Wystan Curnow, art critic and poet, spoke at the Writers House this evening on curating as a critical practice. The event was shown live on KWH-TV and is already available as a video recording. Wystan was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1939, and studied English and History at the University of Auckland, and took his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Yes, Penn. So his two-week visit here is actually a return to his alma mater many many years later. This afternoon he joined me and Charles Bernstein and Bob Perelman to record a PoemTalk episode on a poem by Louis Zukofsky--which will be released in a few months. Then we all went downstairs for his very good talk on curating. Have a look.
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
a New Zealander among us
Wystan Curnow, art critic and poet, spoke at the Writers House this evening on curating as a critical practice. The event was shown live on KWH-TV and is already available as a video recording. Wystan was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1939, and studied English and History at the University of Auckland, and took his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Yes, Penn. So his two-week visit here is actually a return to his alma mater many many years later. This afternoon he joined me and Charles Bernstein and Bob Perelman to record a PoemTalk episode on a poem by Louis Zukofsky--which will be released in a few months. Then we all went downstairs for his very good talk on curating. Have a look.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
