Q.E.D. II: Inchoate Affinities: The Open-Wall Architecture of Language and Gender

“Language is there to bewilder itself and others.” -Sabine Speilrein

Monday
April 8, 2013
7:00 p.m.

MAK Center for Art & Architecture at the Schindler House
835 N. Kings Road
West Hollywood, CA 90069

Featuring:
Kim Rosenfield
Yedda Morrison
Vanessa Place

Moderated by Andrea Quaid

$7 General; Free for Friends of the MAK Center and Members of Les Figues Press with RSVP (office[at]makcenter.org).

Q.E.D. II is a series of performances curated around issues of affinity, influence, and provocation. This program includes three events over the course of three months (March 13, April 8, and May 15); each evening features a Les Figues author alongside two additional writers and/or artists, whose work as impacted the author’s. Q.E.D. II builds on our 2012 Q.E.D. series on queer art and literature, including the questions Q.E.D. raised about bodies, sexuality, and identity. This year, Les Figues Press invites authors to act as both participant and curators—emphasizing communities of influence over issues of queerness—underscoring that both are bonds of affinity.

In her curatorial statement, Kim Rosenfield writes:

“In my writing, and in the artistic/intellectual communities I engage with, language can be moved, turned, buried, supported, doubled, transgenerationally transmitted, and softly assembled. Does gender, like language, like the radical design flow of this Schindler home, arrive from without to within and back out again? And if so, is the dividium the Self? In my work, and the work that I align with, texts are entirely appropriated, moving from strange attractor to strange attractor, able to bewilder and therefore expand or challenge capacities of ‘knowing.”

The program is curated by Les Figues Press and supported through a Cultural Resource Development Grant from the City of West Hollywood.

Q.E.D. references a novel by Gertrude Stein; Q.E.D. (Quod Erat Demonstrandum, or Things as They Are) was one of the earliest coming stories, written in 1903 though not published until 1950, after Stein’s death.

Participants

Kim Rosenfield is a poet and psychotherapist. She is the author of several books of poetry, includingGood Morning—Midnight— (Roof Books 2001), Tràma (Krupskaya 2004), re:evolution (Les Figues Press 2009) and Lividity (Les Figues Press, 2012). Her latest book, USO: I’ll Be Seeing You was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2013. Her work has been included in the anthologies Against Expression(Northwestern University Press), Bowery Women (YBK Publishers, Inc.), The Gurlesque (Saturnalia), I’ll Drown My Book (Les Figues Press), and The Unexpected Guest: Art, writing and thinking on hospitality(Liverpool Biennial, ART/BOOKS). From 1993-2002 she co-founded and co-edited Object magazine with poet Robert Fitterman. She is part of the artist/writer’s collaborative The Collective Task (The Collective Task, Patrick Lovelace Editions, 2009). Rosenfield lives and works in NYC.

Writer and visual artist Yedda Morrison was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her books include Darkness (Make Now Press, 2012), Girl Scout Nation (Displaced Press, 2008) and Crop(Kelsey Street Press, 2003). She has performed and exhibited her work widely and is currently represented by Republic Gallery in Vancouver, BC.

Of Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman’s Notes on Conceptualisms, Mary Kelly said, “I learned more about the impact of conceptualism on artists and writers than I had from reading so-called canonical works on the subject.” Considered a leading practitioner of conceptual poetry, Place’s recent work is available in French (Exposé des Faits), English (Statement of Facts, Statement of the Case, andArgument), Danish (Andersen’s Wank), and German (Die Dichtkunst). Place is also author of the prose-works, Dies: A Sentence, and La Medusa, and a non-fiction book, The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and Law, based on her work as an attorney representing indigent sex offenders on appeal. Place is co-director of Les Figues Press, and a regular contributor to X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly. Place lectures and performs internationally.

Moderator:

Andrea Quaid is a writer and critic. She is a founding editor of the new UCSC Poetry and Politics imprint. Recent critical and creative publications include the American Book Review, aPlod, BOMBlog, Jacket2, Lana Turner, LIT and Los Angeles Review of Books. She is a faculty member of Bard’s Language and Thinking Program and California State University, Los Angeles.