Why I Make Live Art at the Invisible Dog in Brooklyn
WHY I MAKE LIVE ART (WHEN I’M NOT MAKING THE OTHERS) will be an evening of current explanations by contemporary performance makers around the siren call of “liveness” in art practice. The diverse panel will include poet-playwrights, actors moving between the film and stage, conceptual artists and others who situate their collective work under the auspices of multiple genres. Artists will present prepared statements and manifestoes in response to the evening followed by a moderated conversation with curator Jess Barbagallo.
The Wedding Photographer
Directed self-portrait, as a bridesmaid, in New Jersey.
Jacket2: Feature on Stephen Ratcliffe
Reverse Chronology: What to do with Dormant Photographs
I will perform a slide lecture on the photographs I’ve taken of my father and my parents, Ellie & Ira Goldberg together, at the And Now Festival , University of California in San Diego, on Saturday October 15. Text of slide lecture available upon request.
Poetic Labor Project
The September edition features Kristen Gallagher, Dan Thomas-Glass, Monica Peck, and me. In the Bay Area, Brandon Brown, Steve Farmer, Lauren Levin, Alli Warren organize this project of talks and editions of responses to questions about poetry and labor.
Performance in the Galleries of SFMOMA
On July 7, I led a group of people up to Robert Gober’s Newspaper piece, discussing, theorizing, and reciting the photographic acts that happen throughout the museum. Evan Kennedy helped by narrating the script up to the piece.
Read the script and letter to Robert Gober
Listen to the performance archived on the SFMOMA Blog
Reading on the Radio Saturday July 2
Hear selections of new talks titled Not Nostalgia, letters to photographers, and dialogues between photographers.
Live on 7/2 from 9-10am on KUSF in Exile
Or after the fact on the Poet as Radio show archive
Trafficker Press Reading
Date: Friday, June 17th
Time: 7pm
Location: The Harvey Milk Center @ 50 Scott Street / Duboce in SF
reception to follow a few short blocks away @ Books and Bookshelves
Readers: Ariel Goldberg, Erika Staiti, and Taylor Brady
About Trafficker:
Founded in 2007 by Erin Morrill and Andrew Kenower, Trafficker Press is an East Bay chapbook press focused on publishing inadvertently excellent, often queer, poetry and hybrids by variant writers in editions of 150 to 200. Recent titles by Trafficker include False Intimacy by Brian Whitener, Photographer without a Camera by Ariel Goldberg, In the Stitches by Erika Staiti. Forthcoming chapbooks include writings by Taylor Brady, Lauren Shufran, Marianne Morris, David Buuck, Corina Copp, and Monica Peck among others. For more information on our books visit: http://www.traffickerpress.com/
Potential Implications of Photography on the Surface of Clothing
[The Photographer’s recent notes to be read as an expert unaffiliated with any institution: impassioned, earnest, oblivious. Two assistants flank The Photographer, each holding, not wearing, the t-shirts with a blank uniform pose]
I have hung these in my closet near one another. I have pinned them, backlit to my windows, I have shoved them around my room in a crumpled mess like a bill I have a month to pay.
And I have come to these important conclusions:
1. These t-shirts indicate that we no longer need cameras to have photography.
2. We are so mercilessly dependent on cameras to aid ideas of reality that we carry around a simulacrum of the camera as if it were a security blanket.
3. We are no longer interested in what a camera may produce (i.e. the experience of taking a picture, the picture itself, the nonexistent print a picture used to be) that the object’s surface area–in crude graphic representation–has come to suffice.
4. Pining for an “old” camera asserts some control or hierarchy over the shitstorm of cameras we encounter daily and are photographed by.
5. The signifier of “liking” photography that these shirts imply, that you might have taken a photography class if you wear this shirt, or are part of a more professional knowledge of cameras, being able to operate them manually, by wearing this shirt is outdated. Liking photography is anachronistic because it is not unique. This is because we are submerged in photography, that is. I even photograph these shirts to better understand them.
5a. I have worn these shirts.
5b. These shirts have been valued gifts to me from people in my life.
6. These shirts function as pacifiers to cameras while we know their haunting powers.
7. To decorate with a camera both let’s us “read” it’s formal elements like a painting but it also runs the risk of allowing a disregard for close readings, for camera’s to be relegated to a sort of objectifying and potentially misogynist idea of female beauty.
7a. One shirt’s tag read Grrl Small. The other reads Lady.
8. Ultimately, these shirts indicate the level of metaphor cameras operate in–the question is are cameras becoming free from literalization the more prevalent they get. It is possible the opposite is also true: cameras are becoming more shackled to literalizing.
9. What the metaphor of the camera t-shirt offers is a weightlessness. It asks do you know what a burden it is to carry around a camera, even a mildly heavy one? The t-shirt offers liberation from the offense of a camera around the neck, which further attack people in public or private with the fear that they will become ethically compromised subjects, willingly or unwillingly. I have, for example, been advised by teachers to hide my camera with the strap twisted and looped around my wrist.
10. What I propose as a response to these t-shirts are camera underwear, for days of the week, and it could progress, from Monday through Sunday to the most heinous of the top selling digital cameras represented over the crotch. Like key chain cameras. Disposable cameras at gas stations that are called fun times. Flash drives shaped like cameras.
11. My question is this–why is nostalgia so repulsive? Yet a t-shirt with a more recent digital camera on it is non-existent? When I search camera t-shirt online the variations are endless, all caricatures of the body and straps you would find in a closet, out of use, or the glass case of a shop, or your own collection you justify or don’t justify using less and less.
I’ve considered these t-shirts as a vend diagram in a diptych. I’ve considered where on the chest the camera falls, what brand words, or what real photo words decorate the camera. What buttons are included, what angle the camera hangs at. How reflective the lens is, like a puddle after the rain, or is the lens just implied, as a circle with no depth, flat and straight on.
The Photographer Without a Camera: In Print
Preorder your chapbook from Trafficker Press & read an interview with me & Susan Gevirtz online about the work.