Rachel Cole

I hadn’t been to the MCA since before the DNC so decided to head over this previous weekend to check out the Terry Maker exhibit that was opening to the public with lectures by the artist, as well as the other openings I’d missed.

Maker is a Colorado local and the installations on-view through January 18th, demonstrates a certain gesture of manufacturing representations of nature, the Garden of Nineveh and honeycomb, specifically. Maker exhibited at the signature, Robischon Gallery, about a year ago, also displaying an interest is emphasizing process as an aspect of content, in addition to form.

Another highlight is the current Jane Hammond exhibit in the photography gallery. Hammond’s process includes collaging to create a certain surrealist quality. These photographs are rather like Max Ernst’s collage novel, Une Semaine de Bonte, revolving themes of violence, decadence, landscape, and sexualization. Some of Hammond’s photographs carry the same quality of sensuality and disturbance characteristic of Ernst’s.

Fourteen days until Damien Hirst opens, but who’s counting?

For more info about MCA exhibit see www.mcadenver.org, pictured: Terry Maker, "Garden of Nineveh"

You would think there would be a calm before the storm. But around town, it's looking like plenty of galleries and music venues are just warming up. Look out for these events:

AUGUST 16TH (MUSIC): Porlolo, Mark Darling, and Ian Cooke perform at Mercury Cafe, 2199 California St, 9pm, www.mercurycafe.com

AUGUST 19TH (MUSIC): John Weise, spellcaster, Sterile Garden, Novasak, Page 27, and Weak Sisters perform at Rhinoceropolis, 3553 Brighton Blvd, 9pm, www.myspace.com/rhinoceropolis

AUGUST 21ST (EXHIBITION OPENING): DIALOG: Denver opens at Robischon Gallery, 1740 Wazee St, 6-8pm, www.robishongallery.com, www.dialogcity.org

AUGUST 22ND (THEATER): Manhattan's Last Fight, a new play, by my favorite local playwright, Jonson Y Kuhn, premiers at Crossroads Theatre, 2590 Washington St, 7:30pm, www.denvercrossroads.com

AUGUST 22ND (EXHIBITION OPENING): William Stockman, Internal Combustion exhibit opens at Ironton Studios, 3636 Chestnut, 7-10pm, www.irontonstudios.com

AUGUST 23RD (EXHIBITION OPENING): Lynn Hershmann Leeson, "Artificial Intelligence Is Better Than No Intelligence" exhibit opens at Belmar Lab, 404 S Upham St, Lakewood, 12pm, www.belmarlab.org

And don't forget there are many free films to be viewed at www.cinemocracy.org

Denver poet, Noah Eli Gordon, has a new chapbook out, entitled, Acoustic Experience. Gordon is the author of Novel Pictorial Noise (recently chosen by John Ashbery for the National Poetry Series), Figures for a Darkroom Voice (in collaboration with Joshua Marie Wilkinson and Noah Saterstrom), and The Frequencies, among other books.

Gordon’s work often takes musical composition as a subject, but I’m always most struck by how image operates in his poetry. It’s as if to study music via language, one must most express the visual aspect of music. “Acoustic Experience” begins with a poem entitled, “Scorched Anecdote,” referencing other poets in the local scene (though recognizing this isn’t necessary to engage with the poem), and slips into a repetition of salvaging selves from their others, or selves from selves, perhaps.

The chapbook moves as a study of moments and meditations on flight, little nuances of histories, linguistic interrogations, scales of time. And Gordon has a satirical streak. He writes, “It’s true you can refute the historic role of a stone by simply kicking it” and “The problem of the airplane is falling.” I won’t give away the ending lines of the collection, but they’re (fabulously) in this same vein. Despite a raised philosophical eyebrow, Gordon expresses a great deal of tenderness for image as well: “…a sun tied to the sky by schematics like a crayon crushed on a blackboard.” Actually, the reworking of the color yellow throughout the piece (while barely ever saying the actual word), is subtle but visually moving, as if an entire oddly-tinted yellow landscape is laying out between the sky of airplanes being taken apart, and leaves of paper rustling on the ground.

Pavement Saw Press, $7, www.pavementsaw.org

Two more recent 16th Street Mall acts for a slow-moving though enjoyable attempt to archive performers:

Two mimes dressed head to toe in black and silver masks performed one recent Sunday afternoon near Glenarm. They do a bizarre and frightening little dance, with alternatively smooth gestures that reflect each other and sudden jumpy moves. If one of them catches your eye, they'll stare you down. I'll try to post a video of this nightmarish act soon.

Andy, Leah and Bryce, a 3-string folk band sometimes performs near California St, covering old bluegrass songs. All three sing along. Andy, the cello player, spins his entire instrument around for emphasis. Musically they're obviously very knowledgeable about their genre and are laid-back though entertaining performers.

JAMES BELFLOWER

James Belflower’s work appears or is forthcoming in: Jacket, 580 Split, EOAGH, LIT, First Intensity, Coconut, and Abovo, among others. And Also a Fountain, his collaborative chapbook with Anne Heide and J. Michael Martinez, is forthcoming from NeOPepper Press. He was a finalist for the 2008 Sawtooth Poetry Prize and the National Poetry Series Competition, a 2007 Pushcart nominee and winner of the 2007 Juked Magazine poetry prize. He runs PotLatch Poetry, a site dedicated to the free exchange of poetry books, journals, chapbooks and ephemera.

A year ago, I described James’s work as criminal: indecent, thieving and composed of a linguistic momentum comparable to a getaway. Today, I would like to describe James’s work in the specific terms of another criminal act (depending on what country you’re in), called Parkour.

Parkour is defined as An athletic discipline or performance art in which practitioners traverse any environment in the most efficient way possible using their physical abilities, and which commonly involves running, jumping, vaulting, rolling and other similar physical movements.

James’s two most recent projects, The Pregnancy of Contour and Commuter, explore the questions of movement. And if poetry is language charged to the smallest unit, then these works are composed of the most efficient, disciplined movement, a temporary symmetry of a few seconds, an explosion of verbs. But disinclined to closure, this language of motion also short-circuits, dips into hideaways, detours, separates, pauses. These words invade, even to the point of instructing, rather explicitly, to the reader/performer how to express the work. It is this juxtaposition of violent invasiveness, a poetry that asks us read with the body poised, and a sense of forgiveness, a music of empathy, that asks us to listen to the history of ourselves, that these pieces project off the page.

text below from The Pregnancy of Contour

To Address Inviscid Flow:

It will be a much different pregnancy than we are accustomed to. If I cannot boundary a fief can it remain a fife, if I remain in ignorance throughout, can it remain a fief, if I use language other than from stones on a tablet can it remain a fief, if I read it as if it is as drone at least one other language underneath can it remain a fief, if I remove that language and place it on top can it remain if or if I remove the remains of it can if become it and therefore if I…

a formula of negligence…

a formula for ignorance…

a formula for fascination…

It does equal, does not equal. (is there an almost equals, or almost does not equal?) The majority of readers will breeze past this formula, as I have for lack of comprehension. I’ll attempt to address what it means to me, send it on its way…

“Part of any endeavor is ignorance. Part of it is an attempt to repose with fascination, what we might momentarily label the “tourist phase/flow.” Let’s argue that p in the equation is the p which begins both previous sentences. So, in some ways it means part in other senses it establishes the context of the entire sentence. So some letters/words are much more important than others?

I don’t know hoWho). Both address and address. My attempt to address viscous. One and the same. It is to letter, which isn’t similar to address. To speak in the correct direction, to address address. This is that. For our purposes that will be from this point forward. Until we change directions. That is all…

…perhaps. Or perhaps, how is also who, at least when addressed, or is it addressed?

_____________________________________________________________________________________

ANNE HEIDE

Anne Heide is the author of a forthcoming book of poems, Echo Robin (Tarpaulin Sky Press) and two chapbooks, Specimen, Specimens (Etherdome), and Residuum::Against (Woodland Editions). Her work has appeared in various journals including New American Writing, Notre Dame Review, New Orleans Review, and Court Green, among others.

The past has the voice of each imprint, each caress or wound we left around, in the ground, or in a creature. A room is filled with various noises, which silence puts in order. You listen to them the moment they approach the lamp to be burned like a swarm of voluptuous moths. Your body, as mine, responds with a thousand invisible marks whose history we are the only ones to know and not tell. –Edmund Jabes
Anne’s collection, Echo, Robin takes the narrative of a murder event as it’s subject but resists a process of total decomposition. Rather, she begins with the residue, imprint, aftershock of disaster. Her language operates through the shape of memory, loaded like a gun, fragile like an egg, edgy with the cannibal relationship between silence and noise. “I am the hazard of one person,” she writes and so an ethereal “I” echoes “I” becomes lost without becoming loss, bends over a body of water much like the original tale of Echo and Narcissus then swallows a palm. Our narrator is human, a thief, and anonymous, an encasement of language that bears witness without bearing judgment. What perhaps makes the work most restlessly beautiful, is that although organized around multi-perspectival language, the voice has the architecture of an undeniable singularity, an “I” that cannot escape from itself, cannot escape from the swarm of thoughts, obsessions and histories that speak it.

text below from Echo, Robin

In the long span of event, there is a present that is hollow
by necessity,

a hollow creek that wraps the present. A home for
creek: I’ll be home.

Because this has been unable to escape me. I am alone for all my
storied selves,

for all my wooded fables. By speaking the
creek

Am I possible. Am

I gentle

Found the others.

Though: I am the hazard of one person.

16th Street Mall is well-known locally and beyond as a vibrant area where street performers gather.

Below is the start of a list of some of the acts, longtime as well as just passing through. I think it would be interesting for someone or a group of people to archive the various artists and musicians on the 16th Street Mall. So here’s a beginning. I think I’ll add to it over time and perhaps at some point even attempt to capture audio of some of the music. But for right now it’s a humble collection of an identifiable four. By all means, if you know of others by name or fame, send me info (pics, audio and other media welcome).

Maha Dava, musician, specifically a citar player. Originally from Texas. Recently performing near 16th and California St.

Tovio Roberts, musician capable of playing various instruments while juggling. Originally from Detroit but claims to have learned his unique method of music from Eastern European circus acts.

Human Statue, performance artist painted silver who stands at various locations on 16th Street during the warm months, not moving, except to occasionally jump at unsuspecting passersby. Placard near her feet says something to the affect of, “All donations support the care and maintenance of this statue.”

Roger, insect sculptor, no longer plying his ware. Every summer for the past 5ish years Roger used to sit near 16th and California St, sculpting dragonflies and wasps out of wire and beads, selling them for $3-5. Really beautiful objects (I own three). This summer he was kicked off the mall for not having a permit. I’m quite devastated about it and hope to see him return next year (or maybe he’s just on another corner?).

This past week, in separate conversations, I heard two nearly unrelated things, concerning how one could approach contemporary art. The first was from a good friend, who said something to the nature of, “I don’t like most contemporary art because it’s not art.” When I asked him to explain what he meant, he referenced several controversial public art pieces in Denver (which I’ll leave unnamed, as those debates have been well-trodden elsewhere). He explained that, “weird art,” as he put it, doesn’t involve any real skill beyond what any carpenter could do and the intellect behind “real art” is pretentious. The second comment about art was from my father, a carpenter for the past twenty-odd years. He was visiting me at the Dikeou Collection, and always an enthusiast of Western realism, told me that he thinks the, “real art,” is the craftsmanship put into the actual building, pointing to the original mail shoot from the 1890’s that runs from the top floor to the bottom.

Having observed the flurry of construction going on in Denver during the past months in preparation for the DNC, seeing half-gutted buildings (that look a bit like fold-out doll houses), the exposed scaffoldings and metal frames, having the weird experience of walking past a building just as it was being imploded to the ground –strangely like performance art- I got thinking about the relationship between blue-collar construction work and fine art. Specifically, the not uncommon critique that, fine art is intellectually pretentious juxtaposed to the not unheard of claim that avant-garde art is over-priced plumbing.

And I don’t totally disagree with my friend or my father. I have aided in artist installations that required a hammer and nails, and the experience was acutely reminiscent of helping my father when I was child on some home improvement project. My friend is right, much contemporary art no longer requires that an artist hone his or her skills with the paintbrush (though painting is not a dead form), but learn carpentry instead (and perhaps this is even an unexpected result of the Ready-Made era). Furthermore, an antique mail shoot certainly is it’s own art form (and Duchamp would probably not have disagreed). My only question is why such resistance in collapsing the two points into each other as mutually uplifting?

The most thorough creative expression I’ve ever encountered of these ideas (the Ready Made, accidental art, art that is labor-based, imagination vs. reality) is a translation of Dreams and Stones, originally written in Polish by Magdelena Tulli. The collapse, construction and relapse of any city, in response to tragedy or opportunity, is undoubtedly an aesthetic all it’s own, a kind of disturbed, temporary beauty. I really enjoy reading the critique written about the Denver art scene, both by Denver-area critics and those passing through, whether or not I agree. But I think I like most of all taking a walk through this movement, disagreement, momentary congruity, an explosion or construction of layers, the constant cycle that flips over before the dust quite settles. Quite simply, Denver, in transition, is beautiful.

Vis-A-Visage, a group exhibit now on-view at Object+Thought, focuses on the question of the feminine, specifically the female face as it relates to beauty, pop-culture and history, but successfully avoids all the bad metaphors that can disempower the subject. Formal comparison of woman-to-flower, singular emphasis on fertility, and the idealization of female sexuality are not to be found here. The images though striking (and in a few cases, rather disturbing) also avoid hyperbolic gestures of female identity that push and thus expose the cultural/masculine gaze to the nth degree. Don’t get me wrong: I am intrigued and even sometimes moved by traditional representations of woman and I appreciate extreme, deconstructive expressions of the feminine figure. My point is that Vis-A-Visage, as a concept and (mostly) in actualization, is aesthetically powerful because the artists seem to avoid stuffing “woman” full of more political agenda.

Rather, most of the drawings and paintings seemingly operate on the notion of palimpsest, weeding through the intertextual (distant and contemporary) history of feminine portrayal, then making their own marks on the wall (or in this case, face). Danielle Zimmermann’s, “Homage to Andy Warhol,” a series of printed shopping bags referencing Warhol celebrity portraits, first situates abstract female identity in the realm of the famous (a rather witty comment on the fame of this abstract She haunting art history), then from this context of pop-beauty or explosion of self, also explores subjective emotion. The figures in her project are cinematic with exaggerated facial gestures (a reference to Cindy Sherman), but also perhaps darkly reference turn of the 20th century studies in hysteria and the Freudian/Charcot-esque obsession with capturing female “moods” (see The Invention of Hysteria, MIT Press). Micki Tschur explores (with a raised eyebrow) the position of motherhood. Stylized pieces of a female face float throughout the five acrylic paintings on display, the figures ghostly and smiling in unison. Her investigation is playful (and humorous), but leaves a void: children are absent from the portraits, squaring her consideration of female identity on the social and private role of “mother” and not on mother-to-child relationships. Jenny Morgan and her collaborator, David Mramor use what could perhaps be called “negative palimpsest,” in which bright red paint from an under-layer is left exposed beside finished layers of paint. The two pieces executed in this way have all the connotations of emotional red, imply the “bodily” structure of a painting, and perhaps make a statement about the stripping of the actual female form (beauty ideals and domestic violence most immediately come to mind).

Beyond this, the exhibit as a whole succeeds at perhaps one of the most vulnerable, basic qualities of thoughtful portraiture: a disruptive, tender, sincere appreciation of mortality.

Curators: Ivar Zeile, Jessica Zewe and Brittany Schall

Exhibiting artists include: Danielle Zimmermann, Micki Tschur, Douglas Walker, Sandra Fettingis, Jenny Morgan and David Mramor

Vis-A-Visage is on-view at Object+Thought, 3559 Larimer St, through August 29th, for more info visit www.objectandthought.com

Every year, Naropa University in Boulder hosts the Summer Writing Program. Included on the roster is a series of readings featuring some of the most celebrated, strange, equally intellectual and down-to-earth writers of poetry and fiction.

Personally, I especially look forward to:

June 24th: Douglas A. Martin, Reed Bye, Eleni Sikelianos, Alice Notley and Anselm Hollo. Even if you are under the impression that you don’t like poetry, go to this one. Aside from great local (and underappreciated) acts like Sikelianos and Hollo, is Alice Notley, wife of the late Ted Berrigan, mother of Edmund and Anselm Berrigan, major figure in the New York School of Poetry (add The Descent of Alette to your summer reading list, by the way). Notley currently resides in Paris and is NEVER in the U.S. so often for readings anymore, much less Colorado.

June 26th: Elizabeth Robinson, Jack Collom, Will Alexander, Linh Dinh and Laura Mullen. Robinson is one of the best well-read people you’ll ever meet. Her poetry is emotive, subtle and weblike. I’m not terribly familiar with Collom’s work (not yet, at least) but I’ve seen him read once and he is hilarious.

July 5th: Eileen Myles, Daisy Zamora, Anne Waldman, Thulani Davis and Amiri Baraka. With all the performative work I see showcased at various open-mics in Denver, this is not to be missed. The work by these people is highly, highly musical AND philosophically edgy. Eileen Myles is a treat, I’ve never seen Anne Waldman perform the same way twice, and Amiri Baraka is bone-rattling (at least on audio, this July will be my first time seeing him perform).

Archives of various poets reading at Naropa are available here:

www.archive.org/details/naropa

So take a mini-trip out of Denver to Naropa’s Performing Arts Center, 2130 Arapahoe Ave. All readings are 8pm and cost $6. For a full schedule see www.naropa.edu/swp/events.cfm

If the political is personal, then Jonson Y. Kuhn and Ariel Marks catch us with our pants down. “4 Days In Bed,” a play based on a true story and co-written by Kuhn and Marks documents the confusion, exaggeration, banality, joy, aggravation, error and quirky brilliance of Denver, a penniless, frustrated writer, and Tucson, his girlfriend, a recovering alcoholic visiting him from Arizona.

Denver and Tucson are metaphors for geographical points, but they’re real, baffled, insecure, passionate people as well (as if it isn’t already challenging enough to be in a long-distance relationship). The play is distinctly set in the City of Denver, referencing such landmarks as the Mercury Café (where, of course, poets weekly brave the stage to lyrically expose those sensitive –and often gritty- matters of the heart). But as the affectionate, cranky, familiar, disjointed, tragic, humorous, well-trodden conversations between Denver and Tucson evolve, subtle layers of many a political controversy about Colorado arises as well. Tucson often implores Denver that he is never giving her enough –a nod toward Colorado’s own increasing problem with drought and growing population to provide enough reserved water for the greater southwestern United States. Tucson asks an even harder question later on, wondering if it’s possible to keep one moment between herself and Denver private, just for them, not for the demanding eyes and ears of an audience, –a question asked not only by the voters, protestors and lawmakers of the mile-high city, but by the rest of the country –do erotic relationships have a right to privacy (gay marriage, for example)?

The strange but all too necessary bedfellows of economy and love unravel and get tangled up with each other. Denver never has enough time, is emotionally distracted, too short on money, wants to have more resources to work on his plays, indulging the question: how does one (an artist, nonetheless) have time for love in the go-get-‘em landscape of a capitalist society, particularly one in the slow backward grind of a recession? (It should be added: only in recent centuries have courtly love and art been practiced by more than the wealthy classes as leisure activities). Need is the ever-present question in an itchy juxtaposition to addiction (in other words, a desperation of emptiness versus hyper-consumption).

It is here that perhaps what makes the vulnerability of this love story so uncomfortably universal, and the rather normal characters bigger than life, that Kuhn and Marks self-consciously trace the philosophical edges of romance. I am reminded of a passage from Decreation* by Canadian writer, Anne Carson, in an essay in which she critiques the poems of Sappho: “She is posing not the usual lovesong complaint ‘Why don’t you love me?’ but a deeper spiritual question, ‘What is it that love dares the self to do?’...Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.” Carson is discussing a more abstract poverty, a “poverty of self” as a spiritual process of loving selflessly, but there is still potential for a more visceral and actual poverty to her critique. “4 Days in Bed” definitely has a lot of that “usual lovesong” complaining (and why shouldn’t it, if it is to take a stab at genuinely recreating the wages of a "true" love affair) but this deeper, political, aesthetic investigation of “impoverished love” is there too. Denver declares something to the nature of this very idea in one charged argument, saying that until love really happens in his life, it’s in his best interest to be “as selfish as possible,” or in other words, that love is an all or nothing transaction. Countered to his point of view is Tuscon, grappling with her impoverished solitude of Cosmo magazines and AA meetings, more than once demanding that Denver “be more present” (“present” operating as a double-entendre to evoke a mutual gift-giving barter system, perhaps). The resolution (if there is one) in the end, is language, another daring battleground. Words (as any writer or lover knows) are the most compromising, incriminating, draining substance in human experience, the tools/crutches/burdens/flourishes with which we bankrupt ourselves in any personal relationship or act of creativity. The paradox of communication is that language is required to express the self, but it’s also how we give too much of the self away only to find (lose?) ourselves even more bewildered (after all, “What does communication communicate?”**).

“4 Days in Bed” is a story about two utterly selfish, confused, generous, obsessive, honest people. It’s about two dreamers sifting through their separate broken realities. It’s a tense condensation of a long-term affair into a 96-hour tryst. It’s about gender and personal, private lives located in a bigger, more difficult horizon of America, environment, urban metropolis and globe.

“4 Days in Bed” is playing at Crossroads Theater, 2590 Washington St, Thursday June 19-Saturday June 28th, at 7pm. $10/person, $5 if you wear pjs. For more info see www.denvercrossroads.com.

*Carson, Anne. Decreation. “How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God.” Vintage Books, New York: 2005.

**Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. “Signature, Event, Context.” Northwestern University Press, Illinois: 1988.