A performative burial enacted by the Word
NO STONES (Wilder Alison & Monroe Street) with Mirene Arsanios and Maxwell Cosmo Cramer
Friday, September 28th at 7pm
FREE
Taking inspiration from the works on view in Original Language, we present a series of performances approaching language as a medium on the precipice of violence. Amongst us there is no particular fondness for Hegel, but his dictum — “the word kills the thing” — echoes nonetheless. Arm-in-arm with radicals and the resistance, we feel acutely the ways a thorny phrase can devastate nearby subjects and objects. Yet alongside the psychoanalysts, we also feel grateful for the way words can guard against acts of physical destruction. Sensing that literature and sound may be our most direct points of access to this cusp on which language is bivouacked, our evening is devoted first and foremost to hearing its sonic and temporal dimensions. Here it is, then: a sounding, a reading, a staging of new work by three artists who find (and lose) their bearings in the performative burial enacted by the Word.
Mirene Arsanios is a writer based in New York. Author of the short story collection, The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan, 2015), she has also contributed essays and short stories to Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The Animated Reader, and The Outpost, among others. Her writing was featured collaboratively at the Sharjah Biennial (2017) and Venice Biennial (2017). Arsanios co-founded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin. She teaches at Pratt Institute and holds an MFA in Writing from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College.
Maxwell Cosmo Cramer is an actor based in NYC working internationally in theater, film, and performance. Recent work includes: “Pawel & Ebola” by Marianna Ellenberg at The Kitchen; “Mouth” by Maja Čule at Arcadia Missa, London; and “Fassbinder, Faust, and the Animists” by Remote Control Productions at HAU, Berlin and ImPulsTanz, Vienna.
NO STONES is a musical collaboration of Wilder Alison and Monroe Street inspired by Alison’s artist book CALL BACK (2017), an aesthetic inventory of AIDS-related gravestones. An interdisciplinary artist, Alison has shown with 247365, Rachel Uffner, Culture Room, Primetime, and Garden Party Arts, among others. A practicing psychoanalyst, writer, and musician, Street has presented work recently with 315 Gallery, The Candidate Journal, and the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis.
Image: Wilder Alison, 3-WAY CLAM GAUGE, from "Souvenir T-Shirts for Resting Gleaners," 2017