Tyler Coburn

Working at the nexus of performance, art writing, and fiction, Tyler Coburn creates monologues that explore how the “I” is marked in speech. His myriad topics—alternate history, legal personhood, digital labor, and resonant frequency, to name a few—defy straightforward modes of presentation, often insisting on site-specificity and social intimacy at the expense of conventional documentation. 

Some Monologues collects, for the first time, the scripts of Coburn’s work from the past fifteen years, many of which have not previously been published. Accompanying them are texts by eleven artists, writers, curators, and scholars who experienced these performances firsthand, collaborated in their making, conversed with the artist about them, or share an interest in the subjects they engage. Written in theoretical, poetic, and autobiographical registers, these contributions offer new perspectives on the monologue as an expansive and relational form.

Introduction by Elvia Wilk. Contributions by Yu Araki, A.E. Benenson, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Sven Lütticken, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Spyros Papapetros, Camille Richert, Théo Robine-Langlois, Ian Wallace, and Michelle Wun Ting Wong.

Tyler’s scripts refuse to fix an authorial voice; instead, they make the conditions of authorship itself their subject. Blurring the boundaries between fiction and document, the human and the bureaucratic, the self and its doubles, his work thinks through systems from the inside, often using language as both architecture and trap. In their precision and porousness, I recognize a shared pursuit: how to locate agency within constraint, and how to turn the administrative or the technological into a site of intimacy. — Jill Magid

In Tyler Coburn’s Some Monologues, a binary that remains constitutive for the ideological continuity of modern life, in all its colonial and capital forms, is undone: digital vs. physical. In troubling that chasm, Coburn plays out the repercussions of these ideologies of anthropomorphic naturalism, guiding us through their resonances, doubles, codings, and relays. But he also renders himself as the relay of these transferences, in the process expanding art’s premodern calling: to exist as an invocation. Reification suddenly appears as what is situated between embodiment and disembodiment, with both potentially destabilized. Some Monologues, the book, is this destabilization’s ideal format: as much documentation, an echo, of Coburn’s works through their scripts, as it is an instruction manual for denaturalizing our sense/s. — Kerstin Stakemeier

Tyler Coburn is an artist, writer, and professor based in New York. He received a 2024 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and his writing has appeared in ArtReview, BOMB, C Magazine, Dis, e-flux journal, frieze, LEAP, Metropolis M, Mousse, and Rhizome. Coburn is the author of four books: I’m that angel (self-published, 2012), Robots Building Robots (CCA Glasgow, 2013), Richard Roe (Sternberg, 2019), and Solitary (Sternberg and Art Sonje Center, 2022). He has presented artwork at such venues as Centre Pompidou, Paris; Bergen Kunsthall; Hayward Gallery, London; Para Site, Hong Kong; and Kunstverein Munich. 

Vogliamo Tutto. Cultural Practices and Labor has its origin in the novel Vogliamo tutto (1971) by Nanni Balestrini, whose protagonist Alfonso Natella became the voice of an entire generation as well as the workers' movements in 1968 Turin. In 2021, thirteen artists were invited to reflect on the change of labor in the contemporary context.

The result is a sum of choral voices and practices, which together outline the peculiar transformative nature of labor and its socio-cultural context over a wide time span: from the impact of the Industrial Revolution to the post-industrial decline and the shifts of the digital era.

The book features two essays by Samuele Piazza and Nicola Ricciardi, curators of the eponymous exhibition at OGR Torino; new writing by the artists Claire Fontaine and Tyler Coburn; and archive texts selected by the artists in the show: Andrea Bowers, Pablo Bronstein, Claire Fontaine, Tyler Coburn, Jeremy Deller, Kevin Jerome Everson, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Elisa Giardina Papa, Liz Magic Laser, Adam Linder, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Mike Nelson, and Renate Wiehager for Charlotte Posenenske.

The archive texts include the essays "Automation and the Invisible Service Function" by Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora; "Audio Poverty"Diedrich Diederichsen; "Sabotage" by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn; "Wages Against Housework" by Silvia Federici; "The Wreck of the Sea-Venture" by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker; "Charlotte Posenenske Mimetic Minimalism and Practicability" by Renate Wiehager; an excerpted texts from The Human Animal by Émile Zola; as well as the articles "A Game Designer's Analysis of QAnon" by Reed Berkowitz; "Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time" by Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy; the "Letter of Protest, Frieze Art Fair, New York" by Andrea Bowers, and the "License Agreement" by the Cultural Capital Cooperative collective; the script from Erie by Kevin Jerome Everson; a conversation between David Green and Rick Smith, UAW Local 1112, and LaToya Ruby Frazier.

Contributions from Samuele Piazza, Nicola Ricciardi, Tyler Coburn, Claire Fontaine.

Reprinted archive texts by Neda Atanasoski & Kalindi Vora, Diedrich Diederichsen, Silvia Federici, Peter Linebaugh & Marcus Rediker, Renate Wiehager, Reed Berkowitz, Tony Schwartz & Catherine McCarthy, Andrea Bowers, the Cultural Capital Cooperative.

The question of the voice and its prominent role in our postindustrial society.

The (non)human voice has always been part of modern art, notably within performance art, sound art, and conceptual art. However, Master of Voice temporary master program at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, mutated from this history, examining the voice as a unique “discipline.” The graduate program's focus was on the (non)human voice as a means to an end or an end in itself within artistic practice. A special orientation of the curriculum, co-developed with a team of artists with a longstanding interest in the (non)human voice, is the voice in relation to technology and gender. This book captures a two-year-long period of research—of thinking, talking, sharing, learning, making, acting, and creating by students and teachers, artists, and other practitioners—to find possible answers and approaches to the question of the voice and its prominent role in our postindustrial society.

Contributions by Tyler Coburn, Angelo Custódio, Thom Driver, Paul Elliman, Amelia Groom, Miyuki Inoue, Danae Io, Jamila Johnson-Small, Bin Koh, Snejanka Mihaylova, Maria Montesi, MPA, Natasha Papadopoulou, Duncan Robertson, Marnie Slater, Cécile Tafanelli, Mavi Veloso, Geo Wyeth, Eva Šusová.

Graphic design: Juliette Lizotte.

The meaning of the word ‘error’, in its origin, is neutral. In Latin ‘errare’ means both ‘to wander freely’ and ‘to wander from the right path’. After the seventeenth century, however, the word ‘error’ lost its ambiguity within English usage and became clearly understood as wrongdoing, as defect, as a way of missing a desired effect. The ninth issue of Pfeil Magazine focuses on the potential of erroneous processes to redefine the meaning of malfunction and takes a look at movements that are aimless or non-productive. Through this reflection, ‘error’ is introduced once again as the possibility of wandering freely. 

Contributions by: Mitchell Anderson, Christiane Blattmann, Adam Christensen, Tyler Coburn, Hans-Christian Dany, Michael Dean, Gina Fischli, Flaka Haliti, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, Lina Hermsdorf, Judith Hopf, Karl Larsson, Clare Molloy, Susan Morgan and Thomas Lawson, Mense Reents, Stacy Skolnik, Paul Spengemann, Ramaya Tegegne 

Editors: Anja Dietmann, Nadine Droste

Developed over the past year and a half, Cesura//Acceso Issue 2 contains new writing by Paul Abbott, Hannah Black, Nathaniel Mackey, Larne Abse Gogarty, Verity Spott, Irene Revell with Annea Lockwood, Paul Rekret, and Federica Frabetti with Mark Fell.

Issue 2, in response to the open call Corrupting Desires! Technique, Performance, and Control Cesura present a series of texts which deal with the problems of constraint, restraint and domination in relation to musical production, performance and reception. With contributions from Abject Subject Ensemble (Mattin, Farahnaz Hatam, Sacha Kahir, and Colin Hacklander), Naroder Bourniki, ESW, Danny Hayward, Sophie Hoyle, Sacha Kahir, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Claire Potter, Byron Peters and Tyler Coburn, David Morris and Kim O'Neil.

Cesura was formed in 2014 as a place to think through the politics of music. The first issue was published in 2014. They have since held workshops, talks, radio shows, and put on gigs exploring the politics of music, poetry and performance.