siglio

SUSAN HILLER (b. 1940, Tallahassee, Florida) is a London-based artist whose multifaceted practice not only investigates the means by which knowledge and culture are formed, but also disrupts and re-presents accepted bodies of knowledge in ways that call attention to the spaces between the literal and figurative, the unsaid, the overlooked, and the unknowable. From her most well-known work, The Freud Museum, to her many works which engage dreams, visions, and the paranormal, Hiller draws on her training as an anthropologist to engage the political in tandem with the emotional, the rational with the irrational, language with the inarticulable. She has degrees from Smith College and Tulane University. Her work has received considerable international acclaim, including several solo exhibitions world-wide and a recent retrospective at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in England.

DOROTHY IANNONE (b. 1933, Boston, Massachusetts) is an artist whose highly stylized, vividly imagined works achieve a radical and provocative expression of sexual liberation that originates not in the rejection of male power structures but in the embracing of her lover, the artist Dieter Roth, as her male muse. Her ecstatic — and often censored — works exalt sexual union, merging not only traditional sexual roles but also male and female genitalia. Much of her work is rooted in autobiography, specifically her relationship with Roth which is recounted in the image+text work, An Icelandic Saga. Based in Berlin, she had her first solo exhibition in the U.S. at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 2009.

BHANU KAPIL (b. 1968, London, England) is a British-Indian writer whose hybrid forms of writing are highly influenced by her own history of migration and explore the existential position between and across various borders. She is the author of four books of poetry/prose: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers and humanimal [a project for future children] (both from Kelsey Street Press), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works), and Schizophrene (Nightboat Books), from which this selection is excerpted. She teaches at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.

ROHINI KAPIL (b. 1975, London, England) is a British-Indian photographic artist interested in tropical and subtropical environments and architecture. The photographs in Schizophrene belong to the project The Future of Colour. Her work has been shown in London and Prague, and she is currently completing an MFA at the California Institute of the Arts.

HELEN KIM (b. 1966, Los Angeles, California) is a photographer interested in cultural and economic narratives and their effect on the realms of family and history. Kim’s work has been exhibited at the CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art in San Francisco and at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and currently teaches at University of Southern California and Chapman University.

ALISON KNOWLES (b. 1933, New York, New York) is a pioneer in Fluxus, an avant-garde movement that began in the 1960s and radically challenged the prevailing definitions of art and artistic practice. Working in several media, including sound, performance, book arts, printmaking, and sculpture, Knowles is known as an innovator who uses the everyday world as the matter and form of art and poetry. Her early work Bean Roll—a can of texts and beans—connects the ordinary and edible to the aesthetic; it is considered one of the earliest book objects and is the first of many more of her works using beans as a central object and subject. She is also well-known for her sound compositions and their scores. Throughout the 50s she was a member of the New York Mycological Society along with the avant-garde composer John Cage who directly influenced her work and the Fluxus movement. With her husband Dick Higgins, she founded Something Else Press. Her work has been exhibited and performed worldwide.

KETTY LA ROCCA (1938 – 1976, born in La Spezia, Italy) was one of a few feminist conceptual artists working in Italy in the 1960s and 70s. Her oeuvre comprises visual poetry, visual art, and performance, and often critically appropriates mass media narratives to reconfigure language and the representation of female reality. Her focus on the physical aspects of language manifests in works like in principio erat, which stages bodily gestures as communicative signs connected to the female experience. Several retrospectives of her work have been exhibited since her premature death, including one at the 1978 Venice Biennale.

BERNADETTE MAYER (b. 1945, Brooklyn, New York) is a writer who has challenged poetic conventions by exploring the forms of and relationships between consciousness and language. Often collapsing poetry and prose as well as experimenting formally, her work reveals the ways in which language shapes the imagination, the quotidian, and the self. Associated with the New York School poets, Conceptual art as well as Language poetry, Mayer has been a key figure in the New York City poetry scene since the 1960s. She has written more than a dozen books including Poetry State Forest, Scarlet Tanager, Proper Name and Other Stories, and Midwinter Day, all published by New Directions. She graduated from the New School for Social Research in 1967 and began teaching there shortly thereafter. She served as director of The Poetry Project in the 1980s in addition to teaching there for many years. With Lewis Warsh, she founded United Artists Press, and from 1967 to 1969 she co-edited the magazine 0 TO 9 with Vito Acconci.

ADRIAN PIPER (b. 1948, New York, New York) is a conceptual artist and an analytic philosopher whose scholarly work focuses on metaethics, the history of ethics, and Kant. Her work as a visual artist has driven Conceptual art and Minimalism into more politicized territory through her explorations of received, manufactured, and self-assigned identities and their social implications, particularly with regard to race. Her work has been exhibited internationally since 1969, including six retrospectives, most recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona. She received her PhD in Philosophy from Harvard University and became the first tenured African American woman professor in the field of philosophy. In 2008 Wellesley College terminated her professorship upon her refusal to return to the U.S. while listed as a Suspicious Traveler on the U.S. Transportation Security Administration’s Watch List. She now runs the Adrian Piper Research Archive in Berlin.

CHARLOTTE SALOMON (1917 – 1943, born in Berlin, Germany) was a painter and writer whose life ended abruptly when she was deported to Auschwitz from Villefranche-sur-Mer, France, where she lived with her grandparents in exile during the second World War. Her adolescence paralleled the fall of the Weimar Republic and Hitler’s rise to power, and her cultured, assimilated family saw its fortune rapidly diminish. Despite the many ways in which Jews were expelled from public life (her father, a professor of medicine and a doctor, could neither teach nor practice, and her stepmother, a highly lauded singer, was not allowed to perform in public), Salomon was able to secure a place in art school under a special rule. As anti-semitic attacks increased and the worlds accessible to Jews became more circumscribed, the Salomon home became a gathering place of intellectuals and artists where Salomon listened intently to her parents’ guests and whose ideas and opinions likely expanded her education. In 1939 she left for France and to stay with her grandparents. While alive, her grandfather refused to give his permission for Salomon to marry Alexander Nagler. When he died, the couple hastened to marry, which revealed their identities as Jews to the authorities. They fled temporarily, but upon returning to Villefranche-sur-Mer three months later, both were arrested. Salomon died within three days of her arrival at Auschwitz in October, 1943.

GENEVIÈVE SEILLÉ (b. 1951, Saint-Girons, France) is an artist whose work revels in text as an aesthetic rather than semantic material, shifting the verbal to the visual and upsetting the primary ways in which one reads and thus obtains knowledge. She creates books, assemblages, boxes, and works on paper that exploit both the pictorial aspect of language and the range of textures present in the artifacts of writing by using materials from her “Scriptionary,” a scrapbook repository of cuttings from old dictionaries, crossword puzzles, and other printed and recycled matter. Her biomorphic, anatomical, and architectural drawings are governed by what she calls her “secret geometries” that resist the “Western cult of articulacy.” Exhibitions of her work have taken place in the U.S., England, and France, and her bookworks are in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

MOLLY SPRINGFIELD (b. 1977, Columbia, South Carolina) is a visual artist interested in the ways in which society and individuals experience, organize and produce information. Her labor-intensive drawing practice of rendering letters and notes, library catalogue cards, photocopies of pages from books, and other printed matter and hand-written materials yields questions about reproduction and originality, seeing and reading, and technology and labor. She received her MFA from the University of California at Berkeley in 2004 and has had several solo shows in the U.S. as well as group shows in museums and galleries in the U.S. and Europe.

COLE SWENSEN (b. 1955, San Francisco, California) is a poet and translator whose work is deeply influenced by the Language poets, the visual arts, and history. Coupling conceptual departure points with ekphrastic techniques, Swensen’s poetry is attentive not only to the lexica and syntax of various epistemologies but also to the ways in which they layer metaphor and shift perception. The author of thirteen collections of poetry, Swensen’s most recent books include Ours (UC Press), The Glass Age (Alice James Books) and The Book of a Hundred Hands (University of Iowa Press). La Presse, an imprint of Fence Books, is edited by Swensen and publishes contemporary French poetry in translation. She received her PhD from the University of California at Santa Cruz after completing her undergraduate and masters degrees at the San Francisco State University. A National Book Award finalist and a Guggenheim Fellow, she teaches in the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. SHARI DEGRAW (b. 1967) is a letterpress printer and graphic artist based in Iowa City. She runs Empyrean Press which produces limited editions and broadsides featuring contemporary literature and art. Her work is exhibited nationally and collected by major libraries.

SUZANNE TREISTER (b. 1958, London, England) has created a web of interlinking hybrid narratives that dissolve fact and fiction, rationality and paranoia, science and science fiction. Examining the matrices of war, military intelligence, power structures, and documented history as well as of the occult, the alchemical, and conspiracy theories, Treister’s visual evocations of interconnectedness pose questions about perception and reality. Her fictional avatar, the time-traveling Rosalind Brodsky of the mid-21st century, drove a project that manifested in a website, case histories, a book (HEXEN 2039), as well as as a series of exhibitions and interventions. She studied at St. Martin’s School of Art and Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. Her work has been exhibited in England, the U.S., Australia, and Germany.

ERICA VAN HORN (b. 1954, Concord, New Hampshire) is an artist whose bookworks record the fleeting, the incidental, and the easily forgotten. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University recently mounted the exhibition The Book Remembers Everything: The Work of Erica Van Horn and an eponymous catalog was published by Granary Books in 2010. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and since 1989 has been working with her husband Simon Cutts on the projects, exhibitions, and publications of Coracle Press. LAURIE CLARK (b. 1966, New York, New York) is an artist who also runs Moschatel Press and Cairn gallery, an occasional space for contemporary art and ideas, with her husband, the poet Thomas A Clark. Her drawings have been published by Coracle and Wild Hawthorn Press.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS (b. 1953, Portland, Oregon) reconfigures traditional and colloquial narrative forms (stories, songs, jokes, aphorisms, oral histories) to lay bare the systems — whether political, social, linguistic, or visual — that perpetuate racism, classism, and sexism. Investigating family relationships, gender roles, and racial identity, her work draws on both public and private histories, using original and appropriated photographs and texts, as well as film, video, and multi-media installations, to challenge the viewer’s acceptance of the status quo and history as told. She received degrees in art from the California Institute of the Arts and the University of California at San Diego. She also pursued graduate studies in Folklore at the University of California at Berkeley. She has had numerous solo exhibitions at major museums in the U.S. and abroad.

HANNAH WEINER (1928 – 1997, born in Providence, Rhode Island) was a successful lingerie designer and graduate of Radcliffe College before she began mounting performance art works in the 1960s that were documented in the avant-garde journal 0 TO 9 (edited by Bernadette Mayer and Vito Acconci). In addition to her intermedia performance, she cultivated a poetics of translation, not between languages but between person and culture, language and consciousness, the everyday and the extraordinary. Though she was in conversation with writers and artists of the New York School, Conceptual art, and Language poetry, Weiner forged a wholly original artistic vision. The complexity of her aesthetics, her formal composition, and her poetic inquiries was perhaps leavened by her mental illness rather than directed by it. Her most well-known book is Spoke and most recently her unpublished writings were collected in Hannah Weiner’s Open House (Kenning Editions).

SUE WILLIAMS (b. 1954, Chicago Heights, Illinois) is a painter whose darkly comic and autobiographical interrogations of the violence against women also serve as a critique of misogyny as well as feminist myopia. Her insistent political incorrectness and interest in the experience of the body extends now into colorful and seemingly abstract works that, upon closer inspection, are composed of viscera, genitalia, and other body parts and fluids. She studied at the California Institute of the Arts and Cooper Union. She has had numerous solo exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad.

UNICA ZÜRN (1916 – 1970, born in Berlin, Germany) is best known as the author of Dark Spring and The Man of Jasmine, for her tumultuous, damaging relationship with artist Hans Bellmer, and for her association with the Paris Surrealists. Her virtuosic writings and drawings are simultaneously hallucinatory and lucid self-portraits of a psyche under siege of madness, deprivation, despair, and trauma. While she wrote and painted before meeting Bellmer, public recognition came with the inclusion of her work in four Surrealist Art exhibitions in the 1950s. She wrote The Man of Jasmine after meeting Henri Michaux who seemed to embody her childhood fantasy of the ideal lover/father figure. After a series of hospitalizations, she committed suicide by throwing herself from Bellmer’s sixth-floor window.