Sarah Minor on Visual Essayists: Installation Two with Kristen Radtke

As a continuation of the conversation I'm having with essayists about visual essays and the way their multimedia thinking functions (or doesn't), I present to you a conversation with Kristen Radtke. 

S: What do you think motivates you to include graphics in your writing? At what point in your process does a text begin to involve other media? Or is it the reverse?

K: It’s different with every project. I’m generally most satisfied with the results when I work back and forth between text and image, composing them in conjunction with one another rather than creating a prose script and crafting images to follow. I’ve definitely made work that way, especially when I’m doing animation and video. But on paper, I have the most fun when I move back and forth between mediums. It helps me utilize them both as fully as I can.

S: In writing workshops, we commonly describe successful visual essays as those that teach their reader how the form and content will work early on, and abide by these rules of play for the duration of the piece (except for an important slight shift). Do you think your work functions in this way?

K: I hope so. I think this is something every piece of art needs to do, whether it’s prose, visual, or a combination of the two. It needs to teach its audience how to pay attention without overpowering the audience’s ability to interact and interpret on their own. I’m not utilizing an unfamiliar form—I use panels, word bubbles, and captions that anyone who has ever read a comic book, or even a comic strip in their Sunday paper, should know how to read. The struggle comes in, I think, with my subject matter, which is often more about place than people, and more ruminative than narrative. Comics generally count on events and characters to bring readers through a story. My graphic essays sometime go five or six pages without a single human figure. But it’s the same issue that we tackle when writing prose that might be digressive, associative, and non-narrative. The challenges are similar.

S: Do you have a word, or a way to describe what is going on between the images and the narrative voice in Sans Soleil as well as in your graphic essay about Marker’s movie? If not yet, might you invent a new term? For me, the work of your images seems about visually recreating an idea or experience. You address this directly on ED, but I’m wondering what you think the exact work of juxtaposition is here? Is it drawing attention to the hand behind the pairing language and image texts as much as movies?

K: I certainly try to make my drawings explorations of ideas and experiences. Some of them are definitely representational, and I use the images rather than the prose to convey narrative back-story and context. Images have their own voices just as prose does, and maybe the space between the two when they’re put together is where art can happen. I suppose you could call it braiding, but I’m not exactly sure if that’s what you’re driving at. Sometimes an image serves a narrative function while the prose it’s coupled with conveys some essential bit of exposition that lays the groundwork for what’s to come. Sometimes image sets a mood while the prose explores a narrative. I like to approach each panel on its own terms to see how I can get the elements to work together.

S: I like that—image as vessel of mood, or narrative, or voice. I sometimes worry that it takes the art-gesture out of the process to dissect and explain these things but I wonder if you can talk more about or name the various roles of images when paired with text? You’ve suggested that in visual/graphic essays the function of images is often the same as that of a sentence or paragraph, and I agree, but images also obviously do the work that language cannot, or maybe just do it better in certain instances. I like thinking that the use of both image and text is as much about what each medium can convey to a reader (description, scene, idea, tone) as how successful that medium is at conveying the thing. Or maybe multimedia work just expands the range of tools we have to communicate with. Or…something…

K: I think we can convey almost anything through almost any form or medium. In this case, I don’t see either prose or image as superior to the other. The power of images, perhaps, rests in immediacy. A scene that takes paragraphs to describe can be digested by a reader in seconds when rendered visually. A few years ago I was riding the subway in Tokyo and sat across from this kid reading a graphic novel, turning a page every three or four seconds. I had this sudden rush of dread. As Zadie Smith said of Chris Ware’s work, “it takes him ten years to draw these things and then I read them in a day.” There are advantages and disadvantages to every form. 

I hear your concern about dissecting and explaining art, but especially when it comes to the essay, a form all too often misunderstood, I think it’s essential that we try to contextualize what it is we’re doing. Historical and contemporary discourse of painting or sculpture hasn’t done anything to diminish the artfulness of those mediums. That said, it seems to me that the contemporary essay/nonfiction community has been in a rush to assign names to what it is we’re doing, perhaps in an effort to clarify a very crowded genre. Have terms like personal essay, creative nonfiction, or lyric essay really done that much to shed light on what these kinds of literature can or should do?

S: So why nonfiction? Do you think that the draw to include visual material within an essay has something to do with the truth-making gestures of CNF?

K: I’ve identified as an essayist since college. I took nonfiction classes, I worked as a journalist, and I compulsively read books of essays and thought-driven nonfiction. I like the idea that graphic forms lend themselves particularly well to nonfiction, but the vast majority of the graphic market is and always has been fiction, from comic books to graphic novels. I don’t know that genre dictates how and why drawings and images are incorporated, but I try not to think of any of it as an “inclusion” of visuals. In good graphic novels, essays, memoirs, comics, etc., text and image have to work together. Both have to be so indispensable that one can’t function completely without the other.

S: Indispensable seems very right. It’s really my bad for using verbs like "include" and "incorporate" to describe these processes in the first place (and probably, too, for claiming visual truths. I was thinking-ish about the document). These words make it seem like the text is this primary body that visual media become additional to or are buttressed by. The impetus behind this project began as a search for the language to describe and understand the craft of mixed media texts—but maybe that’s the issue, that I’m trying to explain these interactions using language that gets more specific and less flowery than “marriage” and “symbiosis.” I think braiding is a term that comes up often because it describes a kind of alternation that allows each medium the stage momentarily. Maybe, as you say, the success of combination is really happening in the brain of the writer and then the reader in the moments between and after image and text. Maybe this is what art means always, but I’m still looking for a way to talk about craft that gets us to that place of art-happening, or pushes us away...

K: I think we're all a little nervous about saying the wrong thing. Graphic essay? Graphic nonfiction? Graphic novel? Mixed media essay? Illustrated prose? Comics? Maybe naming just gets in the way. Illuminated manuscripts have been around since 400 AD. There is nothing new about literature that is both graphic and prose, but for whatever reason, it's taken us a while to treat this kind of work seriously. I think literary criticism in America is just a little more conservative than we all care to admit. It can be frustrating, but it needn't be troubling. I do see a lot o f progress and a lot of hope for graphic work--in 2011, Lauren Redniss's extraordinary graphic nonfiction book Radioactive was a finalist for the National Book Award. There's a lot of exceedingly good graphic work out there, and there's a place for it, and that place is growing. It's exciting to work in a genre that still has something to prove. 

S: This is heartening. Do you yourself feel inspired or informed by other makers of visual essays? Are there writers who you feel are doing similar work?

K: Most of books that have been influential to me are prose titles, perhaps because there is just so much more going on in literary nonfiction than in graphic nonfiction. I didn’t grow up reading comic books and I don’t read fantasy graphic novels, although I have profound admiration for artists in those fields. The graphic writers I’ve looked to most are heavy hitters like Alison Bechdel, Marjane Satrapi, Joe Sacco, and Lauren Redniss. They’ve all made remarkable contributions to graphic nonfiction over the past decade or so. The Undertaking of Lily Chen, a graphic novel by the immensely talented Danica Novgorodoff, came out at the end of March, and I hope everyone pays attention. Paul Madonna’s All Over Coffee is truly beautiful. Chris Ware and Adrian Tomine never cease to make me giddy when they undertake new projects. It’d be lovely to hear that my work is somehow in conversation with any of these artists, but I’m totally unqualified to make a claim like that. I’ll just say I feel lucky that they’re all producing such wonderful work. It no doubt makes the world a richer place.

S: Thanks, Kristen.

Kristen Radtke is a writer and illustrator living in New York. She is the Marketing and Publicity Director for Sarabande Books, has an MFA from the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program, and is currently working on a graphic memoir about abandoned places and an anthology of essays from twenty-something perspectives with Lucas Mann. Her graphic work has appeared at Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, The Rumpus, TriQuarterly, Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, and many others. Find her on Twitter @kristenradtke.


Sarah Minor is from the great state of Iowa. She has an MFA from the University of Arizona's Nonfiction Program, and will soon begin pursuit of a PhD at Ohio University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming at Word Riot, in Conjunctions:61, Seneca Review, South Loop Review, and Black Warrior Review. Her Interviews appear here and at Terrain.org. She lives in Tucson, where she works at the Poetry Center and picks at a collection of visual essays about liminal spaces. 

 All images by Kristen Radtke. 

Andrew Bomback: POC vs. WAF

Six days after the Donald Sterling tape leaked, I read Junot Diaz’s essay, “MFA vs. POC”, which details the difficulties he and other writers of color have experienced in generally all-white MFA programs. Because the only “news” I follow is sports news, even though Junot Diaz certainly wrote this essay well before Donald Sterling’s taped racist harangues went public, I nonetheless read “MFA vs. POC” as a response to what was happening in basketball.

I sneak in pleasure reading at work, usually when I’m walking from one building of the medical center to another. I printed out the Diaz essay in my office and read it during the walk to the building where I’d soon be teaching twenty medical students the fundamentals of acid-base balance. Like most aspiring writers (I assume), good reading leads me to think about trying to write something that approaches what I’ve just read. And so, because I’d just been absorbed in Junot Diaz’s world for ten minutes, including his summation of MFA programs as “that shit was too white,” I thought upon entering my classroom: “I am white as fuck.”

I tossed around that self-assessment throughout the rest of the day and eventually expanded the analysis: “I am married to a Mexican-American, but I am still white as fuck.”

And then, by the time I was ready to go to sleep that night: “I am married to a Mexican-American, but I am still white as fuck, yet my daughter is not going to be white as fuck.” Her Puerto Rican daycare teacher adores her because she is bilingual. They speak Spanish together throughout the day, a secret language that distinguishes them from the rest of the class. One afternoon, when I picked up my daughter and was amused by how much she’d eaten that day, her teacher said: “That’s just how I was when I was her age, with that little panza. My aunts and uncles still call me gordita.” On the weekends, when we take her to the playground in our town, when she is surrounded by gringitas and gringitos, my daughter refuses to speak Spanish with me or her mom. Is she trying to be white as fuck? Or is this conscious decision to hide her Spanish a distinctly non-white as fuck move?

I don’t think I’m entitled to be annoyed, but I am certainly aware of and amused by how the NBA writers on Grantland (all white or Asian) try to sound young and hip, which in turn often has them emulating the language of black NBA players. They refer to Damian Lillard, the star point guard for Portland, as Dame. They seem to have made a pact to (a) love Demarcus Cousins and (b) consistently call him Boogie, decisions that would be forbidden in mainstream (=white) journalism. They frequently use rap lyrics for their headlines. They call veterans who no longer seem interested in the game, whose skills have eroded and are barely making a professional roster, as “Keep Gettin’ Dem Checks Guys.”

Teju Cole, on the afternoon the NBA handed down a lifetime suspension for Donald Sterling, tweeted: “Nicely played, moderate whites.” He may have been addressing the sports media as much as the NBA hierarchy. He might as well have been addressing sports fans, too. In four words, he trumped the countless hours of television and radio and the tens of thousands of words ESPN launched at the Donald Sterling issue.

That same day, David Shields tweeted out a link to a transcript from NPR’s “Morning Edition” that quoted him on “the nitty gritty of how racism really operates.” The reporter mentioned Shields’s book, Black Planet, and said the book is “about race and the NBA.” I am a gigantic fan of David Shields. He has said that each of his books is about something (e.g. Remote is about celebrity culture), and following that lead, I think of Black Planet as his book about living in Seattle (the “narrative” of the book is his following the Supersonics during one of their most tempestuous season). NPR and, I suppose, Shields (if he really wanted to self-promote) should have steered listeners and Twitter followers, respectively, towards Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine. That title is the David Shields book about race and sports. His essay on tattooed NBA players is burned into my mind. I remember where I was when I read it (waiting outside the Costco auto shop having the tires replaced on my Toyota Prius, white as fuck), and I think about the essay when I watch NBA games, when the camera zooms in on a player shooting free throws. The tattoos all over his arms and neck, to paraphrase Shields in that essay, is the player’s way of saying: “I own my body, not you.”

Coincidentally, I finished Teju Cole’s Open City the same night I was tossing around the idea that I was white as fuck but my daughter wasn’t. There’s a scene, towards the end of the book, where Cole’s narrator, Julius, is mugged just outside Morningside Park. The scene of the crime is just a few blocks from Columbia University, where if all goes well (i.e. if I stay in my current position and my daughter’s preternatural ability to memorize song lyrics is a harbinger of future academic feats) my daughter will be a student someday. The mugging chapter begins with Julius (a half white, half black man) making eye contact with his future muggers (black teenagers) accompanied by a nod with which he presumes a subliminal communication: We are brothers, we are both part of outsider culture. Later in the chapter, the muggers walk past Julius and don’t make eye contact; then, almost immediately, they attack him. In retrospect, what Julius had earlier interpreted as a moment of solidarity was, in fact, two criminals merely sizing up their eventual target. I’ve walked in this exact spot enough times – though not at night, not like Julius – to wonder if I would have been mugged. I might have had my guard up more than Julius if two black teenagers were walking determinedly in my direction. I hope someday my daughter will be just as guarded. The chapter, which I read less than twelve hours after reading “MFA vs POC,” probably wouldn’t have struck me as a chapter about race on another day, at another time.

I’ve never written about race. When I was younger, I desperately wanted to be a short story writer and churned out fifty or so pieces, of which a small number were eventually published. Only one of these stories had a non-white protagonist: an Asian-American who’d just graduated from Harvard, played baseball, and was dating a white girl. The first short story I ever tried to write was in high school and was about a group of privileged white teens who were so obsessed with hood movies (e.g. Menace to Society and Juice) that they referred to each other as “nigga” and, eventually, felt that they had to commit some act of violence to match their cinematic heroes. I am so relieved that I never finished the story and did not keep a copy of the draft.

Hannibal Buress and Tracy Morgan recently held a public conversation at the 92nd Street Y, which is located in Manhattan’s Upper East Side (arguably the most white as fuck neighborhood in Manhattan). When discussing whether white people can use the N-word at karaoke, Buress said: “You can’t pick a song that’s nigga heavy. Like, Kanye’s ‘All of the Lights’ is OK, but YG’s ‘My Nigga’ you should avoid.” Morgan followed up: “When you drinking at the karaoke spot, know how many niggas are in the song.” I don’t karaoke in public but do so in my house, with my daughter. We both love Drake and Kanye. I replace the N-word with her name, which conveniently has two syllables.

“MFA vs. POC” has a happy ending. Junot Diaz reports that, after finding some success with his own writing, he helped found the Voices of Our Nation Workshop for writers of color. In fact, the “MFA vs. POC” essay, which I read on the New Yorker’s website, is drawn from the introduction to a new anthology of writing from this workshop.

Like most parents, I want my daughter to succeed in areas I’ve failed, to accomplish feats I never was able to do, to be the better version of me I always dream about. So, of course, I dream about her becoming a writer. A good writer. A successful and productive writer. In that dream, though, I’ve never considered her a writer of color. After reading “MFA vs. POC,” I realized that my version of her future was, arguably, my most white as fuck move of all. I stare at this offspring of a white as fuck father and a Mexican-American mother and hope that she will someday participate in the Voices of Our Nation Workshop. She will cast a critical eye at her father, at the books he read and the writing he tried to do, and say: “That shit was too white.”

 

Andrew Bomback is a physician and writer in New York. His work has recently appeared in Hobart and Westchester Review.

T Clutch Fleischmann on Is, Being, About

There are a lot of words at the 2014 Whitney Biennial. There’s a Susan Howe poem that cuts and pastes language, then letterprints it into a progression of legible/illegible rhythms, and it’s beautiful. There’s a display of Semiotext(e) pamphlets, including Jackie Wang’s brilliant Against Innocence. And, excitingly, there’s the object-oriented writing of Travis Jeppesen.

Jeppesen’s piece, 16 Sculptures, is a series of black chairs, black sunglasses, black headphones, and black records on the wall. You sit in a chair and put on a blindfold and listen to headphones, blocking out everything else, a divide made more poignant by the installation’s placement within a room filled with one of the most hyper-colored and frenetically sprawling overloads of visual and audio information at the Biennial. Each headphone plays a reading in digitized voice of Jeppesen’s object-oriented experiment with a familiar sculpture. The Venus of Willendorf declares her worth, “My ass has a sort of mouth and a lot to say” and “My hole-iness is raw gorgeosity—fat fuck holey for the masses.” Cady Noland’s Misc. Spill announces “The electric guitar spilled all over my tits got sent there for sure cos like a real motherfucker barks like a dog as he wolfs on down the raw egofuck.” And Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty is a narrative of natural time, the Spiral and “everything that gets in its way,” with adroitly weird grammar.

16 Sculptures exists as a book as well. In its preface, Jeppesen describes his experimentation with object-oriented writing (an echo of object-oriented ontology) as “a writing that positions itself within the work of art, while simultaneously including all the contradictions and impossibilities that come embedded within such an approach.” He further delineates this type of writing— “unlike criticism, which is always necessarily about an object, and unlike poetry, which is inspired by, object-oriented writing takes on the task of being.” For Jeppesen, this is a mode that allows for contradictions, truths that become untrue or maybe true in different ways, lingering possibilities, and the preclusion of conclusions.

The task of “being” instead of the task of “being about.” There is an important ethical distinction in there that resonates through the essay as genre. We cannot, as object-oriented writing acknowledges, successfully represent another thing. Our aboutness is unique to us as individuals and writers and so never purely about our topic, regardless of whether we write about music, about the live of strangers, about our own days, about the moods of weather or the history of cats. To write about something is to lay claim to a fact (emotional, physical, historical)—to write as a form of being is to lay claim to the failure of aboutness, situating the writer within the paradox that the writing can never be the sculpture, the body, the voice, the movement, and yet to write anyway.

Where can the essay take us, as readers and writers? I have never been entirely comfortable representing anything in my writing. I know that I am forever providing false ideas about boyfriends, or this land, or notions of time, or what a word means. Writing that clearly declares itself as fiction allows, as part of its project, for the writer to write herself into experiences that are not her own. It is a project with its own ethics and complications and possibilities. I do not have the skill to work in this mode. When I attempt to write outside of my experience, I stumble and fret over questions of politics and identity (questions rooted in logics with which I do not even agree). The essay has always felt more comfortable as a way to own my self-ness and to hopefully interrogate it. It says from the start that there is no one here but me while allowing me to fill it with citations and quotes from those who formed this “me,” undermining the idea that a self could ever exist alone anyway. And while the essay, on its surface, sometimes seems more restrained than other genres in this way, I also know it has the potential to reach as far and to take us to as many places as any other writing. It can even go inside a sculpture, which is impossible to do (and so it fails).

Object-oriented writing is concerned with the distance between the writer and the object, a distance it tries to disavow. Venus again: “Deep inside my rocky cove, I harbor waves,” which works because Jeppesen the individualized writer is uniquely being in rather than coolly about the sculpture. I believe my consciousness warps and garbles anything it relates itself too, but I also believe in the importance of relating, of language’s endless potential to expand what I know of the world, to bring me into new thought. Writing as being rather than being about does not solve this problem of relation, but instead embraces and works within the problem. It reminds us that the attempt of the essay is not to discover something, but to release some meanings that only we (individuals with other individuals) can find in the not-discovering.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee is writing that is while resisting being about. In drawing from the writer’s life and the life of her mother and the life of Joan of Arc and the life of Yu Guan Soon and so much else, the text creates a constancy of relation, both implicit and explicit. This is the relation of fragmentation, not the relation of cohesion. As it reads, “The present form face to face reveals the missing, the absent. Would-be-said remnant, memory. But the remnant is the whole.” When the writer’s own life is at the center of a text, as it is here, it is a topic over which she can claim the greatest authority. But in Dictee, the text is instead disrupted, fragmented, as to be inside of it is to understand it through the lives of others. By being in the life, the writing is in the blank spaces and disruptions of identity and history. I wonder if the idea of object-oriented writing can be stretched to apply here, too, to relate to a lived experience. Does even writing about our own lives also imply a false distance that could never be there, gladhanding and making insincere promises to the reader? And then, how do we move into the is, as Cha does, so beautifully that the reader is changed?

Everything exists, is whole and potent, regardless of how or if we might relate to it. Yet through relating, through writing or speaking with or handling or ignoring, we change that everything (the world). This is, again, why Jeppesen’s writing, even as it tries to inhabit a physical object and to not be “about” that object, is still Jeppesen’s writing, still wholly of him, as what else could we be of but us? Object-oriented writing and its attendant concerns, then, highlight why the essay is both impossible and exciting, both a problem and a necessary attempt. It refuses to make the individual supreme by rejecting the aboutness, and in turn both features the individuality of the writer and the unique individuality of the subject/object. It’s a way to write into the Venus and declare that “It was dykes who invented porn.”

I’m constantly wanting to celebrate the essay and then talking about its failures. Maybe this is one of the reasons Jeppesen’s budding experiment appeals to me so strongly. In a post “The Object” on his blog Disorientations, he writes “Always a failure then, every instance of writing, yet how to overcome,” which I find thrilling, the same sentence making both the “failure” and the “how” an “always.” Whatever else it is up to, I want the essay to make sure it fails. I want us to write about politics and make offensive mistakes, not to perfect a politicized language of politeness and solid understandings. I want us to lie to each other because we lied to ourselves. I want us to try to use our essays to actually go inside of an object and write its being because that is fucking impossible to do. I’m bored by the lie of about, in pretending we are not failing. I want to get inside of something and be so that I can fail.

T Clutch Fleischmann is the author of Syzygy, Beauty from Sarabande Books and a Nonfiction Editor at DIAGRAM. They write about books and art at a number of places, including queer literature for the Brooklyn Rail, and can be reached at tee.fleischmann@gmail.com. 

Arianne Zwartjes: On 100 Pisama / 100 Letters: 1965-1979 by Marina Abramović

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I used to show my writing students documentation from Marina Abramović’s early performance work. Rhythm 0, often, or Rhythm 10.  They were intrigued, often shocked, some of them put off by the nudity, the violence.

In Rhythm 10, the first in the series, Abramović is on her knees on a stage, in all black, with an array of knives spread in an arc on the floor in front of her. She takes a knife and stabs the floor in between the fingers of her spread hand as fast as she can. Every time she cuts her hand she changes to a different knife.

In Rhythm 0, Abramović is in a closed room for six hours with an audience. On a table are an array of items: grapes, a flashlight, medications, wire, razor blades, makeup & comb, wine, a flute, a polaroid camera, a rose, a loaded gun. Seventy-two objects. Her performance notes say, I am the object. During this period I take full responsibility. By the end of the performance, Abramović stood naked, bleeding where she’d been carved into with rose thorns, her nipples covered with rose petals, her eyes red and her face streaked with mascara.

When I began to explore Abramović’s later work, often silent, focusing on the interpersonal gaze, on presencing, I understood her earlier works in a different light. That going to the body’s edge is not unlike becoming fully, baldly, silently present to what is. Finding the edge of an audience’s discomfort with witnessing nudity, sexuality, pain, not unlike asking them to meet the eyes of the artist for minutes or longer without breaking.

Of Nightsea Crossing, for example, which Abramović and her partner Ulay performed 22 times between 1981-87, she writes,

We are sitting motionless at either end of a rectangular table facing each other, our profiles turned to the audience.

Conditions of the performance.
During the entire period in which the performance takes place both inside and outside the museum we remain silent and completely abstain from food, only consuming water.

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Recently I discovered Abramović’s 100 Pisama / 100 Letters: 1965-1979, an artist’s book put out by onestar press in Paris in 2008. To call this project an artist’s book is in fact misleading; there is little autobiographical narrative to be found here. Instead, what we find are the first sentences of the many letters Abramović received while living in Belgrade, Yugoslavia: sometimes tantalizing, often intriguing, at other times downright baffling. The text’s use of redaction moves it far beyond the realm of the traditional, documentary-oriented artist’s book. 

In Abramović’s artist’s statement, she writes, “I kept every single letter, from the first notes received from my mother, in I965, up to the time I left Belgrade forever in I979. I decided to chronologically write down the first sentence from all of these letters, without noting the name of the senders.”

The choice of first lines emphasizes their disparity; like poetry that chooses the framework of form, working against this constraint makes the dissonance and contrast between the letters’ tone and content far more fascinating. Though Abramović notes that the letters are arranged chronologically, chance has offered powerful curation: the lines’ sharp tonal contrasts and juxtaposition of content seem heightened as though by intentional placement, setting Williams Carlos Williams-esque lines like Dear sweetie, There is yoghurt, milk, cheese, butter and eggs in the fridge against others such as Dear Marina, I regret that I was obliged to call the police to trace you.


The letters begin with all sorts of salutations---Honey, My dear Marina, Dear Comrade, Ma chere Marina, or most intriguingly To Sekica—or with none at all. In fact a scattering of lines with no salutations offer a sort of interspersed commentary:

I no longer have an opinion about anything.

Listen! I have no more strength to look for you or not to look for you.

Send the play to Pittsburgh if you have possibilities.

Who are you to give orders to me?

In general, the project’s lines move between mundane biographical information (Dear Marina, we are writing to you as we are on the vaporetto “Arrow”), seemingly-random interpersonal correspondence (Everything is fine now. We have heard from you and that is quite enough.), and historical/contextual information (Respected Comrade, we have postponed the date for the opening of the May exhibition.)

These former categories provide a backdrop for other, more fascinating categories of lines. Letters whose opening lines seem to hint at fraught relationships, interpersonal tensions, such as Marinice, I will never forgive you for not wanting to travel with me by bus. Or Dear Marina, Your silence has been going on for almost a year.

Lines with concise poetic statements: Many thanks to your mother for having given you your name. 

Lines of political tension or foreboding: Comrade Abramović, The executory decree of the first municipal court of Belgrade no 4802/69 of 1965 condemns you to pay the fine. Or Comrade Marina Abramović, We remind you one more time that you have not accomplished your obligations toward the group.

Or lines such as these, where the letter-writer enacted literary moves reminiscent of Kotzwinkle’s The Fan Man:

Marina, Marina, Marina, Marina, Marina, Marina, Marina, Marina, Marina, Marina, Marina, Marina, Marina, Marina, Marina.

The book has little sense of ongoing dialogue; it hardly seems to accrue even short narrative threads of any one story or interaction. Occasionally, readers can deduce who is speaking---one line mentions “Grandma,” another is addressed to both Marina and Velimir, who we learn from an earlier letter is her brother---and eventually, finally, tiny hints of story-like shadows do begin to take shape---her relationship to the communist government, or to her family---but so many of the other relationships are narrative dots rather than lines, tiny pinpricks of light on a dark canvas, or points plotted on a graph, rather than the full arc. The most interesting moments are those of total strangeness that break the scatterings of mundane moments and correspondence, or those where we are given only a philosopho-poetic fragment of thought----

---moments such as these, which are Fellini-esque in their surrealism:

God! I no longer realize what’s going on, I cannot find time to write you, everything is like in a dream, I don’t understand a thing.

Dear Marina, I cannot write to you right now, the musicians won’t let me concentrate.

My little girl! It’s me in the letter.

Dear Marina, Breeding worms.

Or these:

Respected Comrade, We kindly ask you to make it possible for us to re-record your birds for our needs.

I am delivering a baby right now and as usual I don’t know what to write to you.

--- these are the moments that cause the project to open and open; that allow us to revel in the language and to embellish what is left unsaid. Inside these strange and filmic moments, we find the same call to attention that is present in Abramović’s art; like the most bizarre moments in a black & white Fellini scene, they demand the engagement of our direct gaze.

*

Each letter opens onto a spread of two pages: on the right, the original line in Serbian, on the left, its English translation. The book was initially printed in a run of 1000 copies, which onestar press sold at 50 € each. Now, a google-search tells me, they go for $2070 on Artspace.com. (Thankfully, the pdf can be downloaded for free on the onestar press website.) Upon reaching the end, I discovered that in fact there are only 97 letters, and I savored Abramović’s boldness in blatantly disregarding this limiting truth in favor of the wholer number for her title.

I am left, at the end of the book, with the obvious question: why these choices? Why make this project, in this way? My girlfriend Anna theorizes that it’s a commentary on how audiences react to art, always wanting the full story, a full explanation, rather than allowing their imagination to play. Perhaps a more relevant question is why it is interesting to us as readers, this collection of lines that hardly cohere. Is it pure voyeurism, small peeks into interpersonal dramas and other life moments of this artist who has become, in recent years (particularly due to her 2010 MoMA retrospective/ performance, The Artist is Present), a more widely-known and intriguing figure? There is certainly a degree of this at play: her performance pieces offer us such raw intimacy, and yet to see glimpses of the non-performative moments of her life---the mundane moments, the personal tensions, the mysteries—is something different altogether. But prurience alone is not enough to carry a project like this entirely, and offers little of literary or intellectual interest.

No, voyeurism aside, what is interesting about this book is that---like Jenny Boully in The Body, comprised entirely of footnotes to a non-existent text, or in Book of Beginnings and Endings, comprised of exactly what it sounds like---Abramović has created a new structure and form for the essay: one which is engaging, surprising, humorous, and intriguing---in short, successful. Like any good essay, it raises questions, offers us new angles of insight, and like any good poem, it leaves wide open spaces for our imaginations to sprawl.



Arianne Zwartjes’ book of lyric essays, Detailing Trauma: A Poetic Anatomy, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2012. She is the author of three collections of poetry: The Surfacing of Excess, Disem(body): A Tracing, and (Stitched) A Surface Opens. Visit her online at ariannezwartjes.com.