Pressed Wafer: William Corbett and Linda Norton, Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect

Friday, September 23, 7 p.m., William Corbett discussed his small press Pressed Wafer and Linda Norton presented a slide show and read from her recent Pressed Wafer title, The Public Gardens. Followed by a screening, introduced by Jeanne Liotta, of Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect (1975).

William Corbett is a poet and memoirist who lives in Boston’s South End and teaches writing at MIT. He has published books on the painters Philip Guston and Albert York and edited the letters of the poet James Schuyler. He sits on the advisory board of Manhattan’s CUE Art Foundation and directs the small press Pressed Wafer. In 2011 Hanging Loose published his book The Whalen Poem. This fall katranpress will publish Elegies for Michael Gizzi with drawings by Natalia Afentoulidou.

Linda Norton is the author of The Public Gardens: Poems and History (Pressed Wafer, 2011) and a chapbook, Hesitation Kit (Etherdome, 2007). She worked for the University of California Press and was the founder of the New California Poetry series, with series editors Calvin Bedient, Robert Hass, and Brenda Hillman. She is currently senior editor at the Regional Oral History Office at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. Norton’s collages have been exhibited at the Kitchen in New York, the Morrison Room at UC Berkeley, and Café 504 in Oakland.

Artist & filmmaker Jeanne Liotta will offer some remarks on the film Conical Intersect (1975) silent, 18 min., by Gordon Matta-Clark, preceding the screening of the film on dvd.

Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978) was an American artist known for making site specific works he termed “anarchitecture,” where he removed sections of floors, ceilings, and walls in abandoned buildings. Conical Intersect was a project made for the Paris Biennale in 1975, where he made a spiralling “cut” into two derelict seventeenth-century Paris buildings adjacent to the construction site of the Centre Pompidou.