The séance takes place in a single room, ‘Raum 106’ in the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. A long black table, chairs either side. An arched window, a staircase, a projector. A door to the back. Through the door is a spacious hallway and more windows. Slowly over a full Akademisches Viertel the participants come into the room, take off their coats and gather around the table. Some stand by the window.
(A participant, upright and rigid, only her lips moving, and in a man’s voice) ‘I am glad to meet all my dear friends again and to welcome Mr. Yeats amongst us. As he is a stranger I must explain that we do not call up spirits: we make the right conditions and they come. I do not know who is going to come; sometimes there are a great many and the guides choose between them. The guides try to send somebody for everybody but do not always succeed. If you want to speak to some dear friend who has passed over, do not be discouraged. If your friend cannot come this time, maybe he can next time.’
(Speech is provoked. The participants call out for a face and a voice to appear. Altogether) ‘Haunt me’, ‘Speak to me’, ‘Look at me’, ‘Listen to me’.
The participants were all sceptics once. Their motives vary, some use this everyday séance as a means to enable the words to come, some seek the future in the past, some seek to actualise the present and some seek escape from time altogether.
(A knock on the table. Altogether)
PERSONS AROUND THE TABLE
Jonathan Swift
Lisa Klinger
Marguerite de Ponty
Che Guevara
VOTRAX
Angie Keefer
Glenn Herbert Gould
Hyun-jin Kim
Olli Kolibabka
R.D. Laing
James Langdon
Wladimir Iljitsch Lenin
Elias Lönnrot
Jacques Derrida
Harkeerat Mangat
Karl Marx
Hans van Meegeren
Silas Weir Mitchell
Will Holder
Shin Dokho
Cristiana Cott Negoescu
Remco Reijenga
Maximilian Sänger
Qija You
Marcel Broodthaers
Milton Friedman
Table
George Dedlow
Walter Benjamin
Michael H. Branch
Bik Van der Pol
John Morgan
William Butler Yeats
Rosa Sarholz
Samuel Beckett
T.S. Eliot
Jana Buch
Gilles Deleuze
Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey
Maxi Lorenz
Hans Bernd Becher
Joan Didion
Paul Elliman
Michel Foucault
Richard T. Gagnon
Frank Ocean
Thomas Artur Spallek
Tina
Caner Teker
Mitch Thar
Anna Simons
Mao Zedong
Andreas Steinbrecher
Window
Tradition and the Individual Talent.
T.S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888 − 1965) was a British poet and essayist.
The essay was first published in the literary magazine The Egoist (1919) and later in Eliot’s Selected Essays (1932).
Detroit As Refrain
Paul Elliman
Published in Bulletins of The Serving Library #8, August 2015
Date: 4 January 2013 21:15:21 GMT Subject: VOTRAX
Dear Paul.
I am the daughter of Richard T. Gagnon, inventor of all Votrax voice synthesizers in the 1970s and 1980s. He was very much a part of your “Detroit as Refrain” lecture given in Detroit in 2010. I would loved to have been there to listen to what you had to say about Votrax and Detroit music. You are the only person I’ve found to make the connections that you have in the brief description that I read about it, and I don’t know how to thank you for trying. If you want additional information about the Votrax and things you might not know about regarding its use, please email me. I might surprise you with a story or two
Where were we
Angie Keefer
Published in Bulletins of The Serving Library #6, February 2014
There is a pleat, or a certain type of gown, known as a Watteau Pleat or a Watteau Gown, though the painter Watteau doesn’t seem to have had much to do with its invention. He merely depicted the look repeatedly, famously, and once in petal pink satin on the back of a woman ascending a step. The latter stars in a shop sign commissioned by a man who made his living selling art and baubles to aristocrats, though it’s unclear whether artist or client truly expected the painting to advertise anything other than itself.
Skizze für Tiefzug Alphabet
27.10.2017, Brüssel
Rosa Sarholz
These letters and symbols are used for deep-drawing vacuum formed signs. They were found in the workshop of WIELS on a class trip to Brussels in October 2017. There were rumours that Marcel Broodthaers used them (not yet confirmed).
‘Between 1968 and 1972 Broodthaers made a series of
vacuum-formed plastic reliefs, each of which was industrially fabricated, painted by commercial craftsmen, and realized in two versions (with opposing colour palettes). The artist called them ‘Industrial Poems,’ alluding to their manufacture as well as their play with language. Broodthaers used plastic, he said, to ‘free [himself] from the past,’ wittingly adding, ‘These plaques are fabricated like waffles, you know’ − a nod to his Belgian heritage. (www.moma.org/collection/works/146905)
Gilbert Adair Continued
James Langdon
Published in Bulletins of The Serving Library #7, September 2014
I remember a television documentary that Channel 4 produced about Donald Judd after he died. I watched it in a video library in the basement of the monolithic concrete art block at Coventry University. Matthew Collings presented, looking very English, standing in the scorching Texan desert outside Judd’s compound. A talking head contemporary of Judd’s, Richard Serra, explained how Don began his career as an art critic and used his monotone reviews of painting exhibitions to foreshadow his own elementary sculptures. I can’t actually recall, but I assume Collings delivered a comic parody of Judd’s writing. Something like: There is a painting. It is red. There is another painting. It is green. A yellow band extends from its bottom left corner half way along its bottom edge ... and so on.
Introduction*
Will Holder
The Kalevala, Elias Lönnrot. Translated by W. F. Kirby. London: Everyman, 1907. (New edition with introduction by Michael H. Branch. London: Athlone Press, 1985), p. xvii.
English 106A
Rosa Sarholz
Joan Didion was born in 1934 and is an American writer and journalist. In her essay Pacific Distances which was published first in 1992 in After Henry: Essays she describes how she studied in her twenties at Berkeley in a writing class called ‘English 106A’. This is the start of an investigation on fictive and literary spaces that connect to our room 106 and its yearly publication.
Sketch For A Painting
Harkeerat Mangat
Henricus Antonius ‘Han’ van Meegeren (1889 − 1947) was a Dutch painter and portraitist and is considered to be one of the most ingenious art forgers of the 20th century. In May 1945, after the Allied forces learned that Meegeren sold newly discovered Vermeers to the elite of the German Gestapo during the war, Meegeren was arrested and charged with fraud and collaborationist activities. After three days in jail, he confessed to forging the paintings attributed to Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch. This photograph by Koos Raucamp, taken sometime between July and December 1945, shows Meegeren painting his last forgery. The painting, titled Jesus Among the Doctors, or Young Christ in the Temple in the style of Vermeer, was painted in the presence of reporters and court appointed witnesses.
Glenn Herbert Gould (1932 − 1982) was a Canadian pianist who became one of the best-known and most celebrated classical pianists of the 20th century. He was particularly renowned as an interpreter of the keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach. His playing was distinguished by remarkable technical proficiency and capacity to articulate the polyphonic texture of Bach’s music. He stopped giving concerts at the age of 31 to concentrate on studio recording and other projects. Gould was also a writer, broadcaster, conductor, and composer. He was a prolific contributor to musical journals, in which he discussed music theory and outlined his musical philosophy.
Forgery and Imitation in the Creative Process was first published in Issue No. 50 of Grand Street, titled Models. The article, taken from an essay written by Gould in or before 1964, was never finalized for publication. It appears here as well as in Grand Street in abridged form (approximately 25 percent of the latter portion of the essay was cut) and is not to be taken as the final text.
Sketch for a Painting is a photograph of a work in progress by Harkeerat Mangat taken at the artist’s studio in Düsseldorf, Germany. November 2017.