to take action on a variety of socio-cultural levels. This early period of the ’00s was marked by the need to rethink the parameters of democracy – artists literally trying out what it means to position themselves within and take action in public space as well as within institutional frameworks. The paradigmatic events of 9/11 only added to this momentum. These events have since created a multitude of worldwide movements against the machinery of war, the politics of suppression and the infinite power of the market, that despite crashes and increasing consumer awareness has not ceased to dominate cultural politics.

Over the past decade there has been a shift in our understanding  
of performance art and its histories from a body-based genre to a hybrid medium and discursive practice which functions as a methodology and a way of working. While the reasons I’ve given for the renewed interest in performance art are debated and continuously explored in both theory and practice, they continue to have an effect on the function of performance-based practices and how they appear and react to being documented, archived and restaged.

What are still relevant differences between the “original” once-only, unrepeatable live moment of a performance and a theatre performance/play?

**BC:** These interrelated processes used to follow a chronological order, unfolding over time, changing their authors as well as their protagonists. Whereas today, partly because of social media, they embrace the simultaneousness of their appearance in the real as multi-layered media events. This has led to a collapse of the boundaries between layers of time and to accelerated absorption of the performative act itself into its media afterlife. Seen this way, the relationship between the live and the mediated, the original and the reproduction, becomes obsolete as a dialectical framework but remains of interest as a correlative relationship.

Performance art is set at the interface of opposition and cross-manifestation and has, since its beginning in the 20th century, always been rooted in the tension field of three different spheres of medial expression: first, the perception and experience of the body; second, the reproduction of the act through analogue and later digital media; and third, public distribution and reception in all forms of mass media, from the newspaper to the Internet. We can safely say that the dialectical relationship of the live and the mediated has become long obsolete; one could even argue that this has always been the case. The question whether a performance has an original or authentic state of existence has always been a question of ideological interpretation and a strategy of inclusion and exclusion, all of which continuously change over time. What is most important is to look at how artists engage with the correlative relationship between the live and the mediated and consequently ask how the site and time specificity of the exhibition, as an inherently performative medium, is processed, acted out and reproduced within the becoming of its own image, between spectator and action.

What are the possibilities of recording, documenting and archiving particular actions and performances? And what aspects of actions and performances are impossible to record, document and archive?

**BC:** Looking at the vast image and text-based material available on the history of performance art since the 1950s, most has been commissioned, distributed and archived by artists, professional photographers, chroniclers, witnesses and institutions alike, with admirable and great efforts. The question of what has _not_ been recorded, or is impossible to record, document or archive, can only lead us to ask why someone had consciously refused and taken the effort to not keep a record. Photography, film, video, the Internet and new social media have accelerated this process of immediate reproduction and distribution. The distinction between staging an image for the camera and capturing an event with a camera has collapsed and hence escaped its antagonistic and dialectical relationship and the claim of authenticity.

This said, if an artist decides neither to document nor stage his work for the camera, as in the well-known case of Tino Sehgal, the decision itself will produce an avalanche of non-authorized images, blogs, descriptions and commentaries. One interesting example of an artist who works with this dynamic of documentation in relation to their live works is Tania Bruguera, who recently reversed the process of authorization between the public and the institution by making every image a visitor takes official, while personally limiting and selecting very few the institution is allowed to use.

The question whether works from the history of performance art can be re-enacted, or not, as art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty has rightfully pointed out, should not be centred on the authenticity of the original: “If you believe in the sacred authenticity of the original, then by definition no redo could threaten it; if you think performance is always already mediated, then live bodies are as much a form of representation as any other.”[^1]

Nothing is impossible to re-enact in the sense of re-reading the past, one just has to be clear about whose intentions they are taking as the outset of their work. The impossibility of repetition lies within the personal realm of how each past, present and future participant (regardless of their status as a performer, witness, reader or viewer) individually anticipates, experiences and reciprocates the event.

The early practitioners of the medium have appeared not only to be directing themselves against the conventions and codes of the traditional proscenium or flat-floor theatre – with its reliance on text – but also against certain mechanisms in the art market that concentrated on the object as the ultimate work of art, a commodity. The performance was originally “owned” and “signed” by the artist, the author of the work. Artists today use scripts, scenarios and actors and repeat performances. Is this “just” a redefinition or re-articulation?

**BC:** While this question was important for the wave of re-enactments that started around the mid-’00s, today, one can’t safely equate the immediacy of an event with an anti-institutional or anti-capitalistic gesture. Just as the translation of a live event into a picture, an object or an installation does not necessarily submit to the rules of the market and can in fact be subversive. And then there is the categorization of performance art as ephemeral – despite the original critical, anti-commercial connotation of this term – which has facilitated the exclusion of vanguard artists from a predominantly hetero-normative canon or many decades.

In fact, the financial reality of performance’s “un-marketability” ended when it started, sometime in the 1950s (Yves Klein and James Lee Byars both throwing gold into the air), when the certificate of authenticity for conceptual art practices, often immaterial as well as performative by nature, became not just a proof of purchase, but the actual object of ownership (certificate) and script for future enactments. This idea is clearly stated and acted out in Lawrence Weiner’s _Declaration of Intent_, from 1968:

1\. The artist may construct the piece.  
2\. The piece may be fabricated.  
3\. The piece need not be built.

Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist, the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.

Existing “iconic” or canonical performances are restaged nowadays or reworked by art practitioners. And the practices of various artists and curators who are involved in performance have inspired the formulation of protocols (Marina Abramovic). How does a performance change as a result of a new context and through being carried out by a different artist in a different place? And how does such a re-enactment relate to the original work?

**BC:** There are a good number of artists engaged in performative practices today who have embraced the history as well as the more nuanced historiographies of performance art in their work, via strategies of re-enactment and appropriation. In some cases they oscillate between the “original” artist’s intention, the witness’ claims of authenticity and official historical records. In other cases they simply re-stage images of what has become an acclaimed work in the canon of art history, driven by something between nostalgia and market strategy. The desire to appropriate and reconsider historical performance has the potential for critical reflection, i.e. asking what the revival of performance says about an art world increasingly engaged in capturing the politics of everyday life within its walls. At best the relationship to the past is not competitive nor admiring, but dedicated to finding new questions and viewpoints, alternative histories that point out current issues of political emancipation. Some examples would be the work of Jimmy Robert, Sharon Hayes or Walid Raad. The awareness of the fact that any act of appropriation will always change our reading of the original allows for an articulation of the processes of inclusion or exclusion that in turn speaks for both the past and the present. As part of an effort to emancipate, these artists have taken up Judith Butler’s use of the performative, focusing on the disruptive potential of their actions rather then remaining trapped within the normative traditions that determine the politics of the canonization of art history.

Interviews with original performance artists and the study of documents, photographs and recordings of performances (can) become part of new performances, exhibitions and museum collections. How can these be experienced in a new and “lively” way?

**BC:** The abundance of art historical texts, as well as soundand image-based documentary materials on performance art since the 1960s have become an integral part of critical performance-based art practices, providing an infinite source of knowledge and inspiration. This has led to an increasingly critical reflection on the narrative linearity of performance art and its ongoing institutionalization as a performative process dependent on its medial reproduction. Artists using a documentary approach towards the past, exhibiting an archive based on images of performances, or conducting interviews with witnesses of past performances, increasingly blur the dichotomy between the active and the passive as it relates to the institution, the artist and the spectator. The premise for performance art in the future lies in the conscious integration of the discontinuities, expectations, failures and ruptures that are usually edited out in the process of performance art’s historization.

One way is translating the institutional politics of performance art into the museum and exhibition space, rewriting an institution’s history in parallel to that of the art it shows and the discourses it reflects, and placing the official history alongside other forgotten histories within the mise-en-scène of their works. Good examples of this are found in the works of Sophie Bélair Clement, Babette Mangolte, and Sarah Pierce. While very different in the style and development of their work, all three question performance’s claim of authenticity and the politics of the ephemeral in relation to the power of the archive and the exhibition as a site of valorization.[^2]

Many artists see the exhibition space, or even public space, as an extension of the studio, as a platform for creation. How can an institution provide such a place? Now that performance is cropping up in so many different forms in contemporary art practice, how can shape be given to the relationship between the performance/live art artist and the heritage/collection/museum?

**BC:** The ongoing institutionalization of performative practices, whether as a method of production or a tool of representation, has shaped the way knowledge is processed and communicated within and through the exhibition. The site of the exhibition plays a major role in this development. Exhibitions have served artists as a format of exploration, a site of intervention as well as a medium of manifestation. In recent years, artists[^3] and choreographers,[^4] together with curators, have come to perceive the  
exhibition as an environment that embraces both critical and transdisciplinary practices, increasingly found in the conceptual correlation of the performative with the archival.  
This crossing of performative and conceptual methodologies  
allows artists to “expose” the complexities and  
the challenges cultural producers face when tackling the  
question of authenticity and reproduction as key issues in  
their work. Consequently, the site of the exhibition offers  
the opportunity to activate the tension between episodic  
and semantic experiences. Works by artists such as Pauline  
Olowska, Boris Charmatz, or Gerard Byrne allow us to witness how we experience knowledge by, for example, exhibiting a historical performance from a collection or an archival source (ranging from the library to the Internet), commissioning a series of new performances over a period of time or for a series of events, or asking an artist to engage with an iconic performance. This focus on performance art’s self-reflexive practices as well as time- and process-based states of existence takes effect within, as well as outside of, the medium of the exhibition.

As practices and discourses of the performative and the curatorial increasingly intertwine, playing with the spatiotemporal frameworks of the institution and its increasing dedication to live programming can offer numerous possibilities. This becomes particularly fruitful when performance  
art’s claim of authenticity is not debated within the classical framework of a dialectical relationship but rather discussed, developed and translated within the layering of the settings of an exhibition, a symposium, a publication or a performance series as a correlative relationship. The exhibition as a performative format of its own can simultaneously function as a proscenium setting, a contingent context, as well as a site of knowledge production, mediation, contemplation and reception. It has been proven to work this way, especially when allowed to develop over time within an institution, escaping the parameters of the performance as an event that is part of the opening of an exhibition. Examples are _If I Can’t Dance_; Akira, the mumok performance series; Jay Sanders’ curation of performances for the 2012 Whitney Biennial, the performance series _Live Currency_, programming at The Tanks at Tate Modern and the DeAppel and many more to come and be rediscovered.

[^1]: Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Against Performance Art,” in _Artforum International_ vol. 48, no. 9 (May 2010), 211.
[^2]: See: Barbara Clausen, “Parallel Times Whether One’s Own or That of Others: On Curating Performance Art,” in _Timing_, ed. Beatrice von Bismarck et al. (Berlin: Sternberg Press), 171-86.
[^3]: For example: Ei Arakawa, Jutta Koether, Pablo Bronstein, Gerard  
Byrne, Theaster Gates, Continuous Project, Walid Raad, Rabih Mroué, Jeremy Deller, Joachim Koester, Luis Jacob, Sarah Pierce, Andrea Geyer, Emily Roysdon, Jimmy Robert, Sharon Hayes, Tris van der Mitchell, Paulina Olowska and many others.
[^4]: Michael Clark, Boris Charmatz, Lynda Gaudreau, Xavier Le Roy, Sarah Michelson

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Performance

Art History

In this text Barbara Clausen engages with revised questions from a 2013 De Appel questionnaire on the evolution and documentation of performance-based artistic practices. Clausen explores the resurgence of the genre in the past decade as well as issues of authorship, originality, recreation and technological advancement (i.e. the internet and social media) as they relate to documenting performances. The article concludes with a discussion of the changing relationship between performance art and institutional spaces. 

Looking back now. Or, a forgotten questionnaire on the historization and contemporaneity of performance art

Jayne Wilkinson is a writer, editor, and curator based in Toronto.

issue-129-p22-32.pdf

Photography

Technology

This article discusses the current nature of photography as documentation by using James Bridle’s Dronestagram as a fulcrum. The article posits that the use of the photograph is what makes it documentary rather than its mere existence. This idea is explored in the context of contemporary technology and the culture of instantaneous and broad circulation of images. 

Compressing and Reconstructing: James Bridle’s Digital Documents

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Assistant Editor

Designer

Publisher

Artist Project

**Aryen Hoekstra** is an artist based in Toronto, where he currently serves as the Director of G Gallery.

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Body

Science

Conceptual

Jennifer Sciarrino explores the impact of biomedical therapies and invisible _cloaking_ on our acceptance of nanotechnology, through graphic visualization and text. Aryen Hoekstra provides an accompanying text on the topic of synthetic body modification.

Artist project by Jennifer Rose Sciarrino: Text

Jennifer Rose Sciarrino is a Toronto-based artist working in photography, sculpture, video and installation. Sciarrino’s work engages visualization technologies and contemporary object making to examine the continually shifting line between real and 3D-rendered surfaces. She is interested in ways the digital vernacular affects current and future modes of production, shifts in socio-economic concerns, cultural consumption/participation and the inevitable environmental consequences of these forces. Sciarrino has exhibited her work nationally and internationally in group shows, including _Talking Back_, Otherwise at the Jackman Humanities Institute, Toronto; NADA art fair in New York; _trans/FORM_ at The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art,Toronto; _To What Does This Sweet Cold Earth Belong?_ at The Power Plant, Toronto; and in solo shows, including _Cloak_ at 811 Gallery, Toronto and _Patterned Recognition_ at Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto. In 2013, Sciarrino was one of the winners of the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts’ Artist Prize.

Artist

Cloaked Bacteria and Yeast: Rendered biology seen through a hypothetical object

Review

issue-129-p32-38.pdf

Myth

Government

This is an artwork by James Bridle which is a collection of digital, unpeopled reconstructions of British sites related to immigration, judgement, detention and deportation. These places are “unphotographable” and inaccessible to the public. The title “Seamless Transition” is antithetical to the verbal and written accounts of these places used to visually render these works as they describe “maze-like, bureaucratic architecture, fluorescent lights and scores of people.”

Seamless Transitions

issue-129-p50-52.pdf

This article is a review by Denise Ryner of Laura Piasta’s Sounding the Ultraviolet exhibited at Vancouver’s Access Gallery from November 28 through January 20, 2016-10-17

Laura Piasta: Sounding the Ultraviolet

issue-129-p51-53.pdf

This is a review by Jeanne Randolph of A Putting Down of Roots: 40 Years of Cv2 exhibited at Gallery 1C03 in Winnipeg from September 17 through November 14, 2015.

A Putting Down of Roots: 40 Years of CV2

Lena Suksi attended OCADU. She writes poetry in Toronto.

Liz Magor recently showed five new sculptures (all produced in 2015) at Susan Hobbs Gallery. In _Speckled Veil_, a stuffed blue bird sleeps in a glove. The posed fingers appear tenderly possessive, closing gently around the bird’s throat and chest, while the bird’s head remains animated as its live self would. It angles into the world through the spotted cellophane that gives the work its name. This evocative glove, though, is as eerily unoccupied as the bird’s body, its fingertips collapsing into the softness of shed clothes. Upstairs, the glove in _Pink Shimmer_ makes this still more clear, with fingers limp along their length, and the bird that it supports in a death pose, breast to the sky.

Magor’s work gets talked about in terms of entropy and detritus, but the sculptures on display here mark the moment between disposal and its opposite: offering. Casts of cardboard boxes acting like plinths have come up from the basement and been altered by her in a way not unlike what the weather does when we leave things on the street. So, the boxes look salted and wet, ready for the garbage collector. However, the levitation of their potential contents – _on_ them, rather than _in_ them – takes us again to that delightful act of display in order to give away. Giving is the best outcome of shedding. We hope that others will take what we no longer need. The glove in _Speckled Veil_ could be catching what it’s catching to release it. 

Indeed, the central objects of these sculptures are still things that we expect to see as trash. Ornamental taxidermy is, like pressed flowers, a typically clumsy Victorian way of commemorating nature. The way that the stuffed dog topping _Glow Pet_ has been unevenly painted is intriguing, like the teen impulse to spraypaint our stuff out of boredom with its stubborn persistence as our bodies change. However, these works suggest that the decision to transform something comes as much out of hope for an object’s future as the desire to dismissively sabotage it.

The sculptures refer still more strongly to giving and sharing through the wrapping materials used in each one: bubble wrap resting gracefully under the toy dog of _Glow Pet_, yellow cellophane generating reflected light around _Gold Box_. More specifically, these materials lend the works movement. Formally, in the lovely way that they offer light and potential sound to the other, calcified components. Otherwise, in that gift wrap and packing material is suggested the passage of our things between destinations and hands. They also present the event of covering and uncovering. Without their rustling skins, the stacked birds, gloves, toys and their boxes might feel consigned to the dump, the curb, or the specimen cabinet. With them, they circulate through those and other places.

The cellophane that, again, gives the bird works their names – _Speckled Veil, Pink Shimmer, Gold Box_ – does another sensitive thing. In her artist talk upon reception of the Gershon Iskowitz Prize at the Art Gallery of Ontario this past October, Magor spoke tenderly about wanting intimacy with the world in an impossible way. She described wanting to feel her pillow closer to her head than it could be, and wanting to absorb all the rain that fell in Prince Rupert, BC, and how her practice copes with these impossible desires. Sensitive cellophane is radiant and seductive, but it is also a slippery obstacle. The bubble wrap perched beneath _Glow Pet_’s little bum cuts it off entirely from its grounding support. Sensible knowledge is realized through the same material as protective distance, like how our skin holds our organs in while it sends them nervous signals. The lovely transparencies invite the inspection of the boundaries of our senses at the same time as they enforce  
them. The satisfaction of pinching bubble wrap still gives way to two seamed plastic surfaces. Feeling, rather than dissolving, limits us. At the same time, it is a condition of survival.

This thwarted investigation of the stuff of our world looms in Magor’s long body of work: casts of tree trunks stuffed with unlikely secrets, blankets repaired and folded. For her, nothing can be altogether handled, much as we might inspect it. What is unknown is an inevitable frustration. That she acheives experience of resistance in an expertly crafted way is poetic. That she works through our mundane surroundings reminds me of more of the close afternoon light of an enigmatic short story. Alice Munro writes experience through minor details, describing, for instance, in “Deep-Holes” (2008), a landscape of champagne bottles, picnic blankets and cellars that nervously supports the untethering of a family. Ultimately, these objects are not catalysts but settings for our experience, advancing and receding in the way of weather and dust. Munro and Magor might agree that our efforts to solve our lives with signs or objects are futile, but that we cannot entirely neglect their delicate impacts. In 2011, Magor produced works called _Marks_ for the City Centre Library in Surrey, BC: big clay ottomans with barely legible evidence of relaxing bodies impressed into their surfaces. This treatment of trace persists in her new sculptures, allowing the effects of the world and ourselves on one another while acknowledging that we get up, that we move on.

This observation is not sentimental. The Pets’ noses are inches from the wall they are mounted on, diverting us from nostalgia. The birds do not invite us into the wilderness. Everything here has flown its obvious coop and past uses get confused by the closeness of the inspection Magor’s work demands. We want to angle our heads, like the bird in _Speckled Veil_, near to the wall to measure the barely present distance between it and _Glow Pet_’s nose. Between disposal and offering, taking stock and imagining new purpose, there is fleeting space in this work for our solitude and innocence.

issue-129-p53-55.pdf

This is a review by Lena Suksi of Liz Magor’s exhibition at Susan Hobbs Gallery showing in Toronto from October 29 to December 5, 2015.

Liz Magor

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This is a review by Simone Wharton of Amy Bowles’s Echoing Wood exhibition at Toronto’s Paul Petro Contemporary Art from September 11 to October 10, 2015\. 

Amy Bowles: Echoing Wood

issue-129-p56-58.pdf

This is a review of Hank Bull’s Connection exhibition at Montreal’s Galarie l’UQAM showing from October 23 – December 5\. 

Hank Bull: Connexion

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This is a review of Anna Bouhiguian’s Cities by the Rivers exhibition, written by Yasmin Nurming-Por, which is showing at Montreal’s SBC Gallery showing from October 31, 2015 to January 16, 2016\. 

Anna Boghiguian: Cities by the Rivers

sophia bartholomew (they/them) is a non-binary femme and interdisciplinary artist, currently based in suburban Vancouver. Their forthcoming publication—“Solutions for the Problem of Staying Alive” (M:ST festival, 2020)—is part of an ongoing conversation and collaboration with Calgary-based artist Hannah Doerksen.

issue-129-p60-63.pdf

This article, written by Sophia Bartolomew, reviews Writing Topography: The Marion McCain Exhibition of Contemporary Atlantic Art at Fredericton, New Brunswick’s Beaverbrook Art Gallery from September 26, 2015 – January 10, 2016\. 

Writing Topography: The Marion McCain Exhibition of Contemporary Atlantic Art

Godfre Leung is a critic and curator based in the territory currently known as Vancouver. His recent exhibitions include “Pao Houa Her: Emplotment” (2020) at Or Gallery and “Guesthood and Alienhood: Sun Yung Shin, Jinny Yu, Republic of the Other” (2021) at Hotam Press Bookshop/Gallery. He is currently working on a project entitled Hong Kong Is a Loaded Term with artist Christopher K. Ho.

issue-129-p62-64.pdf

This article, written by Godfre Leung, reviews Christian Marclay’s Surround Sounds at New York’s Paula Cooper Gallery from September 10 to October 17, 2015\. 

Christian Marclay: Surround Sounds

Sabrina Tarasoff is a curator and writer based in Paris.

issue-129-p65-67.pdf

This article, written by Sabrina Tarasoff, reviews Darren Bader: rocks and mirrors showing at Turin’s Galleria Franco Noero from November 3 to December 23, 2015\. 

Darren Bader: rock and mirrors

issue-129-p66-68.pdf

This article, written by Alex Turgeon, reviews Paolo Brusky’s Brusky Invent’s, showing at Berlin’s Dann Gunn from November 28, 2015 to February 20, 2016\. 

Paulo Bruscky: Bruscky Invent's

issue-129-p68-70.pdf

This article, written by Benjamin Hunter, reviews Madelyne Beckles and Delilah Rosier: Masking Is Always More Fun with A Friend showing at Toronto’s Autumn Gallery from August 20 – September 2, 2015

Madelyne Beckles and Delilah Rosier: Masking Is Always More Fun with A Friend

Angela Jerardi is a freelance curator and writer currently living in Amsterdam.

issue-129-p71-73.pdf

This is a review of Speculations (“The Future is \_\_\_\_\_”) (Triple Canopy, 2015) by Angela Jerardi. 

Speculations (“The future is _____”) (Triple Canopy, 2015)

Esmé Hogeveen is a writer based between Tkaronto/Toronto and Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.

During the summer of 1965, Linda Rosenkrantz taped conversations between her friends, participants in the New York art scene, in East Hampton. Transcriptions of these oral exchanges comprise the content of _Talk_, which is made up entirely of dialogue and structured much like a play. The chapters mostly self-contained vignettes with titles like “Marsha and Vincent on the Beach,” “Emily and Marsha Compare Childhood Traumata” and “Marsha and Emily Talk About Nathan, Philippe, Andy Warhol and Nancy Drew” – chronicle Marsha, Emily and Vincent’s relationships with each other, as well as their attitudes towards sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll and their attempts at pursuing and derailing existential contentment by experimenting with creative processes and interpersonal relationships in the infamous 1960s New York  
art world.

Given the potential for its risqué content to incite controversy, Rosenkrantz initially struggled to find a publisher. Eventually, when _Talk_ was first published in 1968, it was marketed as a work of fiction rather than source material from the author’s own life. Only subsequently – and perhaps most explicitly as part of the rebranding project that accompanied the New York Review Books’ reissuing of _Talk_ this past July – has Rosenkrantz been extolled for using audio recordings and transcription methods to explore the protean boundaries of fiction and non-fiction. In acknowledging Rosenkrantz’s role in developing the chimerical genre of experimental autobiography, a mode of writing that has continued relevance within the interconnected worlds of art and literary criticism well into the 21st century, the implicit feminist concerns of Talk inevitably come to mind. Indeed, Rosenkrantz foregrounds the female first-person as a position that involves perpetually anticipating dispute. There is something remarkable, then, about reading transcriptions of the voices of two women, as well as that of a gay man, who are speaking their minds within a self-appointed space. Marsha, Emily and Vincent’s questioning of their own and the others’ perspectives, and the translation of the resulting moments of tenderness, conflict and introspection into print, provides a refreshing counterpoint to the ongoing editing techniques germane to many forms of contemporary digital media.

In coverage of _Talk_’s re-publication, the book is often portrayed as a progenitor of dialogue-based, semi-confessional documents of young – and typically also white, urban and upwardly mobile – female experience. The recently reissued version features an introduction by writer Stephen Koch, who reflects on Rosenkrantz’s categorization as a forebear of Lena Dunham, Ilana Glazer, Abbi Jacobson and other artists engaged with adult coming-of-age narratives. Koch makes no bones about the impetus for marketing _Talk_ to a contemporary audience: “This ‘reality’ novel is a small founding classic which provides a model for television series like _Girls_ and _Broad City_ and all the many novels and series like them that focus on the primacy of non romantic peer relationships. It is filled with the same raw talk between independent women friends that gives those series their crackle of excitement.”[^1]

The comparisons Koch draws between _Talk_ and _Girls_ and _Broad City_ reflect another aspect of the book’s commercial appeal: its chronicling of the uncertainty and fraught passions of individuals in their mid- to late twenties living in New York City. As Rosenkrantz was a member of the muchvaunted 1960s art scene, the recorded conversations between the writer “Marsha” (a pseudonym for Rosenkrantz), the actress “Emily” and the painter “Vincent” (Emily and Vincent’s real identities remain a mystery[^2]) provide unique insight into the social mores and identity politics of an epoch whose resonance lingers today.

It would be reductive, however, to laud _Talk_ simply on the basis of its representation of an oft-fetishized moment in western culture. Though the promise of an insider’s take on soirées attended by Susan Sontag, Harold Pinter and Andy Warhol presents an undeniable allure, interpreting _Talk_ as an (albeit experimental) archival object overlooks the poignancy of Rosenkrantz’s formal undertaking. In recording, transcribing and editing conversations between herself and two friends, Rosenkrantz created a living object that exists selfconsciously within a broader cultural history. To value _Talk_ merely as a primary record risks ignoring Rosenkrantz’s more insistent project of examining how experiences themselves are always made and unmade – understood, challenged and reinterpreted – according to how they  
are articulated in the present. Reading _Talk_ today thereby compels one to re-evaluate the implications of social and political conversations occurring in real life versus online contexts.

In the end, it seems fitting that _Talk_’s setting is summertime, a season known equally for igniting passion and stoking ennui. The artists whose dialogue comprises _Talk_ are at least semi-aware that contemplating their (self-proclaimed) successes and failures could be perceived as indulgent. However, Marsha, Emily and Vincent are unconcerned with audience reaction. _Talk_ is not reality television nor a series with content that reflects viewer response; it is a testament to conversation itself. The characters are self-conscious. They worry aloud about fulfilling their aspirations, about whether finding meaning and love are synonymous, or even congruent, pursuits. In short, they are humans who have been captured in a series of intimate, verbal still lifes. The resulting narrative thus stands in contrast to the kind of direct engagements with an externalized audience that characterize contemporary confessional work.

As readers of _Talk_, we are provided rare access to a thorough, yet unforced, examination of friendship taken up as a project unto itself. As Marsha comments to Emily, “I get a very scary feeling sometimes that I’m pushing myself into a corner – all of a sudden I’m beginning to find everyone except you and Vinnie very dull. We’ve set up such a stimulating, total, free, hysterical, intimate, intense relationship that I find it impossible to relate to other people, they leave me completely cold.”[^3] While the reader intuits that this intensity cannot persist indefinitely, we observe Rosenkrantz/Marsha and her friends noting this as well. Ultimately, we encounter _Talk_ as a testament to conversation as a means of revealing the intersections between art and life, candour and self-awareness, and the ways in which these facets of modern life influence human relationships and critical thinking

[^1]: Stephen Koch, introduction to _Talk_, by Linda Rosenkrantz (New York: New York Review Books, 2015), viii.
[^2]: John Williams, “Among Friends: Linda Rosenkrantz on ‘Talk,’” _The New York Times_, (August 25, 2015), http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/amongfriends-linda-rosenkrantz-on-talk/?\_r=0.
[^3]: Rosenkrantz, _Talk_, 126.

issue-129-p72-74.pdf

This article, written by Esmé Hogeveen, reviews Linda Rosenkrantz Talk (New York Review Books, 2015). 

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Issue 129