The Last Book Performance
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Click below to listen to Steve Fagin’s introduction to The Last Book
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Click here to read about Shanghai author MIAN MIAN’S experience reading The Last Book
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“The Last Book kindles creation-fires of a new kind; it marks the birth of the technological illuminated manuscript. With texts by Mary Gaitskill, drawings by Davina Semo, videos by Leslie Thornton, and sound by Greg Landau, this hybrid folio demands to be man-handled with care, to be rewound and fast-forwarded, to be read and touched. This jeweled and inlaid vellum reveals the book as fetish, book as master controlling and prescribing our movements, book as monster: it inaugurates a novel reading ritual–part riot, part cutting-arcane.
The book at last dead? Long Live the Last Book!”
-Gabriela Jauregui, author of Controlled Decay
On April 26, 2009 The Last Book was performed at the Schindler House, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles. For this project, the haudenschildGarage, Spare Parts produced an homage to “the book” in the age of the conquest of the Kindle. We wished to resuscitate the magnificence of the illuminated manuscript as the world turned toward darkness. Perhaps electronic technology could be used, not to leave the book on the dustbin of history, but to reconstitute a forgotten past where words and images danced in each other’s arms.
To this end the haudenschildGarage constructed a one of a kind book that included text, drawings, moving images and sounds. Its construction in the medieval, supersized tradition consisted of three illuminated folios each eighteen and a half inches high, thirteen inches wide and three inches deep.
To make this more than a dirge for the dead, a proper Joycian Wake, we incorporated into our project the live and kicking writing skills of Mary Gaitskill (Two Girls Fat and Thin), the macabre visual lyricism of Leslie Thornton (Peggy and Fred in Hell) and YouTube, the MySpace-with-a-twist drawings of Davina Semo, the retro-futurist music mix of Greg Landau, and as the piece de resistance, Shanghai’s notorious and ever so talented bad girl author Mian Mian will be our reader. This bouillabaisse was concocted by Steve Fagin.
Other Last Book participants included Eloisa Haudenschild (line producer), Monica Jovanovich (stage manager), John DeMerritt (book binding), Joel Swanson (graphic design), Tad Linfesty (easel and book fabrication), Jim Nisbet (book fabrication), William Brent and Marco Llanos (electronics/technical coordination), Hsiufang Chen and Kate Wall (printing), Alastair Johnston, Teddy Cruz, and Alan Rosenblum (consultants), and Patricia Montoya (video assistant). The Last Book performance photography by Yvonne Venegas and video documentation by Mevre Kayan. The haudenschildGarage wishes to thank Kimberli Meyer, Director of the MAK Center.
Visit the Spare Parts page within haudenschildgarage.com for more information and images.
Click here to read about The Last Book on the LACMA BLOG
Click here to watch The Last Book video on YOUTUBE
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The haudenschildGarage was founded by Director Eloisa Haudenschild in 2003 as a 21st century cultural search engine, pursuant of interesting work wherever it occurs and in whatever form it takes. The haudenschildGarage wishes to transcend the 19th century salon and the 20th century alternative art space. It is a home away from home to all seeking to engage in cultural experimentation, play, and conversation. It routinely presents symposia, lectures, and film screenings to the public. Whether international projects, dialogs or commissions, the haudenschildGarage has a willingness to collaborate with like-minded institutions and artists. The hope is through providing a permissive context for opinion and production, new ideas and visions will have an opportunity to take shape.
More about The Last Book participants
STEVE FAGIN - Steve Fagin (www.stevefagin.net) is a Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. He has produced a series of feature length videos including The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel, The Machine That Killed Bad People and TropiCola. These films have been featured prominently at museums, international film festivals, art biennials and have been screened on Bravo International in Latin America, Canal + in Europe and PBS in the United States. His work has had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and is the subject of a book from Duke University Press, Talkin’ With Your Mouth Full: Conversations with the Videos of Steve Fagin. The work has been presented at both the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in many contexts including both of their summary shows of the essential art of the twentieth century. Currently he is working as Creative Consultant for the haudenschildGarage and is the Commissioning Editor for the Spare Parts Projects, haudenschildGarage.
MARY GAITSKILL - Mary Gaitskill is an American author of essays, short stories and novels. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993 and 2006), and The O. Henry Prize Stories (1998). She is the author of Veronica, nominated for a 2005 National Book award in the Fiction category. Gaitskill is also the author of Because They Wanted To, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1998. Her story Secretary was the basis for the film of the same name. Gaitskill made her book debut in 1988 with the short-story collection Bad Behavior. The novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin follows the childhood and adult lives of Justine Shade (thin) and Dorothy Never (fat). Justine works through her sadomasochistic issues while Dorothy works through her up-and-down commitment to the philosophy of “Definitism” and its founder “Anna Granite” (thinly-veiled satires of Objectivism and Ayn Rand). Her fiction typically is about female characters dealing with their own inner conflicts, and her matter-of-fact subjects includes many taboo subjects such as prostitution, addiction, and sadomasochism. Gaitskill says that she herself had worked as a stripper and call girl. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she teaches creative writing at Syracuse University.
MIAN MIAN - (CLICK HERE TO SEE HER APRIL 23, 2009 READING AT THE HAUDENSCHILDGARAGE) One of the most important writers from China’s new generation, Mian Mian has lived up to her reputation as China’s best bad girl novelist. She drew wide attention from the literati starting at the age of 17 when she became the first Chinese writer to ever describe a drug related life. Her characteristic flavor of “cruel youth” and her serious attitude towards self-reflection quickly attracted a large following of young readers. Her novels have been translated into 15 different languages and published worldwide. Candy, Mian Mian’s magnum opus, an underground best seller, is regarded as the most remarkable adolescent literature in China. In April 2000, the government officially banned her book and subsequently the rest of her books. However by this time, hundreds of thousands of pirated copies had already been circulated. Mian Mian’s literature had exerted tremendous influence on the Chinese X and Y generations. She has become a cultural icon for a generation of Chinese youth who value the authenticity and honesty of her portrayal of the future of the new Shanghai. In 2009 she published her new novel, Panda Sex, in China and France, soon to be published in English.
GREG LANDAU – Greg Landau is an award-winning music/video producer, educator and music historian. He produced three Grammy nominated CDs and among the over 30 CDs, film sound tracks and videos. He has worked with renowned artists including: Patato Valdes, Buena Vista Social Club’s Juane Marcos Gonzalez, Susan Baca, Bobi Cespedes, Dr. Loco, Pete Seeger, Omar Sosa, John Santos, Pancho Quinto, Quetzal, Los Mocosos, Maldita Vecindad and David Byrne’s record label Luaka Bop, Vanguard Records, Six Degrees and many others. His production credits include work for PBS, Disney, Sony, Warner Bros., CNN, Lucas Film, Six Degrees Records, McDonald’s and StarMedia. As Executive Producer at Starmedia, he has produced videos with Christina Aguilera, Carlos Santana, Los Lobos, Sub-Comandante Marcos and many others. Over the last two decades, Greg has worked extensively with Oscar winning filmmaker Haskell Wexler and with his father, Saul Landau making documentary films in Latin America. In addition, he also continues his professional work producing music and videos while pursuing research about the role of music in contemporary societies. Greg currently teaches at the University of California at Santa Cruz and San Francisco City College.
LESLIE THORNTON – Leslie Thornton has long been considered a pioneer of contemporary media aesthetics, working at the borders and limits of cinema, video and digital media. Such seminal works as her ongoing series Peggy and Fred in Hell (1985- ) operate in the interstices between various media-forms, often using simultaneous, interacting projections of film and video to address both the architectural spaces of media, and the imaginary spaces of the spectator’s involvement. Thornton uses the process of production as an explorative process, a collective endeavor positioning the viewer as an active reader, not a consumer. Thornton’s career to date has been a unique and unusual one. She was one of the first artists to bridge the boundaries between cinema and video, to explore their complicities and resistances, and to embrace their differences as positive attributes. Thornton’s complex articulations are both edifying innovations in media form and content and tacit deconstructions of the principles, presumptions and promises of technically reproducible artworks. The Great Invisible, is currently in progress, and has intermittently occupied Thornton for ten years. Thornton’s other works include Minutiae (1979), noexitkiddo (1981), Jennifer, Where Are You? (1983), and Adynata (1984).
DAVINA SEMO - Davina Semo is a writer, filmmaker, and mixed-media artist. Her work explores the disappointments and desires of young women, their friends, and the changing and scary world they live in. She completed an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego and she holds a BA in Visual Arts and Creative Writing from Brown University. She has exhibited in New York (NY), Providence (RI), San Diego (CA), Los Angeles (CA), Wilmington (DE) and Tijuana (Mexico).
Original Schindler House Photograph by Gerald Zugmann, courtesy of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles.
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- Published:
- 01.08.09 / 1pm
- Category:
- Current Events, The Last Book