#aaron peck

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My Year in Writing 2018

My year in writing. For years now, on this nearly dead tumblr I’ve been compiling lists of favorite books of the year. I am more and more dissatisfied with Best Of lists, so instead I’m providing a series of links to works of criticism that I had published. Was a good year for writing, with a number of pieces I’m particularly proud of.

The year began with a piece on the French book illustrator Gus Bofa for The New York Review Daily. Bofa is often seen as a precursor to Franco-Belgian bande dessinée, but he is equally as fascinating as a kind of modernist who broke boundaries between word and image:

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/23/gus-bofas-low-life-art/

That was followed up by a review for frieze magazine of Badlands Unlimited’s recently published interview by the deceased American art critic Craig Owens. Owens’s approach to criticism feels particularly prophetic right now. In the 1980s, for example, he foresaw what would become known as “intersectionality”:

https://frieze.com/article/craig-owens-portrait-young-critic

Then was a piece on the American writer Harry Mathews for The White Review. His excellent posthumous novel, The Solitary Twin, was published by New Directions in the spring. Mathews was the first anglophone member of the Oulipo, a French avant-garde writing collective, which produces literary works by applying compositional constraints. Mathews was always secretive about how his constraints worked, and The Solitary Twin is no different in that regard. Even still, this is perhaps his most accessible and humane:

http://www.thewhitereview.org/reviews/harry-matthews-solitary-twin/

The same month saw my review of Belgian fashion designer Martin Margiela published in frieze magazine. Margiela had two concurrent exhibitions at Musée des Arts Decoratifs and Palais Galliera in Paris. His influence on culture at large since the 1990s is still underrated: 

https://frieze.com/article/famed-fashion-designer-martin-margielas-career-firsts

Along with my piece on Gus Bofa, I was particularly proud of this strange article on the graphically violent political graffiti of Brussels, which I wrote for The Happy Reader:

https://www.thehappyreader.com/issue/11/

In Paris this summer, I saw a fantastic exhibition of the Japanese modernist painter Foujita at the musée Maillol, which I had the pleasure of writing about for The New York Review Daily. He is mostly associated with the School of Paris in 1920s Montparnasse. Foujita is having a bit of a moment right now, and I’m glad to have had the opportunity to write about him:

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/05/27/foujita-imperial-japan-meets-bohemian-paris/

Finally, right as the year ended, I wrote about Two Step, Emma Ramadan and Chris Clarke’s translation of Olivier Salon and Jacques Jouet’s play, Pas de deux, for The Quarterly Conversation. I was particularly interested how this little Oulipian play could help me think about translation as a kind of friendship:

http://quarterlyconversation.com/two-step-a-boolean-comedrama-by-jacques-jouet-and-olivier-salon

Many thanks to the editors of all of the above. I have never had the pleasure of working with such an exceptionally talented gathering of people.

[subterrainblog]

Poets Among Artists: Aaron Peck on “Bicyclists” by John Barton

I admire John Barton’s choice to have his entire poem “Bicyclists” occur in one sentence, with its long detoured meanderings, its lines often beginning or ending with a preposition, because it reminds me of something that Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote in his 1766 book Laocoon. Lessing argued that poetry is superior to painting because the former suggests while the latter merely depicts. At the risk of oversimplifying Lessing’s argument, the crux is that poetry unfolds over time, and is hence durational, whereas painting, which can be apprehended by looking at it instantaneously, is spatial. It was a standard argument of the late 1700s, and when you think of it, it still holds. Because of the temporal element of language—of how we make meaning one word after another until an image or thought finally coheres in our mind, the way I am calling to attention that right now by having this sentence extend and extend the meaning of my thoughts, delaying my point with these subordinate clauses—literature can imply what is not seen, whereas painting is bound by what is depicted in front of you. So it interests me that Barton has chosen to have the entire image unfold in one sentence. Here, Barton’s long hypotactic sentence builds an image in the reader’s mind, all of the elements present in the painting, plus all of the suggestion of what is hidden behind it.

“Bicyclists,” of course, lands in a long tradition of poems about paintings. In reading it, I was somehow reminded of George Oppen’s “Giovanni’s Rape of the Sabine Women at Wildenstein’s,” which not only shares some of Barton’s cadences, again with its prepositions beginning and ending lines, but also with how it presents the painting: The title of the poem identifying the painting, to which then the body of the poem responds by giving the image words. This is often referred to as ekphrasis, a term that corrals poems from Homer all the way to John Ashbery into a tidy genre. But it is a bit of a misnomer, because that word was not used for poems inspired by paintings until 1954 when the critic Leo Spitzer peppered the Greek rhetorical term in a sentence of his essay “The ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ or Content vs. Metagrammar.” Lessing, for example, never used the word in his landmark book. Ekphrasis, as now is commonly known, describes a rhetorical technique of “speaking out” for things, of making an evocative description that can come alive in the reader’s mind. In other words, it is a term to describe a vivid image in words. And then via the New Critics, it became a bona fide genre of poetry. So the category is not only a twentieth century invention but also uses a term that originally had nothing to do with the composition of poems, instead with rhetoric, with evoking or speaking for something else.

Regardless, that’s exactly what Barton’s poem does: It speaks out for the painting, giving us the gestures and implications of these two men, who are perhaps cruising, yet cycling in opposite directions. What works in Barton’s language is that the poem also remains as suggestive as the painting. It doesn’t make explicit the context that lingers under Paul Cadmus’s image. And although expression of same-sex love is not the taboo that it was during Cadmus’s time, the implications that the poem leaves unaddressed (i.e., what these two beefcakes on bikes are doing) make Barton’s poem all the more effective. As Oppen wrote in the abovementioned poem, “Perhaps one is himself / Beyond the heart, the center of the thing.” Barton’s poem leaves room for that centre.

[weststreetgallery-blog-blog]

PHOTOS FROM AARON PECK'S READING AND SCREENING, BY ADAM HARRISON

[weststreetgallery-blog-blog]

Letters to the Pacific - Sunday, April 22, 2PM

West Street Gallery is pleased to present

Letters to the Pacific Written by Aaron Peck Annotated by Adam Harrison and Dominic Osterried  

Sunday, April 22, 2012 Book Presentation from 2 p.m. Reading/Screening from 2:30 - 4 p.m. "The uniformity is remarkable. The air is thick. The city throbs perpetually. Where is the incongruity, the neighbourhoods separated by boredom, the pleasures of low density? There is poverty, of course, but strangely that is not so distressing as the wealth. There are old shipyards along Riverside Park South that have been left as symbols of New York’s industrial past, like romantic ruins floating on the Hudson, set against the shimmering boardwalks commissioned by Bloomberg."      - Aaron Peck, Letters to the Pacific Letters to the Pacific is an ongoing collaborative project between Vancouver-based novelist and art critic Aaron Peck, and Düsseldorf-based artists Adam Harrison and Dominic Osterried. The project began with a series of general letters sent to Peck's closest friends and colleagues while living in New York for doctoral art history research in 2006-2007. In 2010, Peck was asked by Matthew Stadler at the Portland-based publisher Publication Studio/Jank Editions to publish the letters. In turn, Peck asked Harrison and Osterried to hijack the publication. Launches of this project first took place in four German cities during the summer of 2011. At these events Harrison and Osterried asked Peck to read his entire text. Then they made a film collage to be played in between the reading of each letter. The collage and its relationship to the reading become a kind of a "film weaving." The event lasts approximately 90 minutes, and will be the first time it has been presented in North America. The book has been expanded into a limited edition package, featuring twelve prints by Osterried and Harrison, five tipped-in color plates by Harrison and Cologne-based artist Christopher Williams, hand-worked pages by the Italian artist Johannes Bendzulla, and a DVD in a hand stamped and spray-painted case, all in a DHL-yellow spray-painted envelope. This will be available for viewing and purchase. Then we will go downstairs for some drinks. Sam Gould will be in attendance. West Street Gallery 395 West Street #2 NY, NY 10014 [email protected]