Charles Bernstein (New York, 1950) poeta e saggista statunitense, fondatore e redattore con Bruce Andrews della rivista «L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E» (1978-81) e esponente di punta dei Language poets, ha insegnato alla State University of New York a Buffalo e alla University of Pennsylvania, dove è stato professore emerito in inglese e letteratura comparata. È co-fondatore e co-curatore, assieme ad Al Filreis, di PennSound (writing.upenn.edu/pennsound) e curatore e co-fondatore, con Loss Pequeño Glazier, di The Electronic Poetry Center (writing.upenn.edu/epc). Tra i libri più recenti: Topsy-Turvy (2021), Near/Miss (2018), Pitch of Poetry (2016), Recalculating (2013), Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions (2011), All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (2010).
Luigi Ballerini wrote an introduction (https://brooklynrail.org/2022/04/editorsmessage/RADICAL-POETS-OF-DIFFERENT-FEATHERS) to the “gathering of American and Italian poets, scheduled to take place at the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò of New York University and at the Italian Cultural Institute of New York on November 11, 12, and 13” (see the images):
A Milano, domenica 20 novembre, h. 12, al Castello Sforzesco, Sala della Balla, si presenta il libro di Charles Bernstein, Echo / Eco (Edizioni del verri, 2022, testo inglese e traduzione italiana), con Barbara Anceschi, Carla Buranello, Marco Giovenale. Sarà presente l’autore.
Eco/Echo raccoglie le poesie scelte dall’autore a partire da Senses of Responsibility del 1979 fino agli ultimi testi usciti quest’anno negli Stati Uniti in Topsy-Turvy. Ma non è un’antologia con testo a fronte. È un libro bifronte: da una parte i testi in inglese, dall’altra, capovolto il volume, si trovano le traduzioni curate da altri poeti italiani che nell’arco della loro attività hanno collaborato con Bernstein nel segno di una poesia sperimentale e d’invenzione. Il libro si conclude con la traduzione del V canto di Catullo compiuta a quattro mani insieme alla curatrice. Il volume accoglie inoltre un saggio di Bernstein sui rapporti tra poesia americana contemporanea e poesia italiana e una dettagliata nota bio-bibliografica dell’autore. Per Bernstein la eco/echo-poetica è pensare alla scrittura come forma di ascolto verso una “risonanza non lineare di un motivo che rimbalza su un altro. Ancora di più, è la sensazione di allusione in assenza di allusione. In altre parole, l’eco che sto cercando – è lo stesso Bernstein a dircelo – è uno spazio vuoto: l’ombra di una fonte assente”.
+ editor Luigi Ballerini wrote an introduction (https://brooklynrail.org/2022/04/editorsmessage/RADICAL-POETS-OF-DIFFERENT-FEATHERS) to the “gathering of American and Italian poets, scheduled to take place at the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò of New York University and at the Italian Cultural Institute of New York on November 11, 12, and 13” (see the images).
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All the texts in the issue of TBR:
from Floodgate of Wind By Antonella Anedda Translated from the Italian by Eleonora Buonocore
From Scraps By Mariano Bàino Translated from the Italian by Luigi Bonaffini
The Trip By Mary Jo Bang
three By Charles Bernstein
Mandy By Anselm Berrigan
Nest, Hospice, Prison Camp By Susan Briante
(°) – seed By Maria Grazia Calandrone Translated from the Italian by Nicholas Benson
from Every Five Strokes By Vincenzo Frungillo Translated from the Italian by Christina Vani
from Excesses (on a little flight) By Marco Giovenale Translated from the Italian by V. Joshua Adams
Romanticism By Peter Gizzi
Gap and Erasure By John Latta
Dreamlike (Homo Bulla) By Laura Liberale Translated from the Italian by Murtha Baca and Federica Santini
Porta Westfalica By Valerio Magrelli Translated from the Italian by Jamie McKendrick
from Acavity of an Odyssey (Unfinished Mandala) By Ivan Schiavone Translated from the Italian by Alessandro Giammei
Documenta 15 is no ordinary art exhibition. Working with the guiding concept of “lumbung,” the Indonesian collective ruangrupa―the exhibition’s curators―are less concerned with individual works than with models of collaborative practice. This guide offers insights into and orientation for the processes that evolved in the creation of the exhibition. A comprehensive resource both for visitors of Documenta in Kassel and anyone interested in collective practices, this guide presents all the collectives and artists featured in Documenta 15 through in-depth profiles by international authors. Taking the question “what is lumbung?” as an organizing principle, the book offers an introduction to the concept and cultural background of Documenta 15, with documents and photographs tracing the collectives’ working processes. A chapter surveying the show’s locations in Kassel, as well as a large fold-out map and an introduction to the exhibition’s public program, are also included.
LINDSAY CAPLAN Arte Programmata Freedom, Control and the Computer in 1960s Italy University of Minnesota Press, 2022
Tracing the evolution of the Italian avant-garde’s pioneering experiments with art and technology and their subversion of freedom and control In postwar Italy, a group of visionary artists used emergent computer technologies as both tools of artistic production and a means to reconceptualize the dynamic interrelation between individual freedom and collectivity. Arte Programmata traces the multifaceted practices of these groundbreaking artists and their conviction that technology could provide the conditions for a liberated social life.
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Lindsay Caplan’s Arte Programmata offers a compelling account of a group of lesser-known artists affiliated with the Italian Arte Programmata movement, whose experimental art and design practices, emerging in the nascent years of computerization, pointedly (and presciently) engaged with political questions around freedom and control, individuality and collectivity. Beautifully written, sharply analytic, and free of jargon, Caplan’s incisive study should find a place on the bookshelves of anyone interested in the roots and impacts of technological change.
— Janet Kraynak, author of Contemporary Art and the Digitization of Everyday Life
THE CONSULTANT Paik’s Papers 1968–1979 Curator: Kim Yoonseo Nam June Paik Art Center 10 Paiknamjune-ro, Giheung-gu, Yongin-si Gyeonggi-do October 13, 2022–March 26, 2023
Nam June Paik left behind various documents in different languages, including letters, scores, essays, proposals, and reports. One of these, a 1974 report somewhat grandly titled “MEDIA PLANNING FOR THE POST INDUSTRIAL AGE: Only 26 years left until the 21st Century,” seems more like a policy research document than an artist’s note. Instead of simply sharing bold ambitions, the report contains detailed and concrete plans for implementation. The text shares a vision akin to what has been realized today with the internet, stressing the urgency of being able to transmit ideas in real time through “electronic super highway,” just as the building of highways in the 1930s had enabled the movement of goods and the achievement of an economic revival. Emphasizing that “Mind pollution is as bad as air pollution,” Paik also urges caution in ensuring that media communications are not monopolized by technology experts or some “mysterious power complex.”
Paik actually did carry the title of “consultant.” While he was based in New York, he carried out his work with Rockefeller Foundation Art Grants in “Television/Video/Film” and for a roughly 20-year period beginning in the mid-1960s, he served in official and unofficial advisory roles, playing a leading part in emphasizing the importance of supporting medial field and proposing directions for its development. During this time, his video art and the video community were broadcast on television channels, discussed in scholarly contexts, and exhibited, collected, and proliferated by art institutions. His proposal expressed his bold ambitions of solving social problems through the medium of art, with immediate implementation plans laid out in considerable detail: digitalization to record and preserve human cultural history, video exchanges as a tool for learning and resolving our lack of understanding toward different cultures, the creation of electronic superhighways as communication systems connecting the world, and the continued pursuit of diverse representation in public broadcasting content.
As its title suggests, The Consultant: Paik’s Papers 1968–1979, a special exhibition commemorating the 90th anniversary of Paik’s birth, takes the artist’s reports as its starting point. Rather than emphasizing his individual achievements and the aesthetic context for his video art, it considers Paik as a “policymaker” based on reports that he wrote in English between 1968 and 1979: “EXPANDED EDUCATION FOR THE PAPERLESS SOCIETY” (1968), “MEDIA PLANNING FOR THE POST INDUSTRIAL AGE” (1974), and “HOW TO KEEP EXPERIMENTAL VIDEO ON PBS NATIONAL PROGRAMMING” (1979). Compared with his achievements focusing for a lifetime on the medium of video art, relatively little is known of how Paik investigated the raisons d’e^tre for social infrastructure and art and suggested new avenues for them. As it examines his work through the lens of Paik’s papers, the exhibition urges the viewer to see Paik in a new light, while showing how the realization of his artistic vision was underpinned not only by institutional support from the government, but also by collaboration with and support from private foundations, patronage funds, public schools, laboratories, broadcasters and art institutions.
The exhibition’s aims lie in taking a detour from the historic highway of regarding Paik as the “father of video art” and seeing him in a different light on a different sort of path.leaving behind the crossroads of preexisting knowledge and experience to find new opportunities for liberation. Exploring Nam June Paik as an analyst, a media consultant, and an agent of change for social infrastructure and technology during the social transitional period of the 1960s is a way of uncovering new tasks that have heretofore received little attention in studies of the artist, while also creating new points of contact with his works of electronic art. As we stand amid a different kind of digital shift and social change today, Paik’s media consulting is a work that is still in progress.
