#felix bernstein

[contemporaryartdaily]

Gabe Rubin, Felix Bernstein at Westbau

[indreams1]

Those who grew up to be Post-conceptual poets are those who missed the protopunk anarchy of the 70s and the revolutionary politics of the late 60s. Rather they were born in the 80s, during the deadening Reagonomic period in art (the Picture show generation and later in Britain, the YBAs) in which previously political postmodern tactics were frozen into monumentally valorized works of blank irony with global celebrities at the wheel. Then they came of age during the 90s, a time when riot girl feminism and Deleuze (minor literature spawning micropolitcs and microcinemas) and Judith Butler’s subversion and queer theory and Zizek’s Hegelian Marxism became prominent. And then they started working in the 00s: finding ways to combine the empty symbolic art of the 80s with the ‘subversive’ affective cyborg-utopian feminist tactics of the 90s. This Post-conceptual combo meant letting go of the splintered punk and separatist politics found in the late 60s, within hippie culture, but also within lower east side art culture. Suddenly, in the 00s punk seemed as romantically insular and individualistically hedonistic and complacent as modernism and romanticism looked to the radicals of the 1970s. Nonetheless, it was compelling and felt good to be punk! So in order to maintain this ‘good feeling’ punk became permissible only through and after neurotic apologies and academic dissertations and ironic quotations. And in order to maintain the political potential of punk, its movements were reformulated into a universally applicable (rather than individualistic) party politics for-all, epitomized by the universalized particular and academically ‘counterhegemonic’ emblem marked by the word ‘queer.’

Note 36 from “Notes on Conceptual Poetry” by Felix Bernstein

[altcomics]

Felix Bernstein

[altcomics]

The most exceptional artist-critic can seamlessly combine banality and transgression, trespassing temporal and disciplinary norms, while still reaping the conventional rewards of the market.

Felix Bernstein

[whitneymuseum]

Artist, poet, and writer Felix Bernstein ponders the “art of failure” and issues of identity and queer persona in a new musical performance debuting at the Whitney. Tickets at whitney.org. 

Felix Bernstein and Luke Smithers, Bieber and the Elder (promotional photograph for Bieber Bathos Elegy), 2015. Photograph by Luke Smithers 

[dannielschoonebeek]

THE POEMS OF OTHERS

In which a poet hands over a basket of poems that he’s been unable to loose from his head in the past few weeks.

                                                        • • •

Number Six of the Eleven Calamities - Renee Gladman Four Poems - Miguel James If Loving You is Wrong - Felix Bernstein Our Wars, Our Victims - Charles Simic If You Are Over Staying Woke - Morgan Parker Lost Nixon - Robert Duncan Gray Inflections Forever New - Maggie Nelson Helen - H.D. Two Poems - Allyson Paty English - Emily Hunt Written in an Abandoned Movie Theater - Michael Keenan

[wendylotterman]

The Pain Quotidian

Exhibition publication, featuring work by Trisha Low, Anne Boyer, Francesca Capone + Kristin Mueller, Felix Bernstein, Wendy Lotterman, Gil Lawson, Allison Brainard, Ian Hatcher, and Nick Irvin at HQHQ Project Space, PDX.