New York based
magazine and art book publisher Capricious was initially founded as a fine art
photography magazine in 2004 by Swedish photographer Sophie Mörner. Now renowned
for their feminist and queer art books, with titles like Girls Like Us and Randy,
the collection of photographs of Los Angeles sex workers from the 1990’s by Eve
Fowler titled Hustler and Matt Keegan’s
box of art objects , ==. Capricious approached author Andrew Durbin (Mature Themes in 2014 and next year Blonde Summer both published by
Nightboat Books) and asked him to edit a book of his choice with the
stipulation that it be “literary”. Andrew Durbin invited five female writers,
Dodie Bellamy, Cecilia Corrigan, Amy De’Ath, Lynne Tillman and Jackie Want to
each contribute a short book of new or previously uncollected material.
2012 Guggenheim
fellowship recipient, artist Nayland Blake was approached to provide the cover
and packaging artwork. When Andrew Durbin was perusing archived drawings by
Nayland Blake he came across the furiously quacking ducks with the text Say bye
to reason and hi to everything – this artwork became the box cover artwork and
the overall project title.
Five short chapbooks,
five different genres, poetry, memoir, criticism, dramatic monologue and personal
journal are the resultant collection.
First up Jackie Wang’s
“Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb” a personal journal/poetry collection
recalling her dreams The medium Wang used was Twitter, placing the restriction of
the number of characters in play as well as the immediacy of her output and an
unknown audience adds a layer of complexity to the poems. Her simply revealing
to the world her inner demons, and the immediacy of her posting the poetic
tweets as soon as she wakes up, starting the tweet “stanzas” (loose definition
here) with the phrase “In the/my dream”. This demarking of her poems, where as
a twitter follower you will know where one poem starts and ends, is also a demarcation
of her dream life and reality.
On the box of cardboard letters there is a list of suggested phrases.
None of them have to do with Halloween.
The letters have melted together, making my task infinitely more
onerous.
The cardboard letters were also supposed to be perforated but weren’t.
It’s hard to assemble even a simple work, materially.
I have accidentally torn the letters of the word I wanted to make and
feel defeated about language.
An extremely personal
revelation covering a raft of subjects, sexual, artistic, desire, detachable
slug like penises, female lesbian desire, lust, book creation, brothers who are
under arrest, no subject is taboo here, and in a format that is very readable
and enjoyable this is a great introduction to Jackie Wang’s work. Check out
more via her twitter handle @LoneberryWang or her blog at
http://loneberry.tumblr.com/ How can I not like a collection that includes
the following quote?
I revolt: I no longer want to be a person. Clarice Lispector
Dodie Bellamy’s
collection, “More Important Than The Object”, covers a raft of personal art
viewing, and working history through eleven reflections presented as “memoir”.
With titles such as “Permanent Collection”, which explores the nuances,
feelings, emotions when entering an art space;
When I visit the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art I am both an
outsider without status and an artist in my own right, with a peculiar variety
of privilege. Being a writer, I’m not central to the Bay Area art scene, but I
bisect with it in overlapping circles. If you know any curators, the first
thing that you’ll realize is that in private they love to act out, to throw off
the formal constraints of writing copy for catalogues and signage, or whatever
they call those informative blocks of text that hand on the gallery walls, from
which the first person is forbidden. In private they take enormous pleasure in
disclosing, in writing the forbidden, getting all personal and critical and
gossipy, throwing around the first person with abandon. Get them alone and they’re
eager to extricate themselves from the official discourse of the museum, to
show the human side of the process, all the insecurities and resentments and near
catastrophes. They expose their feelings about their jobs, and how at times
when rushing around the museum they’re stopped in their tracks by the wonder of
a piece of art.
And Bellamy’s past as
a 16-year-old art student and her copy of /Vision In Motion” is explored, along
with photography, imagery, capitalist consumerism, in the memoir “Moholy-Nagy”;
In our culture of ahistorical surfaces and angles of gaze, we all know
better than to go around searching for transcendence, yet I suspect that most
of us still long for it, that being human, we’re hardwired for such longings.
“Cream” by Cecilia
Corrigan is a stream of consciousness style teenage anecdote/monologue about
the beauty industry;
Sometimes I have to look at the internet and see what kind of horrible
thing has happened now.
Things don’t seem to be working out very well for most people in the
world and there’s so much disaster and tragedy and so many products you’re
supposed to put on your skin or not, depending, and lists, and no one knows the
answers to any of it.
A monologue that flows
from Stanley Kubrick to Shelly Winters to Jean Genet to Abdallah the tight rope
walker, the common link their make up.
It’s sad how most men don’t get to use lotions, except for the
mysterious “aftershave.”
It’s like they don’t have any secrets.
Eight short poems make
up the chapbook “ON MY LOVE FOR Gender Abolition” by Amy De’Ath
Every feminist man thinks he is a good friend.
He wouldn’t hit a woman, nor rape her. Nor kill her,
but maybe he would writer something to pause the brain, a
Heraclitean litany or regular love song. Save her a song in the spirit
of universalism that she would comprehend –
All my abstract labour is on the mountain top. So fuck unto yourself.
Highly politically
charged poetry, covering Maxism, feminism, sexuality, this is another personal
revelation.
Lynne Tillman’s “In
These Intemperate Times: 9 Frieze
Columns” we have the critical essay. Seven short pieces that explore the
ordinary, where the writer actually explains is a mischaracterisation, maybe
the mediocre “Being mediocre requires an effort not to be ordinary, then
failing.” She explains the bulk of “ordinary people”, getting sucked into
watching reality television, where she generally reaches for the remote, this
time the thoughts, whilst watching The
Voice, she stays tuned, “If she can do it, I can”
On The Voice she sang for an
audience of millions. How at ease, I thought, she looks onstage, which
achievement – ease – is meant itself to be a modern-day miracle. The girl
started to sing and imitated what hundreds of pop singers have modelled on tv
since before her birth. There was no sense, to my eye, of her wanting to make
something her own, just to do what everyone else did as well as she could. She
had the moves down, handling the mic, doing the familiar gestures, and could
add the usual trill and vibrato here and there. The voice was a sweet,
unmemorable voice, a voice like so many voices. I didn’t watch to the end, the
outcome seemed clear, and she won a day or so later.
Factual in feeling, at
times disjointed, the flow or connection at times felt a little tenuous.
Containing a large number of great themes that could be explored in more
detail. The political, the entity known as a nation is explored in “Fighting
Talk” or language in “Seriously?”;
I’m not a cynic. I prefer irony, which depends on the ability to hold
contradictory ideas, which probably springs from ambivalence. People confuse
and conflate irony with insincerity and dishonesty; they believe an ironist isn’t
serious. But saying the opposite of what is meant allows for at least two
meanings to fly. Irony couples and uncouples statements, while revealing the
hidden agendas of language and its conventions. Still, defending irony is
self-defeating and oxymoronic. To mount an attack on anti-ironists would deny
me the pleasure of pointing without being pointed. Earnestness does have its
place. (President Obama’s new press secretary is names Earnest.) But to be
earnest treads the line of righteousness and, worse, self-righteousness. It is
often said of an earnest speaker that he or she means well. ‘Meaning well’
implies the speaker has used platitudes. Irony refuses platitudes, and hopes to
undo them.
Overall this is a very
tight collection of varied works that all address the common theme of identity,
a nicely presented collection that gives you a taste of all the writer’s works
without having to invest in a full length work. An enjoyable visit into the
minds of the margins in the USA.
