This event was held in collaboration with THE WORLD AS TEXT, a temporary reading room (June 16 - August 12) featuring over 75 artists’ books.
An official lead up event for Printers Ball, the readers were organized by Eileen P. Murphy for Poetry.
Music
John Preus, Theaster Gates, Matthew Joynt, Tadd Cowen.
Poets
Mike Puican, Cecilia Pinto, Ava Kadishson Schieber, Kenyatta Rogers, Jennifer Steele
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Check out recent reviews of THE WORLD AS TEXT:
Waxman, Lori. “An alternative summer reading list,” Chicago Tribune, July 13, 2011
Weber, Candace. “The World as Text at the Center for Book and Paper Arts, TimeOut, July 13, 2011
Enjoy!
On Furniture, a panel discussion (June 22, 2011) on craft & contemporary art with John Preus, Lane Relyea, Kevin Henry and Shannon Stratton
visitors enjoy the reading table / stage
“…the writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages” -Roland Barthes
Most of the time furniture just sits there against the wall looking stupid (or beautiful, or cluttered, or un-dusted, or harrowed and long-suffering, or much too polished, or all-dressed-up-with-nowhere-to-go … ) Furniture has (at least) two states of being, as a thing to be looked at, and a thing that performs some essential function more or less efficiently, which in furniture’s case is to obscure, camouflage, cover up, support, enable … the performance of some other task. It is alternately in service and in view. There is the face (mask, appearance) it presents, and something that happens in, around, upon, or because of the thing. It is often the case with furniture that when something is happening on it, (sitting, writing, reading, eating…) the piece of furniture becomes invisible. Its appearance disappears into service. It becomes too close to see. You have to stand up from the chair to see it. You have to leave the building to look at it. This division between function and appearance (symbol and structure; form and content, what is said and what is done…) is text, the space between the lines that we read to determine if form suggests a function that it cannot deliver or presents a facade that is incongruous with its interior. This reading gives rise to thought about authenticity, honesty, belief, commitment, intention, earnestness, identity, rhetoric, meaning what you say…
Indeed, there may be nothing outside of the text, in which case reading is as inescapable as breathing, and the staging of a reading room simply invites a particular kind of attention to a structural framework in which the book in hand is simply the most obvious interpretive activity that we are all currently performing. -John Preus
The World as Text is intended as a provocation to thought about the degree to which we engage the world through a kind of quotation or paraphrase, using language that we didn’t invent, within contexts often not of our own choosing, upon platforms and structures that we have inherited. How it is that we inhabit these pre-existing structures, find value in them, make decisions and take ownership is something like a process of customization, a process of decision-making within a limited range of options.
Quotation is a deliberate use of another author’s text. Paraphrase intends to recast the original idea in ones own words, which is to say to edit, to filter the ideas through a personal lens, in an attempt to restate what was originally said. Paraphrase is the attempt to say exactly the same thing as the author without saying exactly the same thing as the author, or a translation into the same language, as an attempt to bridge some social or language barrier. It serves to expand the ideas into territory that was not covered by the author, but which may be suggested by the original text. Or it implies that the original author was not clear with the initial text, and that the secondary writers serve the role of postscript editors, clarifying and elaborating, ostensibly to disentangle, explain, or personalize the text for a specific group of readers. ... Pure paraphrase assumes that there is a perfect equivalent for every word and concept in our vocabulary, but can hardly help being tinged with editorial energy . Quoting is maybe more complex since it appears to repeat what has already been said, without necessarily acknowledging how its repetition is affected by the given context.
I find this all relevant in relation to the things and platforms that we inherit from our predecessors. My work has for a long time concerned itself with this question of inheritance,of what is worth preserving and maintaining and ultimately believing in and caring about. It is this sort of world that we find ourselves thrown into, amongst an array of more or less significant objects and relationships. And it may be that a good deal of the anxiety attendant to contemporary western urban life is due to the burden of choice and the degree to which these choices define us in the eyes of others.
-John Preus
