OEI #82-83 Art in the Age of Kleptomania

The new publication triangulates between geopoetics, geopolitics, and cultural geography; a 464 page issue with some 50 contributors as well as a large section on Swedish philosophical geographer Gunnar Olsson.

Once more, an astonishing issue of OEI – a thrilling, compelling, stimulating feast of ideas regarding publishing and the book: the perfect big companion to read and hug in bed while the virus spreads outside.

Bringing together contributions from circa 130 publishing structures, publishing communities, magazines, small press endeavors, artists, poets, writers, editors, theoreticians, curators, scholars, and art bookstores, OEI # 86–87 reflects upon the challenges, pressures and possibilities of publishing and creating publics in different contexts and places in a time of far-reaching – economical, medial, political, social, technological – transformations.

The potential and the versatility of publishing open it to a diversity of practices and approaches in the arts, but as an eminently social form of art, a collective or micro-collective work with shared responsibilities, it is also a never-ending process of “crafting a variegated approach to how you create, publish, distribute, and build a social ecosystem around your efforts”, of trying to “build up and strengthen the community around these printed forms” (Temporary Services).

It is the conviction of OEI #86–87 that print has the power to play an important part in the construction of social spaces, of a social world. As Benjamin Thorel puts it in one of the essays in the issue, “conceiving of the dynamics of publishing as making publics as well as making things public is not a pun – insofar as the artists/publishers encompass, beyond the book itself, its possible ‘lives’, imagining the different spaces, and the different people, amongst whom a publication will circulate.” This is what Michael Warner has called “a public [as] poetic worldmaking”, implying “that all discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterize the world in which it attempts to circulate, projecting for that world a concrete and livable shape, and attempting to realize that world through address.”

This is also, as stressed by Annette Gilbert and others, what can make publishing such an active force, a force co-constituting texts and publications and publics. Indeed, with Michalis Pichler, it is tempting to say that in publishing as practice – perhaps more than in any other art field – “artists have been able to assert the aesthetic value of their own socio-politically informed concerns and to engage, often under precarious conditions, in cultural activities fully aligned with their political values.”

OEI #86–87 also includes sections on and with contemporary poetry from Canada; Fluxus publishing; Krister Brandt/Astrid Gogglesworth; Kalas på BORD (Öyvind Fahlström); Lars Fredrikson; Claude Royet-Journoud’s poetry magazines; Carl Einstein; Gail Scott; Ållebergshändelser; OEI #79: edit/publish/distribute!; “det offentligas försvinnande” and many many other things. [publisher’s note]

Design by Konst & Teknik

Ernesto de Sousa (1921–1988) was a major and multifaceted figure from the Portuguese avant-garde—artist, poet, critic, essayist, curator, editor, filmmaker, and a promoter of experimental ideas and artistic expressions. 
Reflecting questions of hierarchy, authorship, and the complexity of framing or dividing within the multiple and complementary practices of Ernesto de Sousa—whose motto “Your Body is My Body, My Body is Your Body” serves as a poetic manifesto—this publication explores the various aspects of his oeuvre (visual, poetical, and theoretical) and his outstanding inventiveness of concepts.

The volume brings together a selection of works, unpublished archives and their translations, and theoretical texts by Ernesto de Sousa, including the first complete translation in English of «Orality, the future of art?» (1968). Richly illustrated, the book reunites an introductory text by Lilou Vidal, two new essays by Paula Parente Pinto and by José Miranda Justo along with a text by Hugo Canoilas.

"There was a time when bread was sacred; and in a general sense, all fabricated objects deserved the respect that resulted from (for the conscience of those who used them) concretely diving into their own motivations. Human gestures, like aesthetic objects, were inseparable from their relevant functions. Naturalism prompted us to look at natural and fabricated objects with a vision that was cosmic and indifferent at the same time. The objects, today, object. In the future, objects and gestures will perhaps clothe themselves once again in their lost dignity. The word love, a bit of bread, the letter A will stop being mortal accidents of daily life. Desacralized, they will once again be as decisive as the tiniest brushstroke the painter made on his canvas. And each of these brushstrokes will reveal the structure of the world. Life can then be compared to a vast work of art. Everything will be absolutely aesthetic.."
— Ernesto de Sousa

Contributors: Hugo Canoilas, Ernesto de Sousa, Tobi Maier, José Miranda Justo, Paula Parente Pinto, Lilou Vidal

Dear ____,

I happened to look for a while out of “my” window on the 17th floor Palliativstation of the Wiener Allgemeinen Krankenhauses last night, where an enormous orange moon was hanging about, consorting with a lick of dark cloud, near to the tiny gaggle of skyscrapers. I didn’t have much to say for myself and so it just sort of looked back at me. 

Every day friends and well-wishers come here and as always I want to run to my room and read a book until they’ve left but for the first time in my life my room is also the room they want to visit, and so I can’t. I wrote down yesterday as best as I could the words of my last long conversation with Marina: there might be more, but the words are running away from her now, which only makes you realise how small and insignificant they are, fleeing from something (from someone) who remains exactly who they were even in their absence: like dust falling from the sun.

* 

A voyage in the insight which comes as a kiss and follows as a curse, made after you ran out of things to say.——first halting efforts at mutual understanding——love letters from twelve years ago. journal entries from fifteen years before lick at the edges like flames. Opaque coloured shadows, projected in three dimensions——of a——future that——has. never ceased to exist and which——Doesn’t——.——.——arrive to speak about their fears.—— Beginning with a naked bathroom selfie. 

An attempt to live nonjudgmentally and without fear, against the desire to be something other than who you were, as a basic form of class hatred, a fear of the common and of everything that happens there, near speechlessness, trailing off, only sometimes coming back to life again, shame dies so that everything else can be saved, and everything else remains present against the background of this absence, beneath the harsh overhead light, as you pull on the pathetic, unassuming string of the pullcord. 

Dedicated to one person, written by one another. “Poems written by / different poets / are my nakedness.”

BRAIDS is a 130 pages-long publication that features both visual and written works of 20 young creatives. The desire of BRAIDS is to expand the idea of queerness beyond the borders of identity. The journal exists to host bodies that deny framing and dare to expose the vulnerability of their difference. The publication is thus a woven story of the contemporary globalised queer, insecure but daring, honey-glazed yet continuously aching. 

It is right and necessary to be speaking with strangers. There are islands, backroads and cliffs of wet inked worded sea ridgelines where aodán McCardle’s work emerges concrete and lyric as a chant of delicately provoking permutations. forbid me my love, the first part of this beautiful book, is poetry as poiesis or making. By means of a series of concrete meditations, McCardle takes us where he, or perhaps the words themselves, unknit, erase, appear and disappear. Wor(l)ds of the size of terrorist and bomb are subject to a system of alterations that end up shooting lovebombs from the page as if love could become an error in the system. The second part of the book, LllOovVee, starts closer to verse. Reading it, one can almost hear aodán’s delicate Irish voice, but any easy reading gets explosively interrupted by the scanned handwritten, scribbled and scratched lines that open another set of permutations, one about what is behind us, how to be there here and what is it to be there then now, in the making, in the ear and in the eye with this revealing poetry.
 - Martín Gubbins 

Aodán McCardle is a performance poet, artist, & tattooist. In this book he combines all three artistic expressions into a performance. These poems are audacious. A poetic trajectory worthy of reading aloud.

Blade Pitch Control Unit is a gathering of Sean Bonney’s work in poetry between 2000-2005. It collects together all the work from his previous pamphlets that he still feels is valid, plus a number of previously unpublished pieces.

The presentation of this work in a single volume makes clear the scope of his project as a psychogeographic/historical exploration of the possibilities of political verse that would seek to obliterate the pitfalls of simple protest or the expression of easily assimilable opinions.

The work moves from psychogeographical registerings of Greenwich and the Isle of Dogs at the time of the Millennium Dome, through excavations of the ghosts of millennial heresies still present in contemporary London, and into a charting of the effects of official mendacity on the psyche of any individual citizen who knows that all private experience is collective.

The events of recent history play a major role, sometimes obliquely, sometimes less so, but Bonney refuses to allow his voice to be merely an outraged commentary on contemporary woes. Instead, he presents a poetry that makes clear that the protestor is also culpable, but equally a poetry that understands that only through a registering of this position can a way out be found.

For Bonney, a poem is typically a highly rhythmic (or arrhythmic) object that seeks through maximum density to communicate a dialectical relationship with the cosmos, and to explore the faultlines of official history and urbanism through which possibilities of liberation can be traced.

In the tradition of poets such as Charles Olsen, Alice Notley and Sappho, Allison Grimaldi Donahues poetry connects the history of breath and language with narratives about the discovery and loss of our own voice.

The Etruscan language knew no blank spaces, no breaks between words—its texture resembled an uninterrupted flow of speech; more singing than speaking, form rather than content. Only in the dictum of the pause, the meaningful fragmentation of the breath and the staccato of the Atemwende (Paul Celan) does language become comprehensible rhythmic expression.

In a world full of slogans and catchphrases, Allison Grimaldi Donahue defends the poetological demand of Sound over Content! The History of Breathing weaves linguistics and poetry, verse and song, meaning and sound into a dense narrative about breathing, rhythm, and the gaps in language that allow words to take on meaning in the first place.

Allison Grimaldi Donahue (born 1984 in Middletown, Connecticut, USA, lives and works in Bologna, Italy) works in text and performance exploring modes in which language and text can move between individual and collective experience. She is author of Body to Mineral and On Endings, and translator of Blown Away by vito m. bonito and Self-portrait by Carla Lonzi. She has given performances at Short Theatre, Almanac Turin, MACRO, MAMbo, Fondazione Giuliani, Kunsthalle Bern, Hangar Biccoca, and Flip Napoli.