Tag Archive - Gwarlingo Originals

Ruin & Repetition: Margaret Lanzetta & Susan Briante’s Utopia Minus Project

July 7, 2012 in Images, Sunday Poem, Words with 2 Comments

 

Margaret Lanzetta, White Rabbit Alice, 2012. Oil and acrylic on panel. 12 x 12"

I’m excited to share this special expanded edition of Gwarlingo’s Sunday Poem series with you. The Utopia Minus Project is an art and poetry collaboration that has been in the works for nearly twelve months now.

Poet Susan Briante and visual artist Margaret Lanzetta have been long-time admirers of each other’s work, but when Lanzetta began a new series of paintings inspired by American highways and Briante published her latest book Utopia Minus (also infused with images of American highways), both artists realized that there were certain affinities between their projects that they were interested in exploring.

For the past year they’ve been collaborating by creating their own unique pairings of their work (one example is an edition of screen prints for Headlamp). For this special online version of the project, they asked me to curate my own combinations. I’ve spent a lot of time with both Susan and Margaret’s art over the past many months, and during that time, my appreciation for their talent has only grown.

I’ve loved Margaret Lanzetta’s striking paintings from the first moment I saw them at The MacDowell Colony in 2001. Her work draws inspiration from nature, Islamic architecture, Buddhism, and sixties’s pop. Lanzetta works in multiples and creates series on specific themes. Silk screening is an integral part of her process: oil and enamel, used fluidly with very porous screens results in rich, layered, tactile surfaces. Drawing inspiration from Warhol’s forays into seriality and abstraction, her patterns migrate, collide, and reappear from painting to painting, series to series.

The Company Paintings series (which you can see samples of on The Utopia Minus page) synthesize Lanzetta’s experiences in both India and Syria. The series title comes from the term for works commissioned by the East India Company to document India at the turn of the century. Each painting is titled after a remote Indian city and its numerical telephone area code. The entire series was done using only four different silkscreens printed in different combinations. Stripes compete with a palette of neon orange, pink, yellow and red, referencing both the intensity of spiritual devotion and industrial OSHA “safety” colors from the industrial arena. The sacred and the concrete are melded.

Lanzetta has spent the past year in Morocco, where her latest series Reign Marks was created. As you can see in the below image, Dharma Index, her color palette has become brighter and bolder in this new series. (Look for Carol Schwarzman’s upcoming review of the Reign Marks show at Le Cube Independent Art Room, Rabat, Morocco, in the Brooklyn Rail.)

 

"The manmade and the organic mesh and grind against one another in Lanzetta’s work," says Briante, " just as they do in that view out my window, just as I want them to do in my poems." (Photo: Margaret Lanzetta by Omar Chennafi)

 

 

Margaret Lanzetta, Dharma Index, 2012. Acrylic and digital ink on paper, 57 x 82". Screen print of mosque floor plans from the Islamic diaspora, ranging from China, India, Thailand, the United States, Europe, etc. In the collection of Nawal Slaoui in Casablanca

Although Susan Briante is also a MacDowell fellow, I only discovered her poetry a year ago. I’m officially declaring her book Utopia Minus (from Ahshata Press) one of my all-time favorite poetry books. Yes. It’s that good.

Briante has an uncanny ability to find the beauty and poignancy in the everyday. She has a photographer’s eye combined with a pitch-perfect ear and a poet’s gift for language. I can’t think of a book I’ve read recently that captures America so well. Like the photographers Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, and Robert Adams, she can transform a seemingly banal scene into a transcendent experience. She is an honest poet—one who doesn’t shy away from ugliness or imperfection.

I was reminded of this passage from Robert Adams’ book Beauty in Photography as I was reading, and re-reading, Utopia Minus, for everything Adams says about landscape photography could also be said about Briante’s work:

“Attention only to perfection…invites eventually for urban viewers—which means most of us—a crippling disgust; our world is in most places far from clean. Photographs that suggest an Arcadian landscape are recognizable from the city dweller’s perspective as partial visions, and they make us uneasy…

Photography that acknowledges what is wrong, is admittedly in some respects hard to bear—it has to encompass our mistakes. Yet in the long run, it is important; in order to endure our age of apocalypse, we have to be reconciled not only to avalanche and earthquake and hurricane, but to ourselves.”

 

"What captivates me about Susan’s poetry," says Lanzetta, "is its Zen-like quality of living in the moment. Celebrations of the poetic and minute, fleeting slivers of nature, beauty, history are all tempered with the sobering full-frontal here and now." (Photo: Poet Susan Briante)

 

 

For this special project, I’ve selected ten poems by Susan Briante and paired them with ten of Margaret Lanzetta’s paintings. The point of arranging these works together is not to impose any specific interpretation, but simply to highlight them and present them as a whole, so you can contemplate the poems and images much as you would in a gallery or at a poetry reading.

The pieces I’ve chosen by Lanzetta cover her entire career. They were selected not only because they are amazing artworks, but also because they share some resonance with specific poems by Susan. I encourage you to peruse Margaret’s website so you can see these works within their larger context. Each series has its own unique style, which is worth viewing in its entirety.

For this expanded edition of the Sunday Poem series, I also asked Susan and Margaret to reflect on each other’s work. Their short, insightful essays are included below.

I highly recommend Briante’s Utopia Minus, as well as Margaret Lanzetta’s catalog Pet the Pretty Tiger: Works 1990-2010. A limited edition set of Lanzetta’s Myths in Translation series (shown below) is also available from Art We Love. Prints start at just $50.

To view The Utopia Minus Project, please visit this special page on the Gwarlingo website, where Lanzetta and Briante’s collaboration can be experienced full screen.

 

Margaret Lanzetta, Double Speak, 2011. Oil and acrylic on mylar 30 x 24"

 

 

Weave Rip Grind
Susan Briante on the work of Margaret Lanzetta

A dazzling surface beauty first drew me to Margaret Lanzetta’s work. At the time, she was layering rich patterns over large canvases that referenced ancient textiles, elaborate wallpaper, or tile work. But the patterns were always rendered somewhat incomplete, so they seemed like fragments, images of a weave disintegrating before our eyes. I take a post-romantic view of decay that comes by way of Robert Smithson and a childhood in postindustrial New Jersey. When I think of ruin I think of the abandoned factories I see when I ride the train from the suburbs to New York City. I think of the foreclosed homes I see everywhere. Those structures tell a story. What was once a skatepark, now looks like a cathedral. I feel comfortable around that which references both what perishes as well as what persists.

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A Sunday Poem Exclusive : The Debut of Mary Ruefle’s Erasure “Melody”

May 20, 2012 in Images, Sunday Poem, Words with 9 Comments

 

 

When Mary Ruefle’s book Melody: The Story of a Child arrived in the mail several weeks ago, I could smell the musty, antique pages and the faint whiff of stale cigarette smoke before I even opened the package. The beige envelope arrived by U.S. Postal Service, without insurance and without tracking–a method that is not only cheaper, but also less conspicuous, as Ruefle explained to me on the phone one afternoon.

Ruefle is anti-FedEx (a description that fits this writer in so many ways); she finds both the cost and the hyped-up urgency of express shipping unnecessary. She also hates preciousness. When I expressed concern about damaging the spine of the book during the scanning process, Mary was lackadaisical: “Don’t worry. It’s meant to be handled. That whole archival, white-glove thing is ridiculous anyway.”

A new erasure by Mary Ruefle is a rare event, and the publication of one online or in print even rarer. Her one-of-a-kind creations occasionally appear in journals or are purchased by museums or collectors. In 2006 Wave Books published the acclaimed volume A Little White Shadow, a book of ”haiku-like minifables, sideways aphorisms, and hauntingly perplexing koans,” as described by Publisher’s Weekly. Although Ruefle doesn’t own a computer or do email, she has a website where fans can enjoy perusing a small sampling of her one-of-a-kind erasures.

Still, these unique works are difficult to come by, so when Mary offered to share an erasure that had never been seen before, I jumped at the chance to publish it on Gwarlingo.

 

"I have resisted formal poetry my whole life," says Mary Ruefle, "but at last found a form I can't resist. It is like writing with my eyes instead of my hands."

 

Ruefle is one of today’s most admired practitioners of erasure poetry–the creation of a new text by disappearing the old text that surrounds it. Gwarlingo readers who enjoyed the erasure poetry of Jen Bervin last December will find much to appreciate in Ruefle’s work. Her writing is playful, poignant, humorous, and eccentric, and like no other voice I know.

It is fitting that Ruefle’s Sunday Poem should follow my article on Lewis Hyde and appropriation, for Melody is an excellent example of a creative work made from existing text, in this case, a 19th century novel called Melody: The Story of a Child.

In Ruefle’s skillful hands, we enter an alternative world that is far removed from the original saccharine plot of Laura E. Richards’ 1894 melodrama: “Miraculously saved from charred rubble, blind twelve-year-old Melody changes the lives of an entire community as well as her greedy captors.” Ruefle has transformed Richards’ religious melodrama into a compelling, concise, subversive work of art.

Why erase the words of other writers? As Jeannie Vanasco explains in The Believer, the “philosophical answer is that poets, as Wordsworth defines them, are ‘affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present.’ The more practical answer: compared to writing, erasing feels easy…To erase is to write, style is the consequence of a writer’s omissions, and the writer is always plural. To erase is to leave something else behind.”
 

"Friends in Fur and Feathers" by Mary Ruefle (Image courtesy Mary Ruefle and Gulf Coast magazine)

 

 

"Friends in Fur and Feathers" by Mary Ruefle (Image courtesy Mary Ruefle and Gulf Coast magazine)

 

 

"Friends in Fur and Feathers" by Mary Ruefle (Image courtesy Mary Ruefle and Gulf Coast magazine)

William Burroughs and Brion Gysin are both considered pioneers of the “cut up” technique, a method that involves cutting words from newspapers and magazines and rearranging them into new stories and poems. (Burroughs said he learned the technique from Gysin).

But text collage predates Burroughs and Gysin. At a Dadaist rally in the 1920s, Tristan Tzara offered to create a poem on the spot by pulling words at random from a hat. And in 1922 T.S. Eliot published The Waste Land, a touchstone of 20th century literature comprised partially of quotes from the Bible, Bram Stoker, Ovid, the Hindy Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, Shakespeare, Whitman, and other sources.

But the technique can be traced back even further. In 1819 Thomas Jefferson cut and pasted numerous sections from various Bibles as extractions of the doctrine of Jesus. Using a razor, he arranged selected verses from the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in chronological order, mingling excerpts from one text with those of another in order to create a single narrative. Jefferson’s new Bible, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, excluded the supernatural elements of the New Testament, as well as perceived misinterpretations he believed had been added by the Four Evangelists.

English artist Tom Phillips is another pivotal erasure artist. His best known work is A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, an erasure Phillips began creating in 1966 and continues to publish in new editions today. ”It is a forgotten Victorian novel I found by chance,” Phillips explained, “plundered, mined, and undermined its text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems.” A more recent addition to the erasure canon is Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes, a sculptural piece of art and book created from Bruno Schulz’s book, The Street of Crocodiles.

 

Thomas Jefferson cut and pasted numerous sections from various Bibles as extractions of the doctrine of Jesus. Using a razor, he arranged selected verses from the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in chronological order, mingling excerpts from one text with those of another in order to create a single narrative. (Photo by Hugh Talman courtesy the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History)

 

 

Jefferson's new Bible, "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth," excluded the supernatural elements of the New Testament, as well as perceived misinterpretations he believed had been added by the Four Evangelists.

 

 

English artist Tom Phillips is another pivotal erasure artist. His best known work is "A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel," an erasure Phillips began creating in 1966 and continues to publish in new editions today.

 

 

"It is a forgotten Victorian novel I found by chance," Phillips explained, "plundered, mined, and undermined its text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems."

 

 

A more recent addition to the erasure canon is Jonathan Safran Foer's "Tree of Codes," a sculptural piece of art and book created from Bruno Schulz's book, "The Street of Crocodiles."

It is in this tradition that Mary Ruefle’s captivating erasures belong. Not only is Ruefle following in the footsteps of Jefferson, Gysin, and Phillips, but she is one of the finest erasure artists working today–a brilliant artist who deserves more attention than she’s received. Although she has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The MacDowell Colony, and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as a Whiting Writers’ Award, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she remains on the fringes of the contemporary canon.

I suspect that Ruefle’s name would be better known were it not for the fact that she shuns technology and (to her credit) completely disregards the trends of the New York literary scene. Reufle isn’t interested in mass production, mass audiences, or mass anything for that matter. You aren’t going to find her on Facebook or Twitter or on a smart phone. Instead, you can find her in Bennington, Vermont, doing what she does best–writing, reading, and teaching. As her website says, “The only way to contact me is by contacting my press, Wave Books, or by running into someone I know personally on the street.”

While this unplugged lifestyle may not help Ruefle promote her writing, I suspect it does help her create these unique, thoughtful works of art. This is “slow art” at it’s best. Reading Melody, I was struck by the amount of time (and patience) it takes create a one-of-a-kind work like this, and also by the passage of time itself–by the threads of human connection that allowed this slender volume to make its way to Ruefle, then to me, and now onto you.

To flip through the pages of Melody is an intimate experience. The hand of the artist is in evidence on every page–in the smears of white-out, the fingerprint smudges, the playful, colorful swirls, the vexed, heavy black marks that transform text into a gaping void.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Several years ago, Mary gave me a copy of the Summer/Fall 2008 edition of Gulf Coast magazine, which includes pages from her ogle-worthy erasure Friends in Fur and Feathers. The excerpt also includes Ruefle’s “Remarks on the Erasures,” which is worth quoting here, since it reveals Ruefle’s own views on process:
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On the Anniversary of the Tucson Shooting: A New Work by Deanne Stillman

January 8, 2012 in News, Sunday Poem, Words with 2 Comments

The scene in a grocery store parking lot in Tucson the day Jared Lougnher shot nineteen people. Six people were killed, including a nine-year-old girl. (Photo Courtesy Chris Morrison/Christian Science Monitor)

 

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the Tucson shooting that killed six and injured Representative Gabrielle Giffords and twelve others.

In place of the usual Sunday Poem, I’m delighted to share with you a new work by Deanne Stillman called “Reflections in a D’Back’s Eye,” which is a literary meditation on the events in Tucson. Also exceptionally, the piece is preceded by an interview with the author that provides additional context.

Stillman is a highly acclaimed creative nonfiction writer who has written extensively about the American West, particularly its relationship to violence and the American dream. This unique prose poem is an experimental piece that weaves together disparate voices–some real, others imagined. Stillman and I had an opportunity to correspond about her new piece via email.

 

Deanne Stillman (Photo by Mark Lamonica)

 

What inspired you to write about the shootings in Tucson?

A few things I guess… A lot of my work has to do with war and peace in our wide open spaces, and as I began to think about what happened, some things began to emerge. Of course, I started thinking about exactly who was this young man who mounted the attack? Some information suggests that one of the many things that agitated him was the question of 9/11 — was it an inside job? It seems he kept trying to get answers and may have been rebuffed by various authority figures.

Then it turned out that the little girl he killed, Christina-Taylor Green, was born on 9/11. She appears in a book about babies born that day. I was struck by the convergence of these things — that 9/11 was running through this incident. Bin-Laden said somewhere that after 9/11 the states would not be united. I doubt that he was talking about psychological states but he had to have known that he was stirring the American hive and some people would be tormented in inexplicable ways by what happened. But of course, this was just part of the murk in Jared Lougnher’s mind.

Christina Taylor-Green

Another thing that resonated for me was that a little girl was killed. The murder of a child is as bad as it gets. I was struck by the fact that Christina-Taylor Green came from a baseball family and played on her Little League team — one of two girls. I love baseball and know how hard that was, having played ball with neighborhood boys myself — or tried to. Her mother had warned her that playing with the boys would be rough, but she wasn’t deterred. In fact she was a good second baseman and hitter, once refusing to walk when she had been hit by a ball and going on to hit a line drive. Another time she broke up a scuffle during a play at second base after someone tried to slide in. Then there was the time that her father called and said she couldn’t play because she was sick, but she showed up anyway and said she didn’t want to let down her team.  The more I learned about her story, the more heartbreaking it became. She just wanted to play ball! That’s what she was doing on the day of the Tucson shootings – going to a meet and greet with Gabrielle Giffords, her representative. She wanted to run for Congress some day…she had just been elected to her student council. She was a team player — that’s what her coach said – and then she ends up colliding with the boy who played roughest of all.

Then of course there was Loughner’s own story. I started thinking about his final conversations and encounters… Who was he talking with and what did he say? One of them would have been with a Wal-Mart greeter before he bought a 30-round clip of ammunition; and then I learned that he liked jazz (!!!) — or used to — and he was evidently into Coltrane for awhile. Also his mother worked in a county park where people once went for the healing waters. One of the first things I did after the shootings was go there. I sat there for an afternoon and I started to wonder if his mother found any comfort among the old mesquites as her son was unraveling across town.

Jared Loughner's parents, Amy and Randy Loughner (Photo by Jennifer Polixenni Brankin courtesy The New York Post)

I had to write about all of this, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it could not be conventional; there were too many rivers running through it, and they were not the sort that could be contained in a linear way, including the desert itself – often a character in my work — and Native American history and myth playing out here, which to me is everywhere, but we don’t pay attention and here we have a major incident in Arizona — the Grand Canyon State. The Hopi say that the Grand Canyon is a point of their emergence, and here is a troubled young man running around in the desert with a gun. There is this sort of thing all over the West amid all of the beauty and really this has been going on since day one in this country, and it’s America’s original sin. The seeds of this incident are very deep.

 

Why did you choose the memorable image of the diamondback as a central part of your piece?

There is a pedestrian bridge that runs over the freeway that passes through Tucson. It’s in the shape of a rattlesnake and you walk though its mouth and you can look through its skin in any direction and it has a goofy-sounding rattle when you reach the tail. Snakes are plentiful in Arizona — and around Tucson — and the Phoenix baseball team is the Diamondbacks, so there was the baseball reference, for those who might pick it up. The image just seemed to work on a lot of levels and sometimes I found myself looking at the story from the snake’s POV, and I spent a lot of time on the bridge while I was writing the story…I didn’t have all of the information but the snake did and what was it?

 

"There is a pedestrian bridge that runs over the freeway that passes through Tucson. It's in the shape of a rattlesnake and you walk though its mouth and you can look through its skin in any direction and it has a goofy-sounding rattle when you reach the tail."

 

 

A photo of the pedestrian snake bridge taken by the author, Deanne Stillman

 

 

The diamondback rattlesnake bridge in Tucson as seen from Google Earth

 

Can you talk more about the various voices and texts you’ve woven into this prose poem?

I’ve taken published statements from players in the incident, news reports, ancient myths, and press releases and combined them with my own texts (not text messages! — although that’s an idea for next time) in order to try to co-exist with this story. For instance, some of the Christina-Taylor Green passages are derived from comments of hers that have been reprinted in articles, interviews with her parents that were published after the shootings, and a book by her mother. The sources for other passages are often identified, but sometimes all of these sources are merged. Regarding news reports, I draw from a wide range of material, often things overlooked by others. I’ve followed up on some on my own.

 

Deanne Stillman and Bugz. Bugz is a horse who survived the massacre of 34 wild horses outside Reno at Christmas time in 1998 -- a story Stillman tells in her critically acclaimed book "Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West." (Photo by Betty Lee Kelly)

 

 

Writer Deanne Stillman at the Little Bighorn Battlefield. In her book "Mustang" Stillman tells the story of the American war horse Comanche, once wild, who was billed as "the lone survivor" of the battle at the time. (Photo courtesy Deanne Stillman)

 

You’ve written extensively about the American West, including books about the massacre of wild horses, two girls killed by a Marine after the Gulf War in the Twentynine Palms, Ca., and an infamous manhunt for a desert hermit who killed a town sheriff, then disappeared into the wilderness (a book coming out later this year). What characteristics of the desert West do you find particularly compelling?

As a child, I was influenced by the Edgar Allan Poe poem “Eldorado,” which my father used to read to me. It was my way out of early personal turmoil while growing up in Ohio, as I’ve written elsewhere, and opened up an escape route which I would later follow, with various detours. Once I began to wander the desert — the land of Eldorado — I molted, shedding a skin that had to do with reacting, always having an opinion, masking pain. As that happened, certain stories began calling me and I followed their trails for personal reasons… How has the American dream tricked or satisfied people?  Where do individual stories merge with the promises we hear in third grade?  The main thing I see is that geography informs and drives everything…the great mantra — “it’s a free country and I can do what I want” — is our promise and our curse and it came right out of the American West.

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