Category Archives: papers

Shifting Audiences: Reconfiguring Pasts

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OoPs Seminar 19th March, Senate House, London
OoPs Seminar 19th March

Goes to Show: Rough Music in Frownlands

Out of Practice Seminar (Oops)
 
This talk considers the contexts and motivations of two recent works: a poem and performance. Each explores relationships to music, visual art and the noise of cultural and critical dissent. E.P. Thompson’s survey of the long standing European traditions of ‘Rough Music’ reveals the uncomfortable tensions between community-based rituals and the local enforcement of law. This talk will demonstrate how Thompson’s archival survey of folk traditions is highly generative for the formation of a contemporary poetics alive to its own fragility, even complicity with its apparent objects of subversion. Olsen’s recent performance, Frownlands, 1969 both celebrates and resists aspects of the commonality and energy of 60’s counterculture. At Bury Art Gallery she presented a feminist inflected performance-text, a nominy delivered karaoke style in a non-site plywood replica of the original scene of production: the Californian Woodland Hills house where the infamous album, Trout Mask Replica was recorded. The talk will explore the overlaps and gaps between imagined and empirical audiences. What happens when the reality of performance and poetic language come up against wider conflicts of interest and power relations at large in the speculative imaginaries and curatorial fantasies of public engagement and participation?

Bedford Room, G37, Ground Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

Speakers Redell Olsen (Royal Holloway, University of London), Christopher Ohge (Institute of English Studies, SAS) 19 March 2024, 5:00PM – 7:00PM
Contact IESEvents@sas.ac.uk

https://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/shifting-audiences-reconfiguring-pasts

Minimalism: LOCATION ASPECT MOMENT October 14-15 2016

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Keynote performance lecture – Professor Redell Olsen 

I See/You Mean: The Minimalist Roman[ce]

Taking as its starting point the post-Minimalist nouveau roman, ‘I See/You Mean’ by Lucy Lippard this lecture will explore Minimalism in the visual arts and writing. It will consider aspects of critical discourse on Minimalism as itself encoding forms of romance and propose a counter series of poetic interventions by way of response.

Redell Olsen is a poet and text based artist whose visual work involves live performance with stills or moving image. Film Poems (Les Figues, 2014) collects the texts for her films and performances from 2007–2012. Her previous books include: ‘Punk Faun: a bar rock pastel’ (Subpress, 2012), ‘Secure Portable Space’ (Reality Street, 2004), ‘Book of the Fur’ (rem press 2000), and, in collaboration with the bookartist Susan Johanknecht, ‘Here Are My Instructions’ (Gefn, 2004). From 2006-2010 she was the editor of How2, the international online journal for Modernist and contemporary writing by women. In 2013-14 she was the Judith E. Wilson visiting fellow in poetry at the University of Cambridge. She is currently Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Royal Holloway, University of London. redellolsen.co.uk

THE PHOTOS

Frank O’Hara Symposium at the ICA – 24th July 2016

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Absract of Keynote Paper:

Frank O’Hara’s Poetics of Art Writing: ‘On Looking’ to the ‘Crowning of the Poet’ Redell Olsen

Grace Hartigan ‘Crowning of the Poet’ (1985)

Grace Hartigan ‘Crowning of the Poet’ (1985)

Frank O’Hara’s writing on art is diverse and crosses multiple genres from criticism, poetry to collaborative and visual works. In addition to critical writings on artists he often wrote poems on paintings, dedicated his poems to painters and made reference in his own poems to particular paintings from a range of art historical periods that included his own. In its diversity O’Hara’s art writing contributed to the conditions of mutual influence that emerged between the poets and writers who were his contemporaries. Grace Hartigan’s painting the ‘Crowning of the Poet’ (1985) demonstrates the ongoing effect of the poet on the artist nearly twenty years after O’Hara’s death. This talk will examine a number of paintings and works of art that relate in very different ways to O’Hara’s poems and explore the ways in which these paintings, when read in conjunction with O’Hara’s writings, might help us to re-imagine and to rethink the traditional modes used to describe the constellated and inter-related practices of poetry and painting.

Programme

See a Video of the Paper Here (Olsen at 4:09)

Contemporary Poetry: Thinking and Feeling, University of Plymouth, 2Oth -22nd May 2016

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Abstract Keynote: Redell Olsen

‘Proposals For Landscapes: and other mutual antipathies’
This talk will offer a series of proposals For landscapes, a recalibration of the optics for a poetics of the conceptual. This reading will explore these possibilities across multiple registers of the material and linguistic possibilities of felt-thought. It will assert a space for itself between the symptomatic dismissal by the visual arts of poetry as ‘literary costume’ and the more recent neglectful mis-readings of conceptual art by writing at the expense of the conceptual histories of the lyric genre.

Programme Here

Hague: International Conference on Artistic Research: Writing

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28th of April 2016 – International Conference on Artistic Research: Writing

The Hague

Keynote: Redell Olsen

  ‘A Column of Air: Flickers/Writing/Painting’

     28 April 2016, 14.15 till 15.00 — Royal Academy of Art

In 1967 Art and Language designated a column of air ‘art.’ The place of writing as and in place of painting seemed assured. When you begin to look away from seeing and reading the dematerialised art work, there emerges a new possibility, a poetics of flickers. In 2016 this column of written air flickers with art forms very different from the art critical language associated with conceptual art. What does this flickering reveal? Poetics and the visual arts flicker with glimpses of this not not-conceptual-art, and not not-writing­-as art. My performance/lecture will explore how writing might engage with a flickering ekphrastic turn to landscape painting and its spin-offs. Timothy Morton questions whether ‘Nature’ was ever really there as more than a flickering ghost. I will nevertheless resist the double bind associated with simplistic definitions of ekphrasis, undoing the binary logic of writing as a half-glimpsed phantom of another ‘proper’ subject. The possibility of the filmic will be registered across the boundaries between the documentary, the poetic, and the visual-as-writing. Tracing this exploration through existing works and images, this lecture/performance hopes to enact a writing of paintings for paintings and an aesthetics of art that flickers in writing.

http://www.sarconference2016.net/rc/index.html#archive

Video of Paper here