Opening Event for Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver’s “Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art” Symposium, Friday, January 25, 2013

Friday, January 25, 7 pm. Craig Dworkin, Seth Kim-Cohen, James Hoff, Michelle Ellsworth, Jeanne Liotta, and Christine Wertheim presented their work as an opening event for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver’s “Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art” Symposium, which took place at the museum on Sunday, January 27, two days after the Counterpath event. Videos of the Counterpath event are below.

Craig Dworkin is a poet, critic, editor, and professor at the University of Utah. He is the author of five books of poetry, including Motes (2011), The Perverse Library (2010), Parse (2008), Strand (2004), and Dure (2004). He has edited five volumes, including Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (2011) with Kenneth Goldsmith, The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound (2009) with Marjorie Perloff, and The Consequence of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics (2008); he is also the author of a critical study, Reading the Illegible (2003), and has published articles in such diverse journals as October, Grey Room, Contemporary Literature, and College English. He runs Eclipse, an online archive of radical small-press writing from the last quarter century.

Seth Kim-Cohen is an artist, musician, and critic. He makes as little distinction between these practices as he can get away with. His work leverages audio, video, text, and performance, to question cultural conventions. His work often utilizes music as a signifier to investigate the social, economic, and political assumptions of our encounters with culture. His work has been presented at venues spanning the cultural spectrum, including CBGBs, Tate Modern, and the Singapore Biennial. Kim-Cohen’s 2012 solo exhibition, Tomorrow Is The Question? Is The Question!, at Audio Visual Arts in New York, was described in Artforum as “collegial and awkward, a real-life mistake framed by a semifictitious context… an allegory for experimental thinking in general.” Kim-Cohen’s book, In The Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art (Continuum 2009), has received a great deal of attention in the art and music worlds. The eminent philosopher and critic, Christoph Cox, called it “a landmark book with which any future theory of the sonic arts will need to contend.” Kim-Cohen has also published One Reason To Live: Conversations About Music (Errant Bodies 2006). From 1993 to 2002, he played in the rock bands Number One Cup and The Fire Show, releasing seven full-length albums, performing throughout North American and Europe, and recording two Peel Sessions. Seth Kim-Cohen is Full-Time Visiting Artist at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. More at www.kim-cohen.com

James Hoff is an artist living in New York City. His practice is varied and consists of performance, sound, writing, artists’ books, and painting. He is the cofounder of Primary Information (with Miriam Katzeff) and No Input Books (with Daniel Snelson), two initiatives that publish artists’ books and anchor Hoff’s editorial pursuits to his wider artistic practice. Recent solo exhibition include “I’m Already a Has-Been” at VI, VII in Oslo, Norway and “Milking the Flat Cow” at Callicoon Fine Arts in New York City. Hoff’s work is included in the survey “Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver and his work will also be the subject of a two-person show (with Anders Smebye) at Kunsthall Oslo in 2013. Hoff has performed at Artists Space (NYC), PS1 (NYC), 0047 (Oslo), La Sorbonne (Paris), and the Centre Pompidou (Paris). Recent publications and multiples includeInventory Arousal (Bedford Press/Architectural Association) and How Wheeling Feels When the Ground Walks Away (PAN Records, Berlin).

Michelle Ellsworth is nationally known for her witty and innovative solo performance work. She has performed at venues such as the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival (Lee, MA), P.S.122 (NYC), DanceTheaterWorkshop (NYC), Diverseworks (Houston, TX), The Sushi Gallery (San Diego, CA), The Telluride Experimental Film Festival (Telluride, CO), and the Solo Mio Festival (San Francisco, CA). Her cartoons and spreadsheets have appeared in the journal CHAIN. Currently she is working on a new performable website that remixes Homer’s The Iliad with the carbon cycle and ideas about how to prepare for the obsolescence of the Y chromosome.

Jeanne Liotta (Denver/NYC) makes films and other ephemera including photographs, works on paper, and live projection performances. Her latest body of work takes place in a constellation of mediums investigating the cosmic landscape, at a lively intersection of art, science, and natural philosophy. Her 16mm film OBSERVANDO EL CIELO received the Tiger Award for Short Film at the 2008 Rotterdam Film Festival and her work has been represented in the 2006 Whitney Biennial; The New York Film Festival; The Wexner Center for the Arts; The Museum of Modern Art; Proteus Gowanus Interdisciplinary Gallery and Reading Room in Bklyn, and the Cornell Astronomical Society at Fuertes Observatory, etc. She has been the recipient of awards from The Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, and The Museum of Contemporary Cinema. She also maintains ongoing scholarly research into The Joseph Cornell Film Collection at Anthology Film Archives, and was the creative force behind Firefly Cinema , a free outdoor screening series at the 6th st and Ave B Garden  which was curated out of the New York Public Library’s film collection. She and has taught widely and variously, and is presently assistant professor of Film Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as faculty at the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. Her website is jeanneliotta.net.

Christine Wertheim is a poet, critic, performer and curator, who teaches at the California Institute of the Arts. Her books include +|‘me’S-pace (Les Figues Press), Corpus, a chapbook from Triage, and the edited anthology Feminaissance (Les Figues Press). With Matias Viegener she organized an annual series of conferences on innovative writing from 2004 –2010: Séance, Noulipo, Impunities, Feminaissance, Untitled, and Untilted NY. From these they edited the anthologies Séance (Make Now Press) and The n/Oulipian Analaects (Les Figues Press), a Bomb Magazine Editor’s Choice for 2008. Her poetry has been anthologized in numerous collections including Against Expression, The & Now Awards: The Best Innovative Writing, and I’ll Drown My Book. She lectures and performs internationally, most recently at the Sorbonne, Birkbeck College, London, Melbourne University, and The Echo Park Film Center, LA. With her sister Margaret she co-directs the Institute For Figuring (IFF), staging exhibitions and seminars on the intersections of art, science, mathematics and pedagogy; most recently at the Smithsonian, the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, The Science Gallery, Dublin, the Museum Kunst der Westküste, Fohr, Germany, and The New Children’s Museum, San Diego. In 2011 the sisters received the Theo Westenberger Grant for Outstanding Female Artists from the Autry National Center. In February 2012 the IFF opened a new space in downtown LA with the exhibition Physic on the Fringe, selected as a Best of LA by the LA Weekly, 2012. Her new book mUtter- bAbel,  a graphic and textual exploration of ugly archaic feelings and their troubling social effects, is forthcoming from Couterpath.