l'art pour l'art

from the curator of "bright stupid confetti"

[christopherhiggs]

Tom McCarthy talks with Daniel Soar, Editor at the London Review of Books, about Alain Robbe-Grillet (2015)

[christopherhiggs]

Alex Garant, self-proclaimed Queen of Double Eyes, studied visual arts at Notre-Dame–De-Foy College just outside Quebec City. After graduating in 2001, she ultimately settled in Toronto, Canada.

[christopherhiggs]

“We must turn against society itself. Gender is a war against all of us, and for those who desire freedom, nothing short of the total eradication of gender will suffice. To those of us who wish to remove all the walls between each other instead of being alienated from each other (and ourselves) because of groupings we never chose, to those of us that wish to access all our potential doings, our potential to become anything instead of pacing within the limits of genders we know to be inadequate, we say: let’s destroy society, let’s destroy gender.”

— “Against Gender, Against Society” nila nokizaru

[christopherhiggs]

“Propaganda: inside the theater, the bloodless attack of images and plots—a view of an alternative world: people on one side of the wall appear human but have super-powers the other side doesn’t. This is seductive. This is new weaponry. Soft weaponry. A fantasy world. Une nuit blanche? Sleep my dear. Trust the translation: here a big cheese is une grosse légume, and a change of heart is changer son fusil d’épaule. We all cross and double-cross the bridge when we come to it (chaque chose en son temps) whether we call it a split personality or a double. Une chape de plomb.” -- Monster Between the Coldest Us, by Thalia Field and Abigail Lang

[christopherhiggs]

Shapednoise - “What Is It Like” (2015)

[christopherhiggs]

The prose poem doesn’t need a meaning, a message; it speaks a dream language, a language that wants to slip through language and use it, that wants to make the words into body in a total concretion. I don’t think dreams mean anything; they just are. There’s no reason to translate them into logic.

Aase Berg 

translated by Johannes Göransson

[christopherhiggs]

Leyland Kirby -- We drink to forget the coming storm (2014)

[christopherhiggs]

Try to meet a poem on its terms not yours. If you have to “relate” to a poem in order to understand it, you aren’t reading it sufficiently. In other words, don’t try to fit the poem into your life. Try to see what world the poem creates. Then, if you are lucky, its world will help you re-see your own.

Mark Yakich, "Reading a Poem: 20 Strategies"

[christopherhiggs]

-- EJ Hauser

[christopherhiggs]

“For Philip Guston,” composed in 1984 by Morton Feldman.

The music is slow and quiet. Very, very, very quiet. And, it’s very, very long.... But for many people this soft, quiet, intimacy continuing for four hours, may seem intimidating or simply boring. Four hours can be a very long time...Society cuts time into vicious chunks then makes us fit into them; but sometimes five minutes can seem like forever while a whole day slips by in the twinkle of an eye.

-- Notes on “For Philip Guston by Morton Feldman” by Robert Worby

[christopherhiggs]

Announcing the release of my new work of nonfiction, Becoming Monster

  "Humanity requires membership. To gain membership, one must say no."

  Becoming Monster

by Christopher Higgs 63 pages. Tape-bound. $5.00 

An essay in nineteen parts, where writer-critic Christopher Higgs investigates how a monster is not born but formed. What are the circumstances that can turn a person into a monster, and what are the ramifications of becoming one? Scanning art, philosophy, literature, and television, Higgs is on the hunt not just for the world’s monsters, but for the monstrousness that hides in the depths of human nature. Then again: “What do we mean when we say human,” Higgs asks, “and what do we mean when we say nature?” These unstable definitions are as dangerous as any monster hiding in man’s stories. Part treatise, part warning, Becoming Monster is a critical study of the very nature of the grotesque. The Cupboard is thrilled to put the beastly thing in your hands.

Order now from The Cupboard

[womxneyes-deactivated20190310]

fuck understanding, live in confusion

my Lit professor  (via womyneyes)

[hobartpulp-deactivated20191226]

I don’t consider myself overly nostalgic. I typically take things from the past (from pop culture to family photos) and somehow break those images down. I erase the identities in family photos. I either draw VHS tapes with permanent markers or reproduce them as pixelated images. My two overall themes are memory and change. So the memories typically come from my youth. I remember in the early 90s when I was in high school, I thought the 80s were so uncool and terrible and I would never look back fondly on that time, but it really was a special time. Bright colors. Max Headroom. The Goonies. The NES and digital technology in the early phases. I think using memory and change as my main themes, I’m really concerned with mortality. Not concern or fear or death, but that human element of knowing that we are limited. I think using personal memories rather than a generic idea of memory makes the mortality association more subtle or balanced.

(via Hobart :: ““Memory, Change, Mortality” — Hobart 14 cover artist, Hollis Brown Thornton, in Conversation with Christopher Higgs )

[lookatallthisstuff-blog]

Young Critic Engaging with John Lavery’s “Portrait of Anna Pavlova” (1911)

[lookatallthisstuff-blog]

(via Christopher Higgs, “How To Be A Critic (pt. 2)”)

[vinylisheavy]

I’m always curious to hear how something was made—though I have no interest in why an artist did something, or what his work means. Like with Jackson Pollock: I’m always interested in what kind of paint and canvas he used, I just don’t want to know what he meant. You’re supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, you’re not supposed to chop the art down to fit your mind.

Soderbergh, hero extraordinaire (via vinylisheavy)

[christopherhiggs]

I am pleased to announce that my new book, ONE, a collaboration with Blake Butler & Vanessa Place, is now available from Roof Books.  It's an experiment wherein I asked Blake to write the exterior perspective and Vanessa to write the interior perspective; then I assembled the two into ONE. Here's the jacket copy:

From the room inside the room, from the house inside the house, memories of a one-legged father and various acts of jurisprudence haunt the mysterious creature who writhes in somatic isolation from one waking nightmare to another. Here, two writers have produced textual bodies: one speaking for the interior and the other describing the exterior, while a third writer has assembled these two bodies into a single grotesque symphony of chimerical language. A hitherto unprecedented collaborative experiment, ONE defies categorization and heralds a new approach to exploring the boundaries of authorship and narrative.

And here's the blurb from Dennis Cooper:

In theory or even usually, three contemporary majors like Butler, Higgs, and Place interlocking works inside a single book would leave users fannishly dissecting more than reading, but One is something way else.  It's as sublimely integrated as any single-minded novel I can think of, but with this absolutely crazy mega-wattage. I.e., not since Ashbery and Schuyler co-made A Nest of Ninnies, but, whoa, even more so.

You can get it on Amazon. At Barnes and Noble. At Books-A-Million. Or through Small Press Distribution. If you are interested in reviewing it or conducting an interview, please email me!

[christopherhiggs]

bright stupid confetti is back!!!

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