The Ineluctable Weight of Living

A fictional text informed by preliminary conversations with Shelly Nadashi regarding her performance and exhibition for New Work Scotland Programme 2010

A Space on Stage: The Dinner Party

For Nicolas Party, New Work Scotland Programme 2010 Through the windows of a ground floor apartment four characters are arranged around a kitchen table. A bright light shines above the orange cloth covered surface. HENRY is stylish and charming; he sits proud in the back left-hand chair with both elbows weightily leaning on the table. MATTHEW leans back on his chair, his relaxed position causing him to be at a distance to the rest of the group displaying an almost detached manner. PETER is tall, willowy with rather effeminate mannerisms; what he lacks in charm he makes up for in an ignorant stubbornness. He too is leaning forward, so much so he could almost be on top of the table. His chair is the only one positioned at the front of the table. NADINE is young, her face soft and rosy with rouged lips and cheeks; a timeless beauty. She sits to the right, positioned outwardly so that she is almost facing away from the others. A still life sits to the left of the window depicting a bourgeois dining table stacked with fruit and lavish silver kitchenware, a knife protrudes, balanced under the corner of a silver platter, it signals a forthcoming disaster. It’s early evening. Light is beginning to fall

The Fruit of Their Actions

For 'What Have We Done?', Smith/Stewart, The Changing Room, Stirling

All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds

for 'Mining the Horizon', Gordon Schmidt, Rhianna Turnbull and Amelia Bywater & Christian Newby, New Work Scotland Programme, Collective, Edinburg

‘You’re the least important person in the room and don’t forget it’: The intimate relations of subjectivity and the illegitimate everyday

Collaging epistolary passage and theoretical discussion, this article both embodies and investigates the intimate, cerebral and emotional voice as a post-critical device and a politics of the personal-made-public. Forms of critical memoir and autotheory are examined as rhetorical forms where criticality is charged by correlation to one’s own life. First-person critique, or the ‘radically intimate’, is recognized as a post-critical turn and as a revisionist return to poststructuralist critiques of subjectivity and citational practices of self-writing. A particular focus is this mode of enquiry applied to art writing and acting as a meta-critique of the conditions of creative practice. As a self-reflexive research methodology, it is argued that first-person observation, inflected by affect, intimacy and the quotidian, can be understood not only as a countercultural trend but as a radical intervention in the means, production and historiography of contemporary art, literature and its discourses

‘Never recant, never apologise, never explain’: Chris Kraus in conversation with Laura Edbrook

Chris Kraus, author of the novels I Love Dick, Torpor, Aliens & Anorexia, Summer of Hate and the collections of art writing, Video Green: Los Angeles and the Triumph of Nothingness and Where Art Belongs, discusses her new work, After Kathy Acker, a critical biography of the late American post-punk writer, due to be released in the UK at the end of August 2017. Writing the stories of her own life in playfully intimate and candid ways, Kraus’ critical gaze turns as much in on herself and her relationships, as on the sociopolitical structures which enable and limit us. Her work, hailed as a new form of philosophy by the art world and academia, has gained something of a cult following since the release of her first novel I Love Dick in 1997. Establishing the editorial directorship of Semiotext(e)’s Native Agents series in the early nineties she created a significant space for the publication and circulation of radically subjective and restless works by her then underappreciated friends or colleagues such as Eileen Myles, Cookie Mueller and Lynne Tillman. Most recently Chris Kraus has transitioned into the literary and broadcasting mainstreams with the re-publication of a number of her novels, and the adaptation of I Love Dick into an eight-part series for Amazon Videoby director Jill Soloway and playwright Sarah Gubbins. Chris Kraus read from After Kathy Acker (then a work in progress) at The Glasgow School of Art [GSA], 19 May 2016, followed by a conversation with Laura Edbrook and questions from the audience. This event was presented by GSA in collaboration with the Creative Writing department in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow. With thanks to Colin Herd, University of Glasgow

The Subject's Object

The objection takes place in a tungsten-lit room when it is dark outside. It begins when everyone is seated, arranged at a central table

Feminist Art/Writing: Genealogies, Subjectivities, and Critique

From Where I Stand Feminist Art/Writing: Genealogies, Subjectivities, and Critique A workshop series, organised by Laura Kowalewski, Oona Lochner und Isabel Mehl, in the context of the Research Training Group “Cultures of Critique” at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg. Presentation with Karolin Meunier

Brass drums, brass suns, beccaficos and a cuckoo

You say, “There are no wolves. I see nothing, and there’s no owl either. I don’t hear a sound, and the wolf is only your imagination.

"And when you’re ready, slowly open your eyes..."

Patrick Staff performed a guided meditation at the invitation of Conal McStravick for the event 'Calling An Audience' on Saturday 16 March 2013 in the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, Cultra as part of Grand Domestic Revolution Goes On at CCA Derry/Londonderry. Cara Tolmie also contributed to the programme. This text has been adapted from a recording of the event with the added participation of the authors. Laura Edbrook, Simone Hutchison, Conal McStravick, Patrick Staff, Cara Tolmie