Tag Archives: Semiotext(e)

TISA BRYANT AND CAULEEN SMITH IN CONVERSATION

I saw a call for the “Best American Experimental Writing,” and it said something like, “Bring us your weirdest, your wildest writing.” And I thought, Is that it? What creates the experimental, the innovative, the hybrid that has to be weird or wild? There’s always grace, there’s always stealth, there’s always nuance, there’s always structural intervention. And, depending on readers, one might not always notice what literary forms are being manipulated until you get uncomfortable with your expectations not being met. The tag on the book says one thing, but your experience of what you’re reading is doing something else. — Tisa Bryant*

Join Bryant—author of Unexplained Presence and a forthcoming book from Semiotext(e)—and Cauleen Smith in conversation as part of LACMA’s Confabulations series.

See link below for r.s.v.p. info.

CAULEEN SMITH CONFABULATIONS SERIES—TISA BRYANT

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Tuesday, February 23.

6 pm on the West Coast; 9 pm East Coast.

*“Hybrid ‘I’: Tisa Bryant, Anelise Chen, Chris Kraus, and Q. M. Zhang in Conversation,” PARIS LA 16 (2018), 174–177.

From top: Tisa Bryant, courtesy of the author; Cauleen Smith, courtesy of the artist, Cauleen Smith, Sojourner (2018), digital video, color sound; Tisa Bryant, Unexplained Presence (2007), cover image courtesy and © Leon Works.

LINDA SIMPSON AND REYNALDO RIVERA

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Across his body of work, Reynaldo Rivera depicts people enmeshed in their own private worlds who completely transcend their surroundings through the force of imagination and their inner lives. This remains true, whether the subject is photographed in a garden, a public toilet, or a house party in pre-gentrified Echo Park. I think this is a primary difference between Rivera’s work and Nan Goldin’s, to whom his portraits of drag queens, trans women, and other friends might be compared. Goldin’s subjects in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency are downwardly mobile: middle class kids who took a wrong turn, captured in louche dens of bohemian squalor during emotionally intimate scenes… Rivera’s photographs of drag performers taken in Latino gay bars in LA between 1989 and 1997 reflect a different kind of collaboration. He sees his subjects less as they “are” than how they most wish to be seen, lending himself to their dreams and illusions of glamour. And why shouldn’t these dreams be realized? — Chris Kraus*

This week, Linda Simpson and Reynaldo Rivera will present their new books—The Drag Explosion and Reynaldo Rivera: Provisional Notes for a Disappeared City—and join artist and editor Alex Jovanovich in conversation.

See link below to register for the online event.

AN EVENING WITH REYNALDO RIVERA and LINDA SIMPSON

Artforum / Bookforum

Tuesday, December 15.

4 pm on the West Coast; 7 pm East Coast.

*Chris Kraus, from her introduction to Reynaldo Rivera: Provisional Notes for a Disappeared City (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2020).

Linda Simpson (images in color, from top): RuPaul, 1992; group of drag performers, including Lady Bunny (far left); Dean Johnson, 1987; RuPaul; event card image courtesy and © Artforum and Bookforum. Images © Linda Simpson, courtesy of the artist.

Reynaldo Rivera (images in black and white, from above): Echo Park (self-portrait), 1996; Vaginal Davis, Downtown, 1993; Cindy Gomez, Echo Park, 1992; Elyse Regehr and Javier Orosco, Downtown LA, 1989). Images © Reynaldo Rivera, courtesy of the artist

MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE IN CONVERSATION WITH ALEXANDER CHEE

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There’s nothing like an election to make you feel hopeless about the possibility for political change. I pick up a magazine promising America’s Essential Recipes, and open it right up to “pork schnitzel.” I’m laughing so hard that everyone at the co-op turns around to see if they can be part of my laughter. And then I’m walking through a field of dandelions. Even if it’s really just the grass between the sidewalk and street I will take this field while I can get it.

The news is always its own trauma, but when the news of the trauma echoes into our lives, past and present at once, the open door never quite closes. Trauma as a curtain that billows around us, a wall we never quite break through. I mean trauma as a weapon. How to make oppression realize its redundancy. But oppression can never realize. Anything but oppression. How saying that something is structural means we need to take it apart or else it’s a weapon we become. — Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, The Freezer Door

On the occasion of the publication of her new book The Freezer Door, Sycamore will join Alexander Chee—author of the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel—in conversation.

See link below to register for the online discussion.

MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE IN CONVERSATION WITH ALEXANDER CHEE

McNally Jackson

Tuesday, November 24.

4 pm on the West Coast; 7 pm East Coast.

From top: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, photograph by Jesse Mann, courtesy and © the author and the photographer; Sycamore, The Freezer Door, cover image courtesy and © the author and Semiotext(e); Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, cover image courtesy and © the author and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Chee (foreground left) and Ggreg Taylor at an AIDS demonstration in San Francisco, October 1989, photograph by Marc Geller, courtesy and © the author and the photographer.

REYNALDO RIVERA AND CHRIS KRAUS

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Coincident with the exhibition of his works in the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. 2020 biennial, Reynaldo Rivera will join Chris Kraus—who wrote a contributing essay for the forthcoming monograph Reynaldo Rivera: Provisional Notes for a Disappeared City—in conversation as part of ArtCenter’s online Graduate Art Seminar series.

For r.s.v.p. information, see link below.

REYNALDO RIVERA and CHRIS KRAUS

ArtCenter Graduate Art Seminar

Tuesday, November 10.

7:30 pm on the West Coast; 10:30 am East Coast.

A signed limited edition of Reynaldo Rivera—which Includes a 7 x 7 archival pigment print on Canson Platine of Gaby and Melissa at La Plaza, 1993—is available.

Reynaldo Rivera, from top: Performers la Plaza,1992; Made in L.A. 2020: a version, Hammer Museum, installation views (2), photographs by Joshua White / JWPictures.com; Reynaldo Rivera: Provisional Notes of a Disappeared City cover image courtesy and © the artist and Semiotext(e); Chris Kraus; backstage at La Plaza; Gaby and Melissa at La Plaza, 1993. Images © Reynaldo Rivera, courtesy of the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York and Los Angeles.

NICOLE R. FLEETWOOD AND JACKIE WANG

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This month, Nicole R. Fleetwood—curator of Marking Time—Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration at MoMA PS1—and Jackie Wang will discuss “carceral aesthetics, the legacy of revolutionary prison arts programs, and the ways that penal space, time, and matter shape the production of prison art. What kinds of worlds and images of freedom have been imagined by prisoners and those with loved ones in prison? What forms of care are embodied by social practices rooted in art-making?”*

See link below for details.

NICOLE R. FLEETWOOD and JACKIE WANG IN CONVERSATION*

Artists Space Dialogues—Carceral Aesthetics and the Politics of Love

Tuesday, November 10.

5 pm on the West Coast; 8 pm East Coast.

Marking Time—Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, MoMA PS1, through April 4, 2021, from top: Tameca Cole, Locked in a Dark Calm, 2016, collage and graphite on paper, image courtesy and © Tameca Cole / Die Jim Crow; collection Ellen Driscoll; Mark Loughney, Pyrrhic Defeat: A Visual Study of Mass Incarceration (detail), 2014–present, graphite on paper, image © Mark Loughney, courtesy of the artist; Sable Elyse Smith, Pivot II, 2019, stainless steel with 2k painted finish, image © Sable Elyse Smith, courtesy of the artist, JTT, New York, and Carlos / Ishikawa, London; Ronnie Goodman, San Quentin Arts in Corrections Art Studio, 2008, acrylic on canvas, image © the artist’s estate.