Impossible to work

I spent yesterday in Hyde Park with Kath going to the Renaissance Society, the Seminary Co-Op”^a1a”, and a reading by Lyn Hejinian presented by Poem Present at the U of C. After the reading, everybody went up to the tea room on the second floor of the SSRB to hob nob with the poet.

The show at the Renaissance Society was not my favorite (which would have to be the Pierre Huyghe installation “The Third Memory” from a few years back) but that had more to do with the fact that I didn’t have enough context to understand the works. I read the vast majority of the essay printed on the poster before going in, but didn’t pick up the piece of paper with the titles of the works until after I had seen the work. After a while, I started to pull things together, but my initial reaction was not good. The individual works did not provoke any emotion in me, they just left me feeling as though I didn’t get something (and that is most certainly still true). After learning that each piece was derived from a very long novel that the artist, Mai-Thu Perret, has been writing for quite some time helped, but didn’t do it for me.

As I was starting to understand the work and what was going on in the gallery, I started to think of the work as not so strongly executed. The majority of the pieces in the gallery were papier-mâché mannequins in dresses (not designed by the artist) with some variety of neon hoops attached to them. These pieces are from a larger series called Apocalypse Ballet. You could still see the chicken wire frame through the paper and they generally didn’t look very good. I had a moment where I thought this might be intentional, but ultimately decided that my initial feeling was the one to go with. I’ll give the artist the benefit of the doubt on this one. I didn’t get to see the whole series, maybe something amazing happens when they are all presented together.

Much better, though still not so amazingly executed, was a huge teapot that you could walk into. The acoustic environment was insane. The fluorscent lighting was crazy. That was amazing. It was perhaps not as subtle as the mannequins, but I really liked it. Inside this teapot were small paintings, painstakingly executed, of various two-dimensional geometric figures.

I love the Renaissance Society partially because I don’t always like the work presented there. What I didn’t like about this show was that you needed a massive amount of contextualization to even begin to understand what was going on with the work. This work is heavily process-oriented, which makes it interesting in and of itself (as far as i’m concerned) even if I thought that the product wasn’t really amazing.

The reading was co-sponsored by the Renaissance Sociey and I really enjoyed it. I didn’t know anything about Hejinian before going. When I heard the name Gertrude Stein in the intro, I immediately thought, “Oh no, I’m going to hate this” (No offense to those of you who love Stein, she’s just not my thing). I was immediately made very happy by the fact that Hejinian’s work is interesting to me. The first piece she read, in particular, a work-in-progress called Lola (I believe) was excellent. Her disclaimer at the beginning was that the work is not a poem but a circus (based in her work on the idea of being in a border space between two other places. This links up to the idea of the circus through the way people act when they are near a border, “Clowning around” being her words, as I recall). The piece is strcutured into three rings (called chapters, for good reason). Much like at an actual circus, your attention is directed to and away from each ring. Lots of real and metaphorical violence, very vivid, very physical, very much so more interesting to me than the rest of the work she read. She’s not my new favorite poet, but I enjoyed the way she uses words.

The perfect ending was had with refreshments upstairs afterwards. I sat in on Jen’s conversation with Ms. Hejinian (which was pleasantly long enough) and found her to be a really interesting, kind, and open woman. I won’t recount the conversation, I’ll just say that I felt lucky to be able to sit and listen (and occasionally say, “yes”) while they talked.

1. Where I picked up Reader’s Block by David Markson as well as Mirror to America by John Hope Franklin. I’ll tell you about them later. aaa