Writing & Talking

In this three-hour seminar, Gaitskill will talk about some of the favorite stories she’s written and about the craft of writing in general.

Join us for a conversation between Maggie Nelson and Ben Lerner as they discuss the relationship between their writing and visual art. Seating is limited, and first come, first served.

This five-day workshop will focus on the craft of writing, including style, point of view, narrative technique, and language. Participants will each submit a piece of writing for the group to workshop.

This workshop will focus on the verbal and the visual, how writing can represent or complement or obscure visual art. Participants will submit writing for feedback from Lerner ahead of the meeting, and the group will discuss assigned readings, including the description of the Shield of Achilles in the Iliad, Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and Barbara Johnson’s essay “Muteness Envy.”

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten discuss their ongoing collaboration and their new work All Incomplete. Ranging from ‘new habits of assembly,’ to logistics and logisticality, to debt and study, to violence and individuation, this talk elaborates their exploration of undercommon social life.

In this workshop we will consider the theory and practice of deviant complicity and experiment with some protocols for the material (re)enactment of the aesthetic sociality that making art and life always bears.

The seemingly simple project of describing reality has so often stumbled into being startling art. In this talk, we’ll consider what we as writers and artists can learn from the luminous work of varied inquirers, such as the late 19th century German naturalist Ernst Haeckel and the bantering language of 20th century mathematician Paul Erdos.

In this workshop, artists will look at two short fairy tales by The Brothers’ Grimm and then assemble their own short stories from visual prompts.

With Bill Brand, Christoph Cox, and Lucy Raven
Hunter College North Building, Room 1604

On October 30, 1968, filmmaker Hollis Frampton delivered a performance at Hunter College titled “A Lecture.” At once a film screening and a meditation on the ontology of cinema, the performance encapsulated Frampton’s conception of meta-cinema and introduced what he would later call “infinite film.” Fifty years later and in the very same room in which Frampton first presented it, the Artist’s Institute will stage a new performance of the lecture, featuring a new recording of the text by artist Lucy Raven. Following the performance, philosopher Christoph Cox will discuss the piece with the filmmaker Bill Brand—Frampton’s friend, student, and preservationist.

Please note this event takes place off-site. Directions: Enter on the north side of 68th Street, between Park and Lexington Ave. Look for the entrance marked “Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College” and follow interior signage for directions to Room 1604.

This is a talk about getting by when you can’t get along. A talk for writers and artists who find themselves in No-Man’s Land, the Twilight Zone, the Upside Down, the wasteland, the badlands and the boonies. On the sidelines, on the bench, on hold, on standby, out-of-sync, in the wings, up the creek, in a ditch, in a fix, in a funk, in stasis.

Drawing on his new book Limbo—a memoir, a meditation on creative block, a cultural history of limbo, and companion for the isolated, delayed, stranded, stymied and those in the dark—Dan Fox considers the role that fallow periods and states of inbetween play in art. In a world that demands faith in progress and growth, what happens when you’re plain stuck? How do you get out of your own way? Questions will be asked. Answers will be stumbled over in the dark and cursed at.

In this workshop, we will muse together on strategies for incorporating improvisation into our various artistic activities.  Individually and collaboratively in the workshop we will do several improvisatory exercises and experiments. Writers and artists should bring materials with which to play, including paper, pens, drawing materials, etc.  Participants are also welcome to bring sources of inspiration for these experiments, whether scraps, objects, photographs, books, or other ephemera.

Inspired by stanzas in his recently-published book, Camp Marmalade, the second volume of Koestenbaum’s “trance trilogy,” the poet will perform improvisatory Sprechstimme recitative, with free-style musical accompaniment—keeping open, in the evening’s séance, to the assistance of such ghosts as Charles T. Griffes, Alexandre Tansman, Germaine Tailleferre, and Witold Lutoslawski, though these invitees have not yet RSVP’d, and may decline to attend.  The poet will also project a very brief instructional video.