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Knot Michael Archer I’m thinking about lots of things and I’m thinking about Chloe Stead – telling stories, making them up, meeting them, and passing them on. Transmitting. I’m thinking about Ann Leckie. I’m thinking about Breq, whose body is so full of so many songs that she leaks melody wherever she goes. I’m thinking about Breq who, like everybody else in her universe, is referred to as she. I’m thinking about a body and many bodies, and a mind and many minds. I’m thinking about Octavia Butler and the way narrative can reverse the seemingly irreversible flow of time. A jejune experiment, Robert Smithson calls it in A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic – mixing sand and soot in a bowl and observing that no amount of further stirring will cause them to separate out again. Butler’s fiction confounds the inescapable fact behind this observation when she describes a meeting of minds as being like two bowls of water mixing, and then being separated back out, molecule by molecule, into their original bowls. I’ve never been convinced that Smithson used jejune quite correctly. In his writing it seems as if he believed it to mean something similar to juvenile, simple, unsophisticated, uncomplex, rather than barren, empty, or unsatisfactory. I’m thinking about a right word and a wrong one. I’m thinking about a point of view, and about accumulation – like the word multiplicity that’s five syllables: ac-cum-u-la-tion – about piling up, gathering, hoarding, collecting, marshalling. I’m thinking about a Judas kiss. I’m thinking of a quotation; in fact it’s an embedded quote, not a quote from a text, but a text quoted in a text from which I am quoting. On the page as conventionally laid out it might appear as a doubly indented passage, but it won’t here because it is now part of a new text that I’m writing: When a man makes a poem, makes it mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them – without distortion which would mar their exact significances – into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses. It isn’t what he says that counts as a work

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Multiplicity – a reader

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Chloe Stead

who read. The name of these three volumes is Multiplicity, and they are each also further described as ›A Project by Chloe Stead‹. Chloe Stead makes things to be read, and she makes the place where the things she makes to be read can be read. Copying, borrowing, quoting, translating (either linguistically, or in the mathematical sense of shifting from one location to another without flipping or rotating): all of these involve repetition, and in repetition, which is not only inescapable but also essential, lies our sense of rhythm and measure. Philippe LacoueLabarthe’s essay, The Echo of the Subject, which can be found in a volume titled Typography, begins from two observations: firstly, Hölderlin’s reported comment that ›All is rhythm; the entire destiny of man is one celestial rhythm, just as the work of art is a unique rhythm‹; and secondly, Mallarmé’s observation that ›every soul is a rhythmic knot‹. I want to quote on something like this echoing from Jacques Derrida’s essay La Parole Soufflée, which can be found in a volume titled Writing and Difference:

of art, it’s what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity. This is William Carlos Williams in the preface to his 1944 book, The Wedge, quoted by Robert Creeley in his lecture, ›I am given to write poems‹, delivered in Berlin in 1967. Creeley liked this statement. He had already quoted it in an interview with Linda Wagner for The Minnesota Review in 1965. It says lots of good things, and it also says some problematic things. If we string some of the problematic things it says together they might read something like this: A man, he, he, him, his, he, he, he. This partiality of the pronoun, here, now, is not an unimportant problem. In 2009, Chloe Stead was one of a small group who started a journal titled Young, Fresh and Relevant. What she did there, and continues to do, is to take words as she finds them interrelated about her and compose them – without distortion which would mar their exact significances – into an intense expression of her perceptions and ardours that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that she uses. I’m thinking again of Ann Leckie and her persistent and insistently all-inclusive ›she‹. I’m faced with three volumes. They all have the same name, but they have different colours and different numbers: #1 – green, #2 – blue, #3 – brown. The text on each of the front pages is different, but the text on all the back pages is the same. Between these covers, all three volumes are full of texts gathered from other places, which is to say, from other books, other volumes. Some of the texts have been annotated by someone who read them in the place from where they have been gathered, and some have clearly already been gathered from other volumes into the place from which they have been gathered for these volumes. The three volumes – the green and the blue and the brown – are described as ›Readers‹, which is a potential problem because Reader does not mean quite the same thing in English as it does in German. Are they published collections of texts, and/or are they copied pages assembled for students to study? They all have English words and German words in them, so perhaps it’s not a problem at all and they’re both Readers and Readers. Either way, Reader is a strange kind of a name, since, surely, all books are readers, which is to say, things to be read, which is to say, things to be read by readers, which is to say, things made in order to be read by those

Henceforth, what is called the speaking subject is no longer the person himself, or the person alone, who speaks. The speaking subject discovers his irreducible secondarity, his origin that is always already eluded; for the origin is always already eluded on the basis of an organised field of speech in which the speaking subject vainly seeks a place that is always missing. This organised field is not uniquely a field that could be described by certain theories of the psyche or of linguistic fact. It is first – but without meaning anything else – the cultural field from which I must draw my words and my syntax, the historical field which I must read by writing on it. The structure of theft already lodges (itself in) the relation of speech to language. Speech is stolen: since it is stolen from language it is, thus, stolen from itself, that is, from the thief who has always already lost speech as property and initiative. Himself, his, his, I, my, my, I. I’m thinking of Chloe Stead and of words found and carried over and made relevant. The title, Multiplicity, is itself a quote, being taken from the fifth of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the New Millennium (the fifth of five, as his death meant that there is no sixth). There, Calvino talks of the contemporary novel as an encyclopaedia, as a method of knowledge, and above all as a network of connections between the events, the people, and the things of the world. ›Today‹, he says, ›we can no longer think in terms of a totality that is not potential, conjectural, and manifold.‹ The significant point about Calvino’s encyclopaedia is that it is ›open‹. It is incomplete and uncompletable, because the complexities of any and all situations are ungraspable and irresolvable. Chloe Stead’s readers are, like Calvino’s contemporary novel, open encyclopaedias. Calvino begins his memo with a quote from Carlo Emilio Gadda’s novel, That Awful Mess on Via Merulana

– a whodunit in which the perpetrator is never revealed. And later in the essay, having reminded us that Gadda ›tried all his life to represent the world as a knot, a tangled skein of yarn‹, he refers to the writer’s view of all pronouns as ›parasites of thought‹. Álvaro de Campos, who is not Bernardo Soares, or Ricardo Reis, or Fernando Pessoa himself, or any of the other seventy or so heteronymous subjectivities attributable to the Portuguese poet, wrote of his own subjectivity: I, I myself … I, full of all the weariness The world can produce … I… Everything, finally, since everything is me, Including even the stars, it seems, Came out of my pocket to dazzle children. I… Imperfect? Inscrutable? Divine? I don’t know. I… Did I have a past? Of course. Do I have a present? Of course. Will I have a future? Of course, Even if it doesn’t last long. But I, I … I am I, I remain I, I… Another of Pessoa’s heteronyms was I I Crosse. I+I=X Cross, times, kiss, no, yes, the spot, stitch, (horizontal) axis, unknown, ten, trans, Christ, extra. Multiplication X I’m thinking about reading and words and their weight and how they settle – on the tongue and on the page. I’m thinking about how they relate, about how proximity speaks or doesn’t speak. This next to this next to this. Juxtaposition. Juxtaposition as one of the signals of multiplication: 6x, or 7y, or 8z. I’m thinking about what is disparaged and what is disparate (the texts are described as having been woven together from disparaging sources). Disparage and disparate – so close that there’s nothing in between them on the page of an English dictionary. Like jam and jar, or like Hamburg and Harburg. Not quite, not quite; there’s metonymy here and then synecdoche. &Stant littore puppes' – the sterns were lined along the shore. Book III of the Aeneid, as Aeneas arrives in Actium. Or, I’m thinking, maybe they’re the two faces of Duchamp’s piece of paper kept at a distance from one another by the infrathin. Disparage/disparate. I’m wondering about what the other side of the paper would look like. What words appear there? Whose words?

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Biografien der Künstlerinnen und Künstler

Language in general, says Aristotle, includes the following parts: Letter, Syllable, Connecting Word, Noun, Verb, Inflection or Case, Sentence or Phrase. A letter is an indivisible sound, yet not every such sound, but only one which can form part of a group of sounds. And Ian Hamilton Finlay calls this poem &Arcady':

Leonor Antunes

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ Here the alphabet stands as an ideal landscape within which, inexhaustibly, each and every linguistic formulation becomes possible. Yet because the word is always and everywhere a substitute for the absent object or action, and because communication is never transparent, that seamless run of letters also holds within itself the seeds of tragedy. In his characterising of the French Revolution as both a pervasive experience, and an ungraspable reality, Thomas Carlyle speaks of it thus: La Révolution is but so many Alphabetic Letters; a thing nowhere to be laid hands on, to be clapt under lock and key: where is it? what is it? It is the madness that dwells in the heart of men. In this man it is, and in that man; as a rage or as a terror, it is in all men. Men, man, man, men. And Louis Aragon calls this poem &Suicide': Abcdef ghijkl mnopqr stuvw xyz The two are not so far apart at all. Et in Arcadia Ego. The last twenty six words of Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate are: Tzett Ypsilon Ixs Veh Fau Uh Teh Ess Err Kuh Peh Oh Enn Emm El Kah Yott Ih Hah Geh Eff Eh Deh Tseh Beh Ah. Forwards and backwards Backwards and forwards I’m thinking about my grandmother, who said ›crowds‹ when she meant ›lots‹. I’m thinking about that Judas kiss, about Keira and the Judas kiss. It was the first story that Chloe Stead ever told me, and it later appeared in her collection, It’s not going to change art history, is it? The eponymous story in that collection, a mere paragraph long, concerns text as semantic matter, text as image, the placement of text on the page, the placement of the page in space, scale, the nature of art, the constrictive nature of established categories, and how we can possibly make decisions in dealing with these things. This is what changes it. This is what changes it.

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Geboren 1972, Lissabon. Lebt und arbeitet in Berlin. Ausbildung: 1993–98 Universidade de Lisboa, Lissabon 1992–93 Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema, Lissabon Einzelausstellungen (Auswahl): 2015 I Stand Like a Mirror Before You, New Museum, New York 2015 I Stand Like a Mirror Before You, KIOSK, Gent 2014 A secluded and pleasant land. In this land I wish to dwell, Pérez Art Museum, Miami 2013 a linha é tão fina que o olho, apesar de aramado com uma lupa, imagina-a ao invés de vê-la, Kunsthalle Lissabon 2013 The last days in chimalistac, Kunsthalle Basel Gruppenausstellungen (Auswahl): 2015 Function Follows Vision, Vision Follows Reality, Kunsthalle Wien 2015 Sharjah Biennial 12: The past the present the possible, Shariqua, Vereinigte Arabische Emirate 2015 Slip of the Tongue, Punta della Dogana, Venedig 2014 Mark the Line, Göteborgs Konsthall 2014 8. Berlin Biennale für zeitgenössische Kunst

Ina Arzensek Geboren 1982, Gelsenkirchen. Lebt und arbeitet in Hamburg. Ausbildung: 2005–12 Hochschule für bildende Künste, Hamburg Einzelausstellungen: 2015 Loose Ends, Galerie in der Wassermühle Trittau 2012 Am Piano, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg

Gruppenausstellungen (Auswahl): 2014 33. Hamburger Arbeitsstipendien für bildende Kunst 2013, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg 2013 Preis der Nordwestkunst 2013 – Die Nominierten, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven 2011 Jeune Création Européenne Biennale D’Art Contemporain 2013–15, Museu Municipal Amadeo Cardoso de Souza, Amarante, Portugal; Casa Empordà, Figueres, Spanien; Villa Olmo, Como, Italien; KKKC, Klaipeda, Litauen; Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, Niederlande 2011 Dialectical Routine, Galerie Sassa Trülzsch, Berlin

Gruppenausstellungen (Auswahl): 2014 Quadriennale Düsseldorf 2011 Keeping an Eye on Surveillance, The Performance Art Institute, San Francisco 2010 Zwischenraum : Space Between, Kunstverein in Hamburg 2009 Der bohèmistische Leichnam, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg 2003 Off The Record – Sound Arc, ARC, Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris

Publikationen: 2015 Loose Ends, Galerie in der Wassermühle Trittau 2015 Ina Arzensek: einander 2012 Ina Arzensek: wohin?

Ausbildung: 2011, 2007 Universität der Künste Berlin 2006 Ecole Cantonale d’Art du Valais, Sierre, Schweiz

Oliver Bulas Geboren 1981, Hamburg. Lebt und arbeitet in Hamburg und Rio de Janeiro. Ausbildung: 2005–12 Hochschule für bildende Künste, Hamburg 2011 San Francisco Art Institute 2009–10 Ecole supérieure d’Art et de Design MarseilleMéditerranée Einzelausstellungen (Auswahl): 2015 Filmset On Spooky Action At A Distance And How To Escape This Dangerous Age, Y Gallery, New York 2015 34. Hamburger Arbeitsstipendien für bildende Kunst 2014, Kunstverein in Hamburg 2013 A Presentation In Lola Not Presented In Lola, M.1 Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung Hohenlockstedt 2011 Boat Tour, [Maknete] (Galerie für Landschaftskunst), Hamburg 2008 WCW-GALLERY. The Basement, Kunstverein in Hamburg

Julian Charrière Geboren 1987, Morges, Schweiz. Lebt und arbeitet in Berlin.

Einzelausstellungen (Auswahl): 2014 Somewhere, Wilhelm-HackMuseum, Rudolf-ScharpfGalerie, Ludwigshafen 2014 Future Fossil Spaces, Musée cantonal des BeauxArts, Lausanne 2014 Die Welt ist mittelgross, Kunstverein Arnsberg 2014 We Are All Astronauts, Centre culturel suisse, Paris 2012 Non Sites Sight, Case Studio VOGT, Zürich Gruppenausstellungen (Auswahl): 2015 The Future of Memory, Kunsthalle Wien 2015 Rare Earth, ThyssenBornemisza Art Contemporary‚ Augarten, Wien 2014 Festival of Future Nows, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin 2013 Les Modules du Palais de Tokyo, 12ème Biennale de Lyon 2011 Über Lebenskunst, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin

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