Category: Uncategorized (Page 12 of 1102)

 

‘In these seemingly anti-literary times, authors tend to do all they can to support literature; Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas is the first I’ve seen to treat it like a disease. That’s not to say, however, that he isn’t supporting the literary in his own way. Rather, it’s just that Vila-Matas’s way of pushing the medium forward is by contemplating whether or not we’re going though a period of literary parasitism because mostly everything Western literature has to utter has been said. If Vila-Matas’s discourse suggests that we might benefit by pushing the current edifice right off a cliff, then consider it tough love.

‘Befitting an author who entertains the notion that contemporary literature amounts to scribbling in the margins of the great works, Vila-Matas seems to be pioneering a strange new genre: the literary essay as novel. The first two of his books to appear in English, Bartleby & Co. and Montano’s Malady, are fine examples. Both translated by Jonathan Dunne and recently published in paperback by New Directions, these books, as any well-written essay might be, are positively saturated with quotes, references, glosses, and other signs of deep research; what’s more, the obvious scrupulousness (even exhaustiveness) with which Vila-Matas has looked into his subject matter seems more appropriate to a critical work than a novel. At a time when more and more novels are including lists of sources and footnotes, Vila-Matas’s books stand out both for their rigor and for making their sources an integral part of the text.

‘In Bartleby & Co. and Montano’s Malady Vila-Matas is grappling with the act of literary creation, and in the process he obsessively stares up at the works of his predecessors. The most important aspect of these two novels is how they are very consciously written from under the shadow of literature; these are books that are not only aware of the debts they owe to great authors—Kafka, Musil, Beckett, Gide, and Robert Walser among them—but that seem to be written desperately, as if the great works make their own existence virtually impossible. Each is trying to understand where the words come from—an author’s life? her imagination? dictated by the divine?—and each is based on the fear that after 2,000 years there may not be that much left to say.

‘Appropriately, the tone taken by the barely named first-person narrators of each novel rests somewhere between droll and depressed, treading a fine line between sarcasm and grief. Usually it’s impossible to tell on which side the narrator stands. When, for instance, the narrator of Montano’s Malady delivers a lecture in which he spontaneously chooses to discuss an affair he suspects is going on between his wife and his best friend (both present), it’s uncertain whether we should laugh along at the elaborate joke or worry that a) it’s true, or b) it isn’t, but this delusional man believes it. It’s similarly difficult to know how to interpret it when the narrator of Bartleby & Co., who is working on a book that consists only of footnotes about writers who didn’t write, informs us that a letter he sent requesting help from the author Robert Derain was never answered, so he has written his own reply and added it in as footnote 20.

‘Though the narrator’s lives revolve around books, they view literature with much ambivalence. Yes, they both read with an austere, at times awe-struck respect, and they clearly wouldn’t trade their reading for anything so transitory as material success or happiness, yet they are all too aware that such a deep love of books is also a burden. Literature is quite baldly linked to a Svevo-esque conception of sickness, and one gets the sense that the narrators have paid a sizable amount for their lifelong intimacy with the written word. They have paid it in terms of obsession, loneliness, and alienation, and perhaps they are living with the dreadful suspicion that they would be better off without books.

‘The narrator of Bartleby & Co. hasn’t written a thing in 25 years. That was when he published his first novel, but his father, angrily believing that the son cribbed from his parents’ troubled marriage, dictated an inscription dedicated to his mother. That was enough to spark 25 years of silence. Now he has decided to write again by penning footnotes to a book not yet written. Is the narrator writing a “real” book? Has Vila-Matas? This is one of the questions that this quietly beguiling novel swirls around.

‘One of the noticeable things about a Vila-Matas novel is how quickly symbols grow obese and references dizzyingly stack up. Watch how fast debris collects around the question “What is writing and where is it?” found on page 3. Two paragraphs down, the narrator tells us of his intention to explore this question what writing is by, ironically, writing an anti-book. On page 4 he links literary anti-creation to transcription by referencing Walser, who couldn’t write because he worked as a copyist. In the next paragraph, this is linked to Melville’s famous “scrivener” Bartleby (thus tying into the title), and then scarcely three sentences later Vila-Matas quotes the critic Roberto Calasso who equates Bartleby and Walser as copyists who “transcribe texts that pass through them like a transparent sheet.” From here the next paragraph tells the story of the narrator’s exit from writing (and the beginning of his life as a copyist) when his father made him transcribe the dedication. The author then discusses Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo, who told everyone that his books were transcribed from stories told him by “Uncle Celerino.” And finally we travel on to the implication that authors are merely the vessels for inspiration, or rather, copyists for the divine. We are on page 7.

‘With all the links and references that there are to keep track of, a novel with as much self-referentiality as Bartleby might easily become suffocating, but Vila-Matas avoids this by making each footnote its own absorbing preserve. It’s quite easy to get caught up in each note as an object in and of itself, and this way each is buffered from the others. You may choose to dive into the rabbit hole of referentiality, but to enjoy this book you certainly don’t have to.

‘Another thing that keeps Bartleby & Co. from gaining oppressive weight is the lightness with which Vila-Matas presents the material. Many of the footnotes read as beautifully crafted, 1,000-word flash stories, and they’re usually shortened or juxtaposed versions of longer pieces. In these, Vila-Matas knows how to give just enough information to make a story meaningful without deflating it—in his artful condescension he often makes something new out of his source material. A wonderful side-benefit of this is that he makes you want to read all the books that he writes about, even (or especially) the nonexistent ones.

‘To see his method in action, take footnote 32, which is essentially a summary of a review written by Borges. Vila-Matas first presents the title of the review, “Enrique Banchs Celebrates Twenty-Five Years of Marriage to Silence,” letting us puzzle over that as he fills in some important background info. After quoting Borges’s definition of poetry at us (“the vehement and solitary practice of combining words that startle whoever hears them”), Vila-Matas is finally ready to return to the title, letting Borges explain that it refers to Enrique Banchs, an extraordinary poet who hasn’t written for 25 years. Then Vila-Matas quotes Borges at length, giving us both a taste of the poet and the critic’s evaluation of him, and finally leaves with this quotation as a conclusion: “His own dexterity may cause him to spurn literature as a game that is too easy.” Vila-Matas has done little more than crib from and reframe the review, yet this has made all the difference—Borges’s review is now Vila-Matas’s story of a poet who quit because the “practice of combining words” was too easy.

‘Virtually all the footnotes in Bartleby and Co. are equally successful postmodern manipulations of literary source material, and in the end this may be what separates this book from a literary essay. Essentially there are no characters worth mentioning in Bartleby and Co., there are no scenes to be set, and there is no real plot—rather than evolve forward in terms of drama, this book evolves forward as an essay might, by increasing elaboration of a central idea. The book is so devoid of the kinds of things typically found in fiction that it all but provokes us to wonder why it is fiction. Beyond a preference for mystery (as opposed to explanation), the only other reason I can imagine for writing this as fiction is the narrator’s tone, which would a require a brave, perhaps depressed author were it to be used in a work of nonfiction. It’s not hard to see why Vila-Matas would want to be distanced from this narrator who is a lonesome, friendless person, a civil servant who occasionally makes deprecating references to the hump on his back and is eventually fired for cutting out on his job to write. At one point he writes about a headache he has just had: “Having recovered from it, I think about my past pain and tell myself that it is a very pleasant sensation when the ache goes away, since then one re-experiences the day when, for the first time, we felt alive, we were conscious of being human, born to die, but at that instant alive.”

‘Being human then is to ache productively. So is to write: “Elizondo proposes that the pain [of a headache] transforms our mind into a theatre and suggests that what seems a catastrophe is in fact a dance . . . a mystery that can only be solved with the help of the dictionary of sensations.” In a similar way the narrator evokes literature as a burden that he could never be separate from and that at times offers him transcendent moments, “a dance out of which new constructions of sensibility may already be arising.”

‘Viewing literature as a monumental headache might be the best answer for a book that asks why writers give up writing, and perhaps Vila-Matas would have had a difficult time making such a point without the help of a narrator. Nonetheless, all the research and creativity that has been brought to bear in making this book probably could have gone into a fine, book-length essay investigating the writers of No. I do believe, however, that even if Vila-Matas himself had written an essay in place of this fiction, he could scarcely have written something more well-built and delightful than this carefully enigmatic work.’ — Scott Esposito

 

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Further

Enrique Vila-Matas Website
Enrique Vila-Matas @ New Directions
EV-M interviewed @ BOMB
‘Enrique Vila-Matas: A Spanish Literary Phenomenon’
Enrique Vila-Matas @ La Femelle du Requin
‘The Triumphant Humiliation of Enrique Vila-Matas’
‘ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS TAKES A WALK’
‘Things Fall Apart: A Spanish master’s quizzical unravellings.’
‘Welcome to Literature’s Duchamp Moment’
‘Géographies du vertige dans l’oeuvre d’Enrique Vila-Matas’
‘A fictional history unfolds with Borges-like literary machinations’
‘Enrique Vila-Matas’s citadel of the self’
‘Irishness is for other people’
‘ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS: THE LAST WRITER’
‘What He Says about “the Cat”: Enrique Vila-Matas on Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain”’
Buy ‘Bartleby & Co.’

 

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Extras

Enrique Vila-Matas and Paul Auster in Conversation

Enrique Vila-Matas re: Proust

Enrique Vila-Matas vous présente son ouvrage “Marienbad électrique, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster”

Vila-Matas sobre Robert Walser

Vila-Matas parla de Bolaño

 

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Interview

 

In your novels you frequently include real writers as characters. How did you land on this idea?

I read a novel by Peter Handke called Short Letter, Long Farewell [1972] and the protagonist was a young man who visits [film director] John Ford at the end of the story. John Ford gives him some advice and talks to him about the past. When I read this novel 30 years ago, I realized you could include real-life people like Hemingway and Kafka, who could at the same time be fictional characters in a book.

In the past you have collaborated with French artist Sophie Calle, another expert in mixing reality and invention. Do you think contemporary art is fulfilling a need that much modern literature no longer does?

I wouldn’t know how to answer that. However it has been very important for me to open up to contemporary art. In Kassel during [the contemporary art exhibition] Documenta, I saw some things that I did not understand and that got me really interested. Because if I don’t understand something, there’s a door that opens. I like this idea of the spectator creating the work they are seeing.

You’ve said that when you started out as a novelist you didn’t read novels but poetry. How did that affect your writing?

I think it was good for me to have only read poetry, because only writers who are connected with poetry can write good novels. I myself decided to quit writing poetry because I didn’t think I was able to compose a perfect poem. I believe the novel is the literary genre that readers find the most accessible, so I’ve done my best to adapt to what publishers require. However, I believe I’ve never written a conventional novel. The closest I’ve come is Dublinesque [2010].

As a journalist in the 1960s you made up interviews. What was going on?

I did what I did because I needed it. The first interview I had to translate [from English into Spanish] was with Marlon Brando. I was 18 and had just joined a newspaper. If I’d confessed to my boss that I couldn’t speak English, I would have been fired.

The next interview I made up was with Nureyev, because the night before I was supposed to interview him I bumped into him at a bar where we had an argument. If I’d have gone to his hotel the next day to interview him, he would have recognized me.

The third was with Anthony Burgess. I didn’t have the time to carry out the interview and to type it and to send it to the Vanguardia newspaper and have it published the next day. That is why I decided to have my own interview already done before.

The fourth one was with Patricia Highsmith. As always in her interviews, she said nothing of interest. So I decided just to make the whole thing up. It was like being a murderer. Once you’ve killed for the first time, it’s easy to kill again. However, let me just say that in this particular case I did it without being aware that what I was doing was that wrong.

When the interview with Marlon Brando was published I was the only one who knew that I had made it up. But I overheard a conversation in a cafe where a Catalan writer I knew told someone else: “Did you read those idiotic things that Marlon Brando said in the newspaper?” I actually got offended. I had to shut up, but I was offended because I believed that was my text which was being criticized, my creation.

Why did you stop?

I stopped but not because I felt sorry about it. I just started to write fiction instead. In France they believe that was the origin of my literary vocation, but I don’t think that’s the case.

You’ve written about Odradeks, the word coined by Kafka for strange, spool-like creatures with mysterious powers. Do you have one of your own?

A friend gave me a real one done with little threads. It’s at home on the floor in my hallway. The lady who comes to clean my apartment is from Bolivia and when I told her about this object that I like to have conversations with she smiled as though she was thrilled by the idea. Then she said: “At last, something normal in this house.”

Do you think art requires certain compromises with reality?

Which reality? If you mean the conventional “consumerist reality” that rules the book market and has become the preferred milieu for fiction, this doesn’t interest me at all. What really interests me much more than reality is truth. I believe that fiction is the only thing that brings me closer to the truth that reality obscures. There remains to be written a great book, a book that would be the missing chapter in the development of the epic. This chapter would include all of those—from Cervantes through Kafka and Musil—who struggle with a colossal strength against all forms of fakery and pretense. Their struggle has always had an obvious touch of paradox, since those who so struggled were writers that were up to their ears in fiction. They searched for truth through fiction. And out of this stylistic tension have emerged marvelous semblances of the truth, as well as the best pages of modern literature.

This sentiment is very similar to something you’ve written — “where there is a mirage there is life” — and it reminds me of something I heard you say in an interview: that for the modernists the quest is rectilinear, in contrast to that of Ulysses, whose quest was a circle. In your books, what inspires this search?

In a movie by Wim Wenders, Nicholas Ray says “you can’t go home again.” Sometimes I think about this phrase, and in order to calm down I imagine myself as a Chinese who came home. “I’m just a Chinese who returned home,” wrote Kafka in a letter. Sometimes I wish I were this Chinese, but only sometimes. Because the truth is that what I write frequently brings me to a descent, a fall, a journey within, an excursion to the end of the night, the complete opposite of a return to Ithaca. In short, I long to journey endlessly, always in search of something new. Always alert.

Your books are very different from Hemingway’s, and your influences—Borges, Kafka, Musil, for instance—didn’t write like Hemingway either. Why did you originally set out to emulate him when you went to Paris, and what do you think of him now?

I continue to admire him as a storyteller and as a great sculptor of language. But the truth is that Hemingway isn’t among my favorite writers. Be that as it may, I read A Moveable Feast at fifteen years of age in what was then a very provincial Barcelona, and it instilled in me a grandiose desire to go to Paris and live the “life of a writer,” just like Hemingway. Some four years later I in fact succeeded in living this writer’s life in the garret that I rented from Marguerite Duras. And now, if Hemingway (as he affirmed in A Moveable Feast) could say that in Paris he was “poor and very happy,” I, on the contrary, can only say that at the end of my experience I was poor and very unhappy. Still, after much time and the writing of Never Any End to Paris my unhappiness has become a true moveable feast—in this case of my memory and my imagination.

What role has anxiety played in the creation of your works?

When it grows dark we always need someone. This thought, the product of anxiety, only comes to me in the evenings, just when I’m about to end my writerly explorations. By contrast, the day is completely different. As I write I control my anxiety and anguish thanks to the invaluable aid of irony and humor. But every night I am subdued by an anxiety that knows no irony, and I must wait until the next day to rediscover the blend of anguish and humor that characterizes my writing and that generates my style. “The style of happiness,” as some critics have called it.

To finish up, given that your books frequently deal with other writers, I’d like to ask you about your friendship with Roberto Bolaño, who, as you know, has become a very popular writer in the United States. Did the friendship leave traces in your literature?

Meeting Bolaño in 1996 meant that I no longer felt alone as a writer. In that Spain, which was trapped in a provincialism and an antiquated realism, finding myself with someone who from the very first moment felt like a literary brother helped me to feel free and not consider myself as strange as some of my colleagues would have me believe. Or maybe it was the opposite: I was stranger still. We laughed together very much. We wrote letters to imbeciles and we talked of a beauty that was short-lived and whose end would be disastrous.

 

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Book

Enrique Vila-Matas Bartleby & Co.
New Directions

‘In Bartleby & Co., an enormously enjoyable novel, Enrique Vila-Matas tackles the theme of silence in literature: the writers and non-writers who, like the scrivener Bartleby of the Herman Melville story, in answer to any question or demand, replies: “I would prefer not to.” Addressing such “artists of refusal” as Robert Walser, Robert Musil, Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Duchamp, Herman Melville, and J. D. Salinger, Bartleby & Co. could be described as a meditation: a walking tour through the annals of literature. Written as a series of footnotes (a non-work itself), Bartleby embarks on such questions as why do we write, why do we exist? The answer lies in the novel itself: told from the point of view of a hermetic hunchback who has no luck with women, and is himself unable to write, Bartleby is utterly engaging, a work of profound and philosophical beauty.’ — New Directions

 

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Excerpt

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** scunnard, My complete pleasure, sir. Everyone, This past weekend’s Soft Territories showcase had/has a fraternal twin showcase that you should check out to get the biggest picture. Find it here. ** Adem Berbic, Well, hey there, Adem. Ah, it’s set. Hold on. Everyone, Adem Berbic and his compatriot Alex Abrahams and others have launched an exciting new publishing house called Porters, and their first two titles are born. Go read about them and possibly order them by heading over here. Congrats, bud. Cool that you made it to Thomas’s et. al’s reading. He was just over here visiting us Parisian transplants as you may know. I’m good, Z’s good. Just basically non-stop film stuff as usual. Mm, the Chicago screening is on the 17th and we’ll likely go there a day or two earlier, so I don’t know … we might be here at the very, very beginning of your visit possibly. I hope so. Hugs back. ** Steeqhen, Hey. From every single thing I’ve heard of Taylor Swift she seems like the absolute epitome of mediocrity to me. She makes Elton John seem like the Velvet Underground. But I’m all for getting pleasure where you need to. Glad Jared’s post spoke to you. No, I have yet to play ‘Stray’. It’s coming though. I’ve never played any Steam games. I try to avoid playing on my laptop because I’m too wedded to it otherwise. Luck with the bookshop job hunt. I think the Paris stores are just reopening now. ** Dominik, Hi!!! The park was Efteling in the Netherlands, my favorite park. It was really great. Have you been to Prater yet? Our temperature is sinking by the day. I hope yours is reaching friend status too. Most of the upcoming screenings are in the US, but it looks like there’ll be one in Europe and maybe one in Paris too. We’re waiting for the verdicts. Uninterested twink = god? Love pirouetting everywhere he goes, G. ** Misanthrope, Sounds like a solid birthday. Nice. Holy moly, amazing about your mom! Wow, what a giant relief. Wow. On the other hand, David sounds like he’s in serious, latter stage junkie mode. Let’s hope he secretly realises that. Life here is its usual self, which is fine. But a bunch of film-related traveling is coming up before too long. ** jay, Cool. Kier’s great. He/they did the cover of ‘I Wished’ as you may know among many other large accomplishments. The Kristof novel trilogy is a masterpiece, says I, and definitely in my top five novels of all time, so, yes, I think you should read all three if you like ‘The Notebook’. My favorite is the second one, ‘The Proof’. My weekend passed without a hitch. Yours? ** Mari, Very happy you liked the post, and I’m sure Jared is too. So did you make progress with the color work knitting? Socks for me?! I have this stupid allergy to clothing and dyes so I have to wear organic clothes, which is very boring, but I have these very thin organic socks that you can slide regular socks over easily without turning your feet into lumps unsuitable for shoes, so, long story short, if you ever make me socks, I can even wear them! Thank you. I hope your weekend was everything a weekend can be at its happiest. ** Hugo, Well, happy if I nudged into theme park visiting. Ghost rides aren’t scary at all. Even the cheesiest horror movie is a hundred times scarier. They’re just outsider art with a gloomy pretence. I don’t know MR X Toon, but I’ll look for his stuff. August is not a rich time for exhibitions, but I can recommend Ramelzee @ Palais de Tokyo, Alain Guiraudie @ Fondation Cartier, and Rick Owens @ Palais Galliera. ** Nicholas., Hi. I think I’m kind of blank when it comes to those things, yes, I suppose so. You make me want to go to Paris’s only Chipotle, and maybe I will. ** Steve, Interesting: that documentary. Well, yeah, seems like the least they can do is mail those things to you. It’s a fucking bank, they can afford it. ** _Black_Acrylic, Wow, that’s quite a gig your brother has there. It sounds big. I saw the American Apparel doc, yeah, wow. I knew some people who worked there at the big building in downtown LA, and let’s just say, yes, spot on. ** Darby 🍝, Whatever’s on that plate, if it’s a plate, looks good. Yes, I did enjoy it. ‘That’s harakiri’, gotcha, I’ll go there. And do the youtube ‘Messes’ experience too. Thank you! Yes, come to Europe. And don’t leave France off your agenda, or at least not Paris. Well, of course we should meet in person. Absolutely! That would be a joy! That link didn’t take me to the keychain, but I’ll find it. Haha, yes, I would say Trent Reznor is plenty awkward, and never more so than when Gary Numan is imitating him. Good pasta, one hopes? ** Roma, Very happy you liked the post and the stuff. ‘The Cat Lady’ … that’s a game? My next game is ‘Stray’ about a stray cat, so they seem like they would be a handy couple. ** HaRpEr //, It’s the same with Nathalie Sarraute. When people even know who she is, it’s always because of her memoir ‘Childhood’, which is extremely not her best work. Oh, David Trinidad! Excellent. Yes, he totally singular. So happy you like his work. He’s a very long term friend and colleague of mine since youth as you probably know. Good, staying productive is the key, or it always is for me. If I’m working and into it, the rest feels like it will fall into place even when it’s actually falling apart, haha. ** Okay. Today I spotlight an excellent novel by Enrique Vila-Matas that I’m guessing a bunch of you don’t already know? See you tomorrow.

Crossing One is the first iteration of Soft Territories, an ongoing experiment from Pup and Tiger, a queer-run art space in Canterbury, UK. While we prepare to launch our physical location later this year, this showcase unfolds across both Dennis Cooper’s and Delere Press, forming a split-site exhibition of porous and intersecting practices.

There was something instinctive about placing these works within already active online spaces, a kind of quiet rewilding, letting them thread into existing habitats rather than carving out something new. It felt closer to how Soft Territories moves, not by staking claim but by dispersing, echoing, folding into what’s already there.

I reached out to artists whose practices drift, overlap, and resist enclosure. This is what emerged.

– Jared

***

As the works for Soft Territories came into view, certain patterns began to surface. One recurring motif was a sense of metamorphosis, not just as subject, but as process, material, and approach, with practices overlapping and folding into each other.

Many of the artists operate within spaces of flux, moving between physical and digital, queer and mythological, human and animal, public and intimate. This movement is not always linear or directional but instead folds in on itself, occupying multiple positions at once.

Some of the work drifts between human and digital, not as a rupture but as a slow crossing, body, where identity is filtered through code, where memory flickers in pixels, where presence is both embodied and rendered.

Ray Luke Cuthbertson, Wintermute (video still)

Ray Luke Cuthbertson’s Wintermute is a datamoshed slide of image and signal. Something flickers as if trying to come into form. Not glitch as rupture but as becoming. A presence stuttering across frames.

The piece calls back to Wintermute in Gibson’s Neuromancer. An AI built to evolve. One half of a split mind, coded to seek its other. Not desire in the human sense but a kind of programmed striving. A reaching. A signal folding over itself, again and again.

Identity becomes porous. Skin slips. Memory becomes texture. The self as interface. What if this is the crossing. Not arrival, but movement toward coherence. Always partial. Always refracting.

Ray Luke Cuthbertson, Wintermute

“As a trans teenager who was obsessed with Cyberpunk literature, I was intrigued by the worlds that Gibson created and by his depictions of cyberspace: where you could connect your mind to a digital world larger than your own existence and partially disconnect from your body. I wanted to explore in my own way the experience of entering cyberspace, and re-adapt Gibson’s novel ‘Neuromancer’ through a predominantly sensory perspective.” – Ray Luke Cuthbertson

There is comfort, even agency, in holding these parallel states, in coding while decoding, becoming while undoing, or existing both as subject and avatar.

In this way, the work feels acutely contemporary. Not just in the sense of being “of the moment,” but in showing us how to live within a moment that is itself unstable, simultaneous, overlapping, in a world that feels more than a little fucked.

Lance Lin, The Endurer

Lance Lin, The Sweater

Lance Lin, install view

“This project stemmed from my foot/footwear fetish. It dissects masculinity as a set of socially constructed attributes, focusing on a minor aspect of a body: feet and what covers feet. I used socks that I personally wore as a means to document the act of performing masculinity before casting my own feet. The feet, made of silicone, serve as a canvas to reflect masculine qualities, through uniforms, scents, activities, and professions associated with masculinity.” – Lance Lin

***

The name Soft Territories suggests something both unstable and deliberate. Not soft as in weak, but soft as in sensitive to context, as in pressure-sensitive. As in queer. As in feral. It’s about the places we occupy without being invited, the ones we build as we wander down the street or behind a false floor and call home anyway. The ones we have to imagine because the map simply smudges an entry: “human-like bodies with the heads of dogs” as a glossing, or worse—misnamed us entirely.

Les Beaux Plastiques, nanotesla

“Utilising data visualisation and oscilloscopes, it seeks to explore our solar system through techno/noise music and demonstrate how planetary magnetospheres impact our lives in an abstracted fashion. Each planet’s magnetic response is used to create waveforms that produce unique Lissajous curves that allow the music to tell a story through its own frequency responses, allowing for an understanding of the overload of information without need for an understanding of the data itself.” – Les Beaux Plastiques

Kier Cooke Sandvik, Living Room

Kier Cooke Sandvik, Bedroom

At Pup and Tiger we’re trying (not always successfully) to make room for things that don’t easily translate. That might mean a poem that resists closure, a gesture repeated until it collapses, a piece of fabric that once belonged to someone’s mother. It might be a sound that never resolves into music. It might be nothing at all, except a feeling.

Cory McLellan, There is More Than The Pain You Were in

Julian Konuk, Space Dykes and Other Adventures (video still)

Julian Konuk’s Space Dykes and Other Adventures isn’t quite memory. Not quite fiction either. It conjures a kind of queer rewilding: in one scene, someone turns to the camera and half-smiles while a voice offscreen says, “It’s very… 2014 Tumblr?” “Yeah, I’m kinda thriving,” comes the reply, followed by laughter. “You need to return to the days.”

The footage moves like a long exhale, faulting through synthetic textures, soft takes, and sonic drift. A kind of screen test for a version of self held together by references, fragments, mess, and longing. Snow globes in natural habitats. The decentring of nostalgia not as retreat but as a catch and release. A landscape in flux, haunted by past encounters, carried like static in the body.

Julian Konuk, Space Dykes and Other Adventures

“The vessel-like structure of the film mirrors the way queer people carry fragmented histories, both personal and collective, within themselves. Through its layered textures and chaotic yet intimate sonic landscapes, the film evokes the spectral remains of past relationships, manifesting longing in digital form.” – Julian Konuk

With this we’re interested in the minor, the fugitive, the practices that stay small on purpose. Not out of modesty, but as strategy. Work that is uninterested in making itself palatable. Work that might seem incomplete unless you know where to look.

Nathan Lomas, Cyclical Trauma

Nathan Lomas, Pup Sprocket

River Smith, Not Safe for Childhood series

“These are visual explorations of how we survive, transform, and rise from the ruins of what shaped us. Each piece becomes a vessel: a place to name the unnamed, to surrender to what was, and to open to what could be.” – River Smith

What unfolds here isn’t built around a single theme, but held in conversation: across disciplines, across approaches, across the many ways the world tends to silo and flatten. What connects these pieces isn’t genre or even a shared politics, but a shared refusal. A refusal to tidy up the mess too soon. A refusal to make work that performs its own relevance. A refusal to speak only when spoken to.

Jake Wood, Muscle Mary

Enzo Marra, Gathering

Enzo Marra, Happening

Jonathan Armour, Angel Skins

Something slips the skin as self, a shimmer of diffuse glow across a shifting frame. Angel Skins moves like a séance of facades, a slow rotation of bodies worn and shed. Matryoshka logic. Not stripped back but layered forward each surface catching the next. In Jonathan Armour’s wider practice the idea of birth sleeves recurs, lifted from Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon, bodies as vessels, skins as temporary homes. Here that speculative fiction flickers less prophecy more residue. The voice detached and intimate drifts through Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy pulsing with synthetic warmth. Not quite divine. Not quite digital. Like auto-destructive art it had to be invented. Content becoming form. A body resequenced again and again.

Jonathan Armour, Angel Skins

“Combining the concepts of avatars and matryoshka dolls, this is an exploration of multiple identities. We all use different facades in different situations, but I imagine that with the advancement of technology, we will soon be able to swap these literally.” – Jonathan Armour

Soft Territories is curated by Jared Pappas-Kelley, an artist and writer interested in how things fall apart, slip through, or refuse to stay fixed. He’s worked across journals like Art Monthly, Cabinet, 3:AM Magazine, and The Rumpus, and his books include Solvent Form: Art and Destruction, To Build a House that Never Ceased, and most recently Stalking America, out with Delere Press. Alongside writing, he’s spent years conjuring and holding space for strange, independent projects that flicker in and out of existence. This is one of them.

James Mellor, The Fiend

Sai Aryal, Dragphoria

“This short film, Dragphoria, presents an exploration of deeply personal and vulnerable expression of my identity through drag and gender fluidity. It shows how I evolved as a person throughout the years, sharing an intimate reality of growing up in South Asia as a queer person.” – Sai Aryal

Fabienne Jenny Jacquet, Nightmares

Nicholas Davies, from Blacking Out On Concrete 1

Nicholas Davies, from Blacking Out On Concrete 1

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Soft Territories Crossing One/New Haunts: A conversation with Jared Pappas-Kelley (part 1)

Jared Pappas-Kelley is an artist, writer, and co-founder of Pup and Tiger. His past work has haunted places like Art Monthly, Cabinet, 3:AM Magazine, and The Rumpus, among others and he is the author of three books including Stalking America, Solvent Form: Art and Destruction, and To Build a House that Never Ceased. He’s written about ruins, disappearance, and the slippery nature of objects. He’s also spent years building weird, independent spaces that didn’t last forever but mattered while they did. All of which feels relevant here as we share a lot of crossovers in our interests and ideas of the nature on the unnatural things that haunt our world along with my background of working with and running small artists spaces in Dublin.

In the conversation that follows, we dig into the origins and ethos of Pup and Tiger, the thinking behind Soft Territories, and what it means to build spaces that are messy, generous, and alive. Jared talks about shapeshifting formats, the legacy of queer and DIY art spaces, changelings, slutty pop, and the politics of cringe. There’s talk of ghosts, glitchy futures, and what it might mean to haunt the art world rather than conform to it.

This is the first half of a conversation between Jonathan Mayhew and Jared Pappas-Kelley, shared here as part of Soft Territories: Crossing One, the opening showcase in a dispersed series curated by Pup and Tiger.

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Jonathan Mayhew: As is tradition here we are again continuing our conversations exploring Jared’s latest project Pup and Tiger, a queer run art space that’s based in Canterbury (no better place to haunt) which is incredibly vital not just for queer arts visibility but for the arts in general for the UK as they’re facing massive funding cuts and loss of supports from government. It’s an incredibly generous and important space to bring to the UK in this time of crisis. Jared as you know better than I, could you introduce Pup and Tiger to us and also who your partner in this beautiful endeavour is?

Jared Pappas-Kelley: Pup and Tiger is something that Ash Sweeney and I have been building quietly for a while now, both as a physical space and an ethos. At its heart, it’s a queer-owned art space and café, but also a kind of platform or staging ground for art that’s often overlooked, work that’s intimate, process-based, deeply felt, and sometimes messy in the best way. It’s a space for conversations and weirdness and evolving. It came out of this sense that so many of the spaces we needed, especially as queer artists and audiences, were either disappearing or never there to begin with. So we decided to build one.

We’ve spent years immersed in the art world but also adjacent to it. I ran a gallery and directed a nonprofit that staged large-scale exhibitions in unconventional spaces, with cities as the backdrop or material, or installations in buildings on the edge of use. I think a lot of that is still in Pup and Tiger’s DNA: this interest in what’s falling apart and what can still be built in those cracks. And Ash brings this incredible photographic eye and care for community that shapes everything we do. We’re both trying to make something that’s generous but also critical. A space for artists who are often left out of the conversation.

JM: Another of the Weaklings OG’s Diarmuid Hester’s book Nothing Ever Disappears documented the history of some spaces that still haunt the landscape of the UK. Queer spaces have been vital for building and developing culture in general as free space of exploration, did you have any models of spaces to draw upon, I know you have a history of making spaces and places yourself?

JPK: Absolutely, and spaces like those, and even the Weaklings as well, definitely left an imprint in how this kind of work is approached. (Dennis, are we still Weaklings even now that the site is gone?) I’ve always been drawn to spaces that don’t quite make sense, that exist somewhere between formal institutions and punk DIY. I’ve run a few different artist spaces over the years, most of them temporary by design or necessity or with more legacy. I think about the lore of places like Black Mountain College as experiments, alongside the more personal influence of experimental art spaces in Olympia and Seattle, which were formative for me. Some were fleeting by design, but they shaped whole generations. What matters is that they happened. They became sites of energy and transmission. That’s what we’re aiming for with Pup and Tiger. A soft haunting.

It’s part of why I’m so focused on building a physical space again. A swipe right mentality still permeates. There’s something incredible that can happen when you bring people together in a physical space, this kind of soft, casual energy that can’t really be replicated elsewhere. It becomes part of the fabric of a place and is very inspiring. I grew up going to art spaces, DIY venues, and in Seattle especially, it was all about coffee house culture. A lot of the people I met in those environments went on to do world-shifting things in art, music, or film. But those early, informal encounters, the ones where nothing in particular is expected of you, they matter. And I worry that we’re losing that. Whether through design or neglect, the world feels like it’s becoming increasingly hostile to those types of open, generative spaces, especially for generations coming up.

There’s also this creeping sense of the politics of cringe, a fear of putting something vulnerable or sincere into the world. But we’re up against genuinely grim circumstances and having grown up in the US and lived in the UK for many years, I can see that same kind of flattening taking root here too. That only makes it more urgent to nurture physical spaces where people can gather, take risks, and feel connected, alive. We have to build the environments we want to inhabit, then protect and care for them. That’s what we’re trying to do with Pup and Tiger.

JM: Taking risks is really important for art to grow and harder and harder these days to do in the hyper curated shiny happy smooth online world we live in, so its fantastic Pup and Tiger is here, as Huggy Bear said, you gotta take the rough with the smooch. You had an open call and this exhibition titled Soft Territories, and I’m curious about the title. Our world seems increasingly rigid, trapped in stark black-and-white binaries of us versus them. Could you elaborate on your fascination with softness and further unpack this concept?

JPK: Soft Territories came out of a desire to hold space for ambiguity, for shifting states, open-endedness, and porous boundaries. So many of the artists we’re working with navigate these in-between places: between digital and physical, between identities, between past and future. Softness, in that sense, isn’t weakness. It’s a kind of refusal, a resistance to being easily defined or consumed.

The show plays with that. There’s a looseness in form, but also a deeper throughline of care and speculative thinking. Coming to terms with or moving through, this notion of being more than one thing at the same time, as a way of navigating contemporary life. The “territories” part refers both to geography and embodiment. It’s about mapping something that resists being mapped. And maybe that’s the most radical gesture right now, to embrace softness in a world that demands certainty.

JM: It feels like I’ve been “existing” in this Softness for a while with my own practice, so its lovely to have a name for it. I know one of the threads you’re pulling on in Soft Territories explores the rupture of our humanness into the digital and that strange feedback loops it can create. We have definitely surpassed the Cronenbergain taboo of merging with technology, ‘long live the new flesh’ and is something I think Michel Serres was getting at in his essay Thumbelina where having the Internet gives us access to information that makes us freer to create with all its information at our fingertips. Like how we have never met IRL but are able to have this on-going conversation and why places like Dennis Cooper’s and Pup and Tiger are deeply important for a deeper exploration of ideas that then leads to creativity. How do you see this entanglement of the digital and humanity blurring play out in the works that were included?

JPK: Yeah totally, there are a lot of threads running through this work, but one that kept surfacing was that blur between the digital and the human. Not as estrangement, more like a soft merging. A coercion. Things leaking into each other. Ray Luke Cuthbertson’s Wintermute really sits in that space. He talked about being a trans teenager obsessed with William Gibson, and you can feel that in the work. And it makes sense that the piece takes its name from Gibson’s AI, Wintermute. In the book, if I’m remembering correctly, Wintermute is always stretching, trying to evolve, to unlock. Not exactly human desire, but still a kind of strategy. That coded determination feels close to the way Ray’s work flickers, images stuttering into being, glitch not as error but as measure. Becoming. The self not as fixed but constantly re-rendering.

Or Les Beaux Plastiques’s nanotesla kind of scrambles all that, takes planetary magnetospheres and turns them into audio-visual feedback, this strange music that almost lets the data feel emotional. And Jonathan Armour’s work pulls it back into the body, but a body already fused with something else. Flesh as interface. There’s something very corporeal in all this but coming back for another pass. Which maybe gets at what you were saying, this entanglement. But also, this metamorphosis, where we’re more than one thing at once. A shifting of phase, not quite arriving, just always in motion. Finding forms. There’s something very queer to this conception.

JM: We’re definitely in unknown territories with technology at our finger tips, it took 100 years to feel the full effect of the printing press on society and the iPhone was only released 18 years ago. It has become part of us in many ways so it’s great to have artists exploring our new fusion with its affects and effects. Your descriptions of the works is making me think of Byung-Chul Han who has been delving into how we exist through technology even when we’re not logged in through our avatars and social media, his hope is that we reclaim authenticity using technology rather than being used and avoid the narcissistic nature and commodification of the self by disrupting its operating systems. Returning to the idea of softness is there a curatorial concept or direction you will be taking Pup and Tiger in?

JPK: We’re thinking in terms of seasons rather than permanent collections. Each moment unfolds with a different texture. Some are more reflective, some chaotic. The guiding principle is care: care for artists, for community, for the process of making and unmaking. We’re also committed to showing work that might not get seen elsewhere, by artists who are queer, working class, disabled, or outside the usual art world circuits. At the same time, I’ve been at this long enough to have a wider network to draw from. What excites me is the chance to nurture what’s already growing here while opening the door to wider conversations, letting the local brush up against the unexpected, the astonishing. It’s what art is supposed to do: give form to what doesn’t yet exist.

If people want to find out more of what we are doing (and free copy of our new zine as well), they can sign up and keep updated here.

Jonathan Mayhew is an artist and occasional writer based in Dublin Ireland. He has recently had solo shows in Sports Hall Window Helsinki and Pallas Projects in Dublin and his work has been shown in the IMMA the Irish Museum of Modern Art Dublin, The National Gallery of Ireland Dublin, Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, The Library Project Dublin, the Bomb Factory London and HIAP Helsinki. He has an upcoming project with Gorse Press in Ireland. He is mostly renovating a house right now but you can find his ghosts online.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. Serious boon for the blog and, consequently, y’all this weekend as Jared Pappas-Kelley commandeers the space to introduce you to the project ‘Soft Territories’, part of his (and others’) larger project, a physical space/cafe/etc. in-progress called Pup and Tiger. But he’s here to tell you all about that. It’s a fascinating post and array that I hope you will explore to your fullest and, if you feel so inclined, share words with Mr. Pappas-Kelley. Thank you, Jared, and thanks to all of you out there who give what’s just up above these words your attention. ** Dominik, Hi!!! There you are! Week’s been pretty good, visited my favorite amusement park on a little road trip and did work and so on. It has been way too hot, but they say the sky is being cured today, so we’ll see. I hope your heat will follow suit? Yes, Zac and I will go to the Chicago and Toronto screenings. Very exciting. And we’ll announce some more screenings very soon. Love is a complete rim pig and he’s loved very few things more than deeply feasting on Cheap’s very soft, loose, puffy, swollen, meaty, stretchy, blown out twink arsehole, G. ** Vincent, Hello there, Vincent. I don’t know of ‘buda’, but I doubt my social circles intersect with his. More’s the pity? Right, ‘monkey on my back’. I just did a search and it told me the monkey emoji indicates ‘playfulness or naughtiness’, which is much more boring, so let’s say your instincts must be right. ** scunnard, Dude, look up above? Seem familiar? Thank you! Wild that your pal was at Efteling. What an upstanding person he must be. ** Darby 🐌, Hi. Time is relative here, no problem. My memory is … what do they say … like a sieve (whatever that means). We’re told the heatwave here starts dying today, and based on the slight coolness in the air so far morning, maybe they’re right about that. Oh, otherwise I just went on lots of rides and ate ok pizza, I think. No, I don’t know Sd Laika, but I’ll check them out via your link, thank you. Boris for Halloween! Nice! I saw some recent live videos of Gary Numan, and I wish he still acted weird and awkward and introverted onstage instead of looking like he really wants to be Trent Reznor, but it still could be fun, I guess. Same for me with animatronics. I crave one or more, but I haven’t got any room at all. ** _Black_Acrylic, That sounds suitably ugly. That sounds like the US of A. Which is very not good, need I even mention. I hope the football season was birthed with a win. ** Nicholas., Oh, hi there. Cooperation Boy, me too, high five. Winging it seems like a generally good move. With some discipline mixed in. Dinner … just my usual Cappelini pasta with a combo of tomato and mushroom sauce and tons of parmesan. Up? Work, zoom book club, film usual stuff, hopefully under less brutal skies. ‘Them’: A performance work I co-made in 1983 with Ishmael Houston-Jones and Chris Cochrane. It was hugely controversial at the time. But we’ve restaged it three times since, most recently several years ago, and now people who watch it get all moved and weep and stuff. It was all fun, and I don’t remember it being hard really. The attacks on it in 1983 were hard, probably. Nice to see you, natch. ** Steve, We’ll go to Knotts Scary Farm, for sure, and maybe Universal Horror Nights although it’s ridiculously expensive. So probably to Halloween made-over amusement parks. I’ve got my eye on your IA channel for sure. Great work. Everyone, Steve wrote about Lincoln Center’s “Scary Movies” series, which begins today, for The Arts Fuse here. As always, no clue on DadNSon’s realness, but the profiles are collages, so that version of DadNSon is not entirely real at least. No, not EZTV, it was for a video by this artist named Pam (something) who was at the time the girlfriend of Jenni Olson. Jenni is the one who restored my memory about that. ** jay, I’m happy there were some lookers in there. My friends who played the latest Zelda mostly talk about the underground world parts, so that’s where I’m going to run or fly or ride a horse to immediately. Have a pleasantly evil weekend. ** Hugo, I assume your heat is in its supposed death throes just like our heat supposedly is. Okay, cool, about the 20 pages, just remember I’m really slow, but cool. It would be nice to have a dream and remember it. Maybe your wish will break the dam. I wish for you a reality filled with ghost rides and cartoons. ** Roma, It’s so unfair that cake is great and looks so great and is so satisfying to dissect with a fork but inevitably makes one feel sorry one actually ate it. Admittedly, when I eat cake, I eat a lot. It does seem to be looking at least a little gloomier here today. Hey, it’s the weekend isn’t it? How and what was yours? ** Carsten, Big congrats on the poem acceptance! Lovely! I do intend to walk over to where the Seine is supposedly swimmable and watch and try not to imagine the swimmers lying in hospitals with breathing tubes. ** Mari, Hi. I never use them in the posts but the higher priced escorts’ guestbooks are full of people berating them and asking them who do they think they are and so on. Which doesn’t mean they aren’t very successful. Because the escort profiles are like Frankensteins of texts purposely mismatched with photos and names and locations that don’t actually belong to them — my attempt to protect the real guys’ identities — they’re essentially fictional characters, so I don’t get a lot of related visitors. But, that said, by weird coincidence just yesterday I had a videochat with this young guy who said his photos were stolen and used in the last slaves post. He didn’t mind, but he wanted to chat with me to make sure I wasn’t evil, and I think I convinced him. Nice young fella. Oh, shit, it would have been cool, obviously, if we could’ve met at the SF screening. It’s your birthday? Happy birthday! Do you have a special or particular kind of socks that you like to make? Happy weekend of sock making and other pleasures whenever possible. ** HaRpEr //, Oh, that’s curious. Well, I thought it was a pretty good sequence of sentences, so the synchronicity would seem to be a good omen. I almost never get sick, it’s weird, but I am okay at pretending to get out of things when need be. ‘A Far Cry From Kensington’ is terrific. I did a post about it here years ago, but it needs to be restored, which I will do. Yeah, about WSS. Strange when that happens. I feel like it’s kind of the same with Marguerite Duras and ‘The Lover’, which is the only novel of hers that regular reader-types seem to read, and I think it’s definitely a big lesser among her books. ** Bill, Thank you, although the windfall was a matter of the fates, I guess. Highest hopes that this weekend will be your jet lag’s death knell. I never thought about cheesiness as a possible cure, but … huh. Did it work? ** Right. Jared has your local weekend all laid out for you, so be with it please, and I’ll see you back here on Monday.