Dumb Riffs » arts

Event: John Holten in conversation about The Readymades

Karl Whitney — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 11:13:38 +0000

On Thursday night from 7pm I’ll be in conversation with John Holten about his debut novel, The Readymades. The event takes place at the Pygmalion bar on South William Street, Dublin.

From The Readymades’ Facebook page:

‘Holten has expanded the scope of the contemporary novel’
— Brian Dillon

To mark the first Irish presentation of John Holten’s novel The Readymades Broken Dimanche Press are pleased to announce an evening discussion between Holten and writer and journalist Karl Whitney.

Holten has created a unique fiction that uses a variety of forms, genres and found texts to tell the story of Đorđe Bojić and the LGB art group. In collaboration with the Serbian artist and filmmaker Darko Dragicević, they have resurrected contemporaneously a catalogue of LGB artworks from 1995-2007 that accompany the story of The Readymades.

BDP, together with our new partners at Galerie Gojković, will be presenting this work through exhibitions that will mark the launch of the book across Europe this autumn. We’ve already started in Oslo at Gallery 1857 in August, and this discussion will lay the ground for a further Dublin intervention in the coming weeks.

This fiction is on-going; the novel is dead, long live the novel! Time for a fight

An aversion to experimentalism

Karl Whitney — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 13:47:55 +0000

Poet Christodolous Makris on Irish writing:

“It seems I’m happier writing away from, rather than towards, something. I arrived here at the height of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ and therefore into an awful lot of smugness, which didn’t mix well with the country’s inherent parochialism and insularity. The smugness seems well and truly smashed now… A lot of the poetry written in Ireland appears far too preoccupied with the idea of ‘Ireland’. It places huge emphasis on place in rather territorial terms. And there’s generally an aversion to experimentalism. Poetry that uses ‘unpoetic’ language or plays around with convention is looked upon (at best) as an entertaining oddity. With few – but striking – exceptions, the ‘scene’ is dominated by a small number of established organisations which have an interest in maintaining the status quo.”

From an interview with SJ Fowler in 3:AM Magazine here.

Some Parisian Walking

Karl Whitney — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 15:54:10 +0000

Two recent articles by me, written for 3:AM Magazine: a review of Tom McDonough’s new Situationist reader, and an interview with Eric Hazan, radical publisher and author of The Invention of Paris.

Karl Whitney — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 09:45:49 +0000

The first issue of The Kakofonie is launched tonight in the Pygmalion Bar, South William Street, Dublin (near the Powerscourt Centre). Events begin at 7pm, and at around 7.45pm I’ll be interviewed by the journal’s editor, John Holten, on my thoughts about urban space and memory.

Karl Whitney — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 12:41:47 +0000

This evening in Berlin, a new literary journal will be launched. Titled The Kakofonie, and edited by John Holten, the contributors come from Italy, Germany, Ireland, the USA and Denmark. In the first issue, American cruciverbalist Charlie Stadtlander provides a crossword puzzle, French-based Irish artist John Lalor provides a textual exploration of notions of the void, and there are stories and poems from Luke Sheehan, Patrick O’Beirne, Christian Ward and Andrea Bedorin. In addition, I contribute an essay on Georges Perec and urban form. The first issue is available for download in PDF format here.

Karl Whitney — Sun, 10 May 2009 21:28:59 +0000

Laura’s started a blog about caricatures, looking at contemporary chaps what draw (Steve Bell, for example) and auld fellas from years ago (Daumier, for one). Expect a post on why noted pioneer of photography, Nadar, was also an underrated cartoonist, and other engaging tales from mid-19th century Paris. Read her blog here.

Karl Whitney — Mon, 04 May 2009 12:36:55 +0000

My interview with legendary ex-NME writer Nick Kent is available in full from 3:AM Magazine here.

Karl Whitney — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 12:31:16 +0000

Last night myself and Laura went to see David Byrne in Dublin’s National Concert Hall. It was a quite brilliant show – drawing on Byrne’s work with Brian Eno, but transcending the fashionable concept of clapped out artists retreading classic albums in the name of nostalgia. First of all, it was a real spactacle: the band were all dressed in stark white outfits, and they swapped dance moves with three roaming dancers throughout the show – even Byrne himself. Also, Byrne performed a particularly silly version of ‘Burning Down the House’ – tutus and all – near the end of the gig (video from the Paris performance here). I also wrote a preview of tonight’s Belfast concert for last Friday’s Belfast Telegraph here.

David Byrne on the Colbert Report here.

Karl Whitney — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 17:31:59 +0000

Last week, a knock on my door signalled the arrival of a book I’ve been expecting for some time: the grandly titled ‘Has Man a Function in Universe?’, part of a series of books, curated by artist Gavin Wade, based on the Strategic Questions asked by Buckminster Fuller, who said:

It is my working assumption that the following 40 questions must be definitely answered before we may realistically discuss our respective philosophies and grand strategies.

My interest in the book comes from the artist Neil Chapman‘s seemingly chance encounter with an essay I wrote for my MA course about the Oulipo group. Printing out that essay on green paper, Chapman has chopped it up (it was made up of a number of free-floating paragraphs), and then integrated some of my text into the sections of the book produced by him. Rather chuffed about the whole thing, I am.

(Strategic Questions website here.)

Karl Whitney — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 15:34:55 +0000

The Nobel prize for literature has been awarded to French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. Fair play, etc. What caught my attention was the statement from the Swedish Academy:

As a young writer in the aftermath of existentialism and the nouveau roman, he was a conjurer who tried to lift words above the degenerate state of everyday speech and to restore to them the power to invoke an essential reality

As a fan of the ‘degenerate state of everyday speech’ which so enlivened the twentieth century novel (particularly in the works of James Joyce, Flann O’Brien and Raymond Queneau) my initial reaction to this statement was a terse: ‘fuck you’.

See NY Times here.