Revenge

Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas, co-editors at INCA Press (along with Irena Borić), are the guest-editors of this issue of OEI: it contains essays, artworks, and archival materials by 21 artists, theorists, writers, and artist-run spaces (mostly from the Americas).

The subject of the issue is art and neoliberalism, and it encompasses essays, images and other works by Dorothée Dupuis, Max Jorge Hindered Cruz, Luciano Concheiro, Yvonne Osei, Diego Bruno, John Riepenhoff, Suhail Malik, Good Weather, The Luminary, Bikini Wax, Beta-Local and more.

Charismatic Spirals is for an America circa 2024, where poetry—the art of developing new means of speaking—has never been of such artistic, technological and political consequences.

An archetypal outsider, Will Alexander released his first poetry collection aged forty-four while working at the Los Angeles Lakers' ticket office. Three decades on, he has ascended to the legendary status of the city's great living surrealist, existing, as Eliot Weinberger wrote, in a state of "imaginal hyperdrive," with forty such collections to his name.

Operating at the edge of language, Alexander deploys words in a way that feels prophetic—human psyches synthesize with technological artifacts; atoms and archetypes collide; bodies are vacated, voices are newly incarnated. His America—like Glissant's—is multinational and—like Coover and Spiegelman's—multivalent and symbolically unstable. That is to say, he belongs to an America circa 2024, where poetry—the art of developing new means of speaking—has never been of such artistic, technological, and political consequence.

In doing so, Alexander draws from a vast array of influences, from luminaries like Aimé Césaire, Bob Kaufman, Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Philip Lamantia, to holistic visions such as Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga, the Mayan numerical system, and Cheikh Anta Diop's perspectives on ancient Egypt. In a preview of Charismatic Spirals in the New York Times, Anne Boyer captured the essence of his work: "visionary poetry [that] achieves its effect through sound, not image...Cadence [that] can shatter us, set the world ablaze."
Read it syllabically, surf it quickly—there is no single way to approach this work.

Will Alexander (born 1948 in Los Angeles) is an African-American artist, philosopher, poet, novelist, essayist and pianist.

Faced with photos of a once-tumultuous New York art world, the narrator's mind in this scathing, darkly funny novel begins to erupt. Memories jostle for center stage, just as those that they are about always did. These brilliant but broken survivors of the '80s and '90s have now reached the brink of middle age and are facing the challenge of continuing to feel authentic. Luminous with imagery, cackling with bitter humor, and with a new foreword by the author, this roman a cle spares no one.

First published in 2003, Gary Indiana's turn-of-the-millennium novel traces the lives of a loosely connected group of New York artists and the dissolution of their scene.  

During the summer of 2001, the narrator of Do Everything in the Dark, a gallery curator, receives intermittent dispatches from his far-flung friends, many of whom resemble well-known figures in the art and intellectual worlds, who are spread out across the globe, from Istanbul to Provincetown to Santa Fe. Seeking various reprieves from a changed New York, the long-festering, glossed-over incompatibilities of these aging bohemians blossom into exotic and unbearable relief. Beneath the contemporary excesses Indiana chronicles, we can see the outlines of the earlier New York bohemia captured by Dawn Powell.  

Arguably Indiana's most intimate, internal, and compassionate work to date, Do Everything in the Dark is a chilling chronicle of madness and failure, success and disappointment, and the many ways love dies in a world people find increasingly unlivable.

As an artist how can you get out of the hiding position? To make art is to understand how you are, notice your prejudices and assumptions about value and acknowledge your hand in an unequal world, to recognise how you institute yourself while letting go of the outcome of work.

Ghislaine Leung is a British conceptual artist. Her work uses score-based instructions to radically redistribute and constitute the terms of artistic production. For Leung, limitations, felt as personal, institutional, structural or systemic to the parameters of industry, are engaged in as means to institute differently. Born in Stockholm, Sweden to a father from Hong Kong and a mother from London, she was raised first in Reims, France and then in London, England. She received a BA Fine Art in Context at the University of the West of England in 2002 and a Masters in Aesthetics and Art Theory at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University in 2009. Between 2004 and 2014 she worked at Tate and LUX, London. Leung’s first book was Partners (Cell Project Space, 2018). She lives in London, UK.

978-1-9164250-0-2
21.6 x 13.9 cm  
96 pp 
Paperback
September 2023

One day in April the body of Owen Beausoleil, a poet, is found drowned. As the investigation begins, three people find themselves haunted by him – Noah Lang, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy; his wife, Kitty Lang, a psychotherapist; and Lolita Hammershøi, a ballet dancer and Owen’s close friend. As the three of them become bound up in the mystery of what happened to Owen, their lives begin to interweave in both expected, and unexpected ways. Meanwhile, Owen intervenes from the after-life, desperate to find out his fate. Interiors is a about how loss and desire shape our lives, and about what waits beyond the borders of everyday life.Jessie Widner’s debut novel Interiors is poised and poetic, a moving account of what happens to the lost inner lives of the people who leave us, ‘the invisible things that expand within the self … that leave no record’. The mood of the novel, an air of trepidation, stayed with me long after I put it down like a ghostly presence, echoing the novel's own fictional haunting.

Jessica Widner is a writer and academic. Her work has appeared in Extra Teeth, Gutter Magazine, and The Cardiff Review. Interiors is her first novel.