The New New Museum

In the last decades of the 19th century, after decades of revivals in European art and design, an avant-garde emerged that was committed to artistic originality – imitations or interpretations of the past were out, and, for artists and designers associated with Art Nouveau and early modernisms, the new was in. Fast forward to the last decades of the 20th century in New York, and Downtown art, music and literature engendered a similar shift in American culture. While the Downtown aesthetic was eclectic – from Richard Prince and Sherry Levine’s appropriations, to the critical performances and posters of the Guerilla Girls – Downtown art, music and literature presented a formidable critical challenge to both the formalist modernism of the uptown commercial cultural scene and the serious tradition presented at larger cultural institutions such as the Met.

Founded in 1977, the New Museum was a key player in the Downtown scene. It was a museum dedicated to contemporary art – back when contemporary was the new new with the modern now associated with the thoroughly institutionalized modernism of MoMA. Under the directorship of Marcia Tucker, the New Museum opened in a cast-iron building in Soho and remained an important center for artistic production in the bourgeoning 1980s Downtown scene. More than just a venue for exhibiting paintings, the New was a critical laboratory for the production of non-commercial art: raw, collaborative, politically-charged and cross-disciplinary, its irreverent program consciously rejected the previous generation’s polished minimalism and aloof abstraction. Importantly, the New was a crucial venue in the development and dissemination of postmodernism, both as an artistic and as a critical practice (the New’s Documentary Sources in Contemporary Art publication series, for example, produced such classic anthologies as Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation and Blasted Allegories: Writings by Contemporary Artists).

Finally, last December, the new New Museum opened in the Lower East Side with the accompanying publicity promising either a transformation or a revitalization of the New. However, the vitality of New York’s Downtown scene which gave birth to the original New is now all but gone – the artists and art galleries of 1980s Soho have long gone in favour of fashion boutiques, upscale apartments and designer furniture stores. Even the Lower East Side has recently gentrified – both CBGBs and Tonic, two key Downtown music venues formerly located near the new New, have closed in the past two years, while starchitect-designed luxury condos are rapidly sprouting like mushrooms in the fertile downtown ground. While the original New was located in the midst of the Downtown scene, the new New’s neighbours will no doubt soon be Wall Street financiers seeking a “bohemian” lifestyle while the artists have long since moved out to more affordable neighborhoods in Brooklyn or Queens. At the same time, the major figures of the Downtown scene of the 70s and 80s have (for the most part) been canonized and safely institutionalized. Three brief recent examples will suffice: “The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984” exhibition at NYU’s Grey Gallery in 2006; a companion book on the Downtown literary scene, Up Is Up But So Is Down (NYU Press, 2006) edited by Brandon Stosuy; and Richard Prince’s 2007 retrospective at the Guggenheim. If the New helped nurture the cultural ferment and political radicalism of New York’s Downtown scene in the 1970s and 1980s, what can it mean in the 21st century? Is the kind of critical engagement and institutional critique engendered by the New thirty years ago still possible?

Brand New

Designed by the Tokyo-based firm Sanaa, the new New Museum is located on the Bowery amongst restaurant-supply stores, small businesses and run-down tenement buildings. The building comprises six rectangular shapes, stacked in a haphazard pile and covered in a silvery steel mesh. With its distinctive form and materials, the new New delivers the most important post-Bilbao demand expected of a new cultural institution: it is an instant icon. The distinctive shape not only sets the building apart from its local context, but importantly provides a memorable silhouette for reproduction on promotional material – from advertising posters to tote bags – the New’s jagged stack of blocks is a readymade logo.

The ground floor street facade is comprised entirely of glass, which makes the New feel open and accessible from the street. Besides the ticket desk and coat check, the obligatory book/gift store and cafe are located on the ground floor, and both are accessible without buying a ticket to the museum – consumption is prominently sited within the 21st century New. The galleries in the floors above are accessed via either a large central elevator or a concrete stairwell. The classic white walls, high ceilings, exposed beams and banks of fluorescent tubes are complemented by polished concrete floors, with few windows to distract from the art.

Experimental? Radical? New? Certainly the exterior could just as easily be a luxury fashion house headquarters, while the interior could be a fashion retail store, an upscale bar or a designer furniture outlet. The style is what I referred to in an earlier post on the Meatpacking District as “retro-fitted industrial chic” – except here it’s not retro but apparently, well, new. While the interior has been publicized as a (polished) attempt at the “raw” Downtown aesthetic, a few eccentric details make the building itself almost worth the hype, particularly the long, narrow and unexpected back stairs between floors three and four, which feature a framed view of the Lower East Side halfway up, and an odd little exhibition space further down. Framed vignettes of the LES appear through odd windows on the upper floors, indicating both a careful attention to detail on the part of the architects, as well as some sensitivity to the location.

Rather than choose an established starchitect to design their new New Museum, the board opted for Sanaa (principles Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa), a firm largely unknown in the US. Importantly, Sanaa has designed several cultural institutions in the last few years, including a New Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, as well as a building for Christian Dior in Tokyo and for Prada in Hong Kong. These last two examples highlight the easy fluidity between the world of high fashion and new museums of contemporary art – whether for high fashion or contemporary art, the container is essentially the same.

As well as a new building, the New’s newness is further highlighted by a new identity program, analysed briefly in a recent article by Joe Marianek. The New’s new identity program was overseen by global brand consultants Wolff Olins – they of the successful (RED) campaign , Tate gallery franchise identity (note similarities to New Museum’s?), and the not-so-popular London 2012 Olympics logo. Marianek also includes excellent images of recent posters and publicity material, all featuring the building’s distinctive silhouette. Together, the building and graphic program comprise a polished contemporary identity for a new global cultural institution with little connection to its local context or critical beginnings.

In contrast to the slick identity, the art exhibited in the New’s first exhibition was an attempt to display their continuing experimental program. The show, entitled Unmonumental, was as the title suggested. The first part of the three-part exhibition featured “unpolished” sculptures such as John Bock’s series of small works comprised of old bottles, yoghurt containers, milk boxes, and assorted kitchen trash patched together roughly. Radical and un-monumental in 1977 perhaps, but in 2007, an exhibition featuring junk-piles of found objects all seemed like déjà-vu. Which makes me think the context in which such work appears is crucial – the new New is a familiar and predictable institutional space for a certain cosmopolitan “cultural” class to safely consume contemporary art rather than a space which might challenge their expectations or raise critical issues about contemporary life.

New for Whom?

Beyond the vague “downtown” references, the new New’s building and identity program fit comfortably into 21st century Manhattan’s spectacle culture. For some local residents, the new New represents a final step in the ongoing process of the Lower East Side’s gentrification and sanitization. Given the proximity to cultural producers is now gone, the new New Museum has less to do with engaging with a vital, living culture, and more to do with real estate and tourism – on the one hand, the “avant-garde” prepares the ground for further escalation of downtown rental prices, and on the other, provides entertaining “culture” for consumption by tourists and middle class residents. The thoroughly establishment New is part of the global spectacle of cultural institutions featured in glossy architecture journals and airline travel magazines – it could be located just about anywhere. After taking in the Met and MoMA, tourists will marvel at the building’s unusual form, wonder at the “trash” that passes for contemporary art (“my three-year-old could do that”), and consume a cappuccino and a few catalogues on the way out. The new New? New for whom?

Photo by D.J. Huppatz

Good interior photos of the new New building at The Gothamist while this Arcspace review includes both interior photos and plans.

Jean Prouvé’s Maison Tropicale in New York: Update

I have been fitfully researching Jean Prouvé’s Maison Tropicale, and now have enough new material to justify an update to my post of May 31, 2007. I have been encouraged by the recent interest of Dutch-based architects and academics who maintain the website ArchiAfrika, on which they recently republished my original post, Jean Prouvé’s Maison Tropicale in New York. As this is an update, you’ll need to read the original post first for it to make sense. And speaking of republishing, the new online journal, Design Philosophy Politics has recently published an expanded version of my "Design for the Other 90%" review here.


Two Pères, Three Maisons

In May, I was unsure of who actually rescued the Maison from “deepest darkest” Africa: French dealer, Eric Touchaleaume, or American collector, Robert Rubin. Despite reading many more articles, I am still unsure, but this in itself may be interesting. In the official catalogue for the Christie’s sale of the Maison, Touchaleaume stated categorically that he made “arrangements in 2000 for a trip to Africa in pursuit of the prototype Maisons Tropicales, determined to salvage them from ruin and to bring them back to France. I was eventually able to buy them, dismantle them and ship them home.” (p.9) This cleared it up for me: Touchaleaume rescued all three Maisons from Africa, and then sold one to American collector, Robert Rubin. However, while at the hairdressers last week, I picked up a copy of Town and Country (October 2007) which contained an interview with Rubin in which he claimed to have rescued the three Maisons, then sold two of them to a French dealer. Now Town and Country is perhaps not the most reputable source of information but what is interesting is that, going back through the articles about the Maison, both Touchaleaume and Rubin both claim the glory for rescuing the Maisons from Africa – it depends on who the journalist interviews. Another possibly relevent aside I did find out is that Touchaleaume has been on the Prouvé trail for a lot longer than Rubin, as he co-published a catalogue in 1987, Jean Prouve Mobilier, 1924-1953, then in 1989 presented “Jean Prouve Meubles, 1924-1953” at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Bourdeaux.

However, I did clarify which Maison is which, and what has happened to each of them since the great African rescue. Of the original three Maison prototypes produced by Prouvé, the first was commissioned by Paul Herbé, architect-planner of Niger colony, to be used as his office in Niamey. His idea was to extend the industrial prefab architecture technique to later construct Niamey civic structures such as schools and other institutions (an idea which never came to fruitition). The second and third prototypes went to Brazzaville, and were similar to the first, though not exactly the same. The Brazzaville prototypes comprised a smaller one, 10 by 14 meters, and a larger one, 10 by 18 meters, originally joined together by a bridge. And here’s the interesting connection I’ll come back to below: the smaller one was originally an office for the Bureau Régional d’Information de l’Aluminum Français. The larger one was originally a residence for the commercial director of Aluminum Français, Jacques Piaget. While the smaller one was originally partitioned into Director’s office, a secretary’s office and a waiting room, the residence was originally partitioned into a master bedroom plus two smaller bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom.

More recently, Robert Rubin painstakingly restored his Maison, the smaller one from Brazzaville, exhibited it at Yale and Hammer Museum, UCLA, and then donated it to the Pompidou Center where it now rests on the roof. (Another neat connection worth mentioning here is this: Prouvé was president of the Pompidou Center selection committee which approved Rogers and Piano’s high-tech "industrial" design, a high-profile commission which continued Prouvé’s legacy). Meanwhile, Eric Touchaleaume is currently painstakingly restoring the Niamey Maison, which he intends to set up in the South of France as a study center and exhibition site dedicated to architecture and design. And the third, the larger Brazzaville Maison, after being painstakingly restored, was sold to hotelier/developer Andre Balazs in New York in June. And though I don’t usually indulge in gossip on this blog, the Maison is rumored to be destined for a life as a bar in a Balazs luxury hotel in the Bahamas, with interiors designed by Lenny Kravitz. After the Love Revolution, give it up for the Design Revolution?

Colonialism and modernism

The interesting but, in retrospect, unsurprising, connection here is between Prouvé and Aluminum Français, the state-owned company that controlled French aluminum production in the interwar period, including, of course, bauxite mining in various French colonies in Africa. The Christie’s sale catalogue contained a photo of a Prouvé Aluminum and Formica Table, c. 1950, in situ in the Bauxite Processing Plant of Aluminum Français in Edea, Cameroon. The close relationship between the interests of French industry, colonialism and modernist design that I pointed out in my previous post were further confirmed by these concrete (or should that be aluminum?) connections. In addition, in 1951, ORSTOM, the Office of Scientific and Technical Research in Overseas Territories, placed a large order with Prouvé’s workshop to equip both their colonial offices and their main office in Bondy, Paris.

So, Prouvé’s Maison clearly illustrates the postwar colonial triangle: the French colonial mining company, Aluminum Français, extracted raw materials from the African colonies which were then returned to France, refined into aluminum, designed into prefab Maisons and furniture by modernist designer Jean Prouvé, and finally returned to the colonies as finished designer commodities, proof of French technical and cultural superiority. However, the final, and somewhat touching part of the tale, is that in 1953, Prouvé’s beloved workshop near Nancy which produced these objects (including the Maisons), was taken over by none other than Aluminum Français, a fact Prouvé seemed to be most unhappy about. Prouvé’s Maxeville workshop, run under socialist principles and founded on the Arts and Crafts ideal of maintaining a close connection between the designer and craftsman, was gobbled up by the colonial system it was both dependent upon and also supporting in its promotion of all the marvellous things, from tables and chairs to complete houses, that could be designed using colonially-sourced aluminum.

Designer Treasure Hunters

An interesting point about the Christie’s New York sale in June that I overlooked was the sheer volume of modernist designer loot “rescued” from countries in the developing world. While the star of the sale was the Maison, the sale also contained a range of additional French modernist designer loot by not only Prouvé, but also Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. It included furniture produced by Prouvé from the 1930s and 40s, ranging from single armchairs to a steel dining table (ranging from $20 000 - $40 000). The sale also featured a range of other salvaged French modernist design and architectural details, including loot from Le Corbusier’s postwar government complex at Chandigarh, India. Here it seems, Touchaleaume (or Rubin?) rescued library tables, chairs from government offices, shelving, stools, lighting fixtures – anything portable and designed by French modernists, including a Cast-Iron Manhole Cover designed by Pierre Jeanneret (asking $20 000)! It seems the 21st century market for design is hot enough to justify just about anything connected to the hand of a certified modernist great – if design isn’t art, it sure sells like it!

A further valuable source of colonial loot for sale was an Air France Unité d’Habitation in Brazzaville, designed by French modernists Jean Hébrard, Louis Lefevre, Jean Létu and Pierre Bienvenue. In 1950, Air France commissioned Charlotte Perriand to outfit their Brazzaville Unité, comprising 60 apartments designed to house French airline personnel on stopovers. Completed in 1952, it was a showcase of Modernist French design and must have been considered successful, as Air France commissioned subsequent projects by Perriand, including a similar building in Dakar, Senegal. For the interiors, Perriand used both her own designs and those of Jean Prouvé, as well as some in collaboration, such as the “Brazza” storage units which combined local tropical woods with Prouvé’s steel parts. Unlike Prouvé, Perriand went to Brazzaville to oversee the project and produce work there. Again, the building was stripped of its goodies some time in the past few years by Touchaleaume (or Rubin?). Presumably it was impractical or uneconomical to ship the entire five story concrete building to New York for the auction. Finally, there was similar loot from the Perriand-designed Air France building in Dakar also auctioned in New York – tables, lamps, cabinets, a Brazza storage unit, drying racks, even molded concrete paving stones from the rooftop terrace garden.



Constructing a Design Master, Constructing a Design Market

Finally, a comment on the reissue and rediscovery of Prouvé. In a previous post on Design Within Reach and Vitra, I discussed the phenomenon of “fully licensed classics”. These are not “original” Modernist classics like you might have picked up at the Christie’s auction for tens of thousands of dollars, but “authentic” design classics available for only two or three thousand dollars. Let’s look at a concrete (er, steel?) example: Jean Prouvé’s Citie armchair, steel and leather, c.1930. One of these chairs sold at Christies in June 2007 for $102 000 – this is the “original” version. In comparison, the “fully licensed classic” or “authentic” version is currently available in the US at Design Within Reach for $3265. While the original version may have been reconditioned or at least cleaned up a little, it was manufactured in 1930 at Prouvé’s workshop. In the contemporary reissues of Prouvé’s furniture, laser cutting, computer-driven machinery and new epoxy finishes have replaced Prouvé’s pioneering interwar methods and materials.

It is worth briefly unpackaging the various levels at work here, as they are inter-dependent: on on the one level, at the Christie’s auction of “originals”, we witness the fetishization of a design object as art – the original product of the certified master, rescued from Chandargarh or deepest darkest Africa, brought back to the safety of Western private collections and museums, stripped of its functionality and destined to a life on display on a pedestal. On the second level, that of the “authentic” version, we engage with the Prouvé chair as a 21st century simulacra, a virtual Prouvé, created with contemporary production processes and technologies. What is ultimately important is the chair’s modernist design, and design here is exclusively understood as aesthetic – it looks like the original, even if the production processes and technologies are quite different (and in fact, the new “authentic” chair may well be more perfect, more durable, and more "functional" than a well-worn “original”). I noted in the last post the vested interest that a company such as Vitra has in such a system – they not only reissue “authentic” Prouvé furniture, but also have a design museum containing “original” Prouvé furniture - so they operate on both levels. But the marketing doesn’t stop there. Vitra currently have a touring exhibition entitled “Jean Prouvé: The Poetics of the Technical Object”, which began touring various museums in Japan in 2005, and since then has been touring around various European museums (due to end in 2008 at the Design Museum in London). Finally, all this is not necessarily just about Jean Prouvé, but ultimately about the gap between what modernist design was and how it is perceived in the 21st century. Beyond this, what really interests me about modernism and its contemporary reception are two things: how to extricate it from contemporary market-driven design, and, following this, what its future possibilities might be.

All photos of the Maison Tropicale in New York, May 2007, by D.J. Huppatz

This will be my last blog entry for this year, I'll be back in the new year with more. Thanks for your interest.

Drew Gardner: Petroleum Hat

With its inconsistent tone and self-conscious awkwardness, Drew Gardner’s second book of poetry, Petroleum Hat (2005), may already be an early Flarf classic. The flatness, the fakeness, and the constant disruption of “communication”, that is, information consumption, doesn’t make for an easy read. Gardner’s poems, many of which read like constellations of fragments culled from internet searches or strings of spam, have caused some anxiety recently in poetry circles – anxiety specifically related to his methodology – are these anti-humanist poems simply “generated by machines”? Following generations of collage from Dada to Burroughs, not to mention MTV, mashups mediated by various forms of technological tools are hardly revolutionary. But beyond the methodology lies the importance of Gardner’s intervention into the spectacle of contemporary American media culture. For Flarfists, the contemporary muse is not an ancient Greek nymph who whispers sincere odes in the poet’s ear but a drag king impersonating the tragi-comic (late) Elvis in Las Vegas, all bejeweled jumpsuits and awkward karate moves. She may well be the specter haunting contemporary American poetry. Or it is a he? And perhaps that should be “spectacle” rather than specter?

While Gardner’s poems in Petroleum Hat might be perceived as conventionally “awful”, they ultimately declare themselves as poems. Nada Gordon’s recent book, Folly, on the other hand, extended poetry beyond its conventional bounds with Gordon’s interjections, conversations and references to theater or performance texts, all of which served to disrupt the book as a collection of discrete poems (see my previous post). In contrast, Gardner’s poems certainly look like conventional ones – blocks of text with justified left margins and ragged right margins, arranged into stanzas over a page or two. However, like Gordon’s Folly, Gardner’s Hat is characterized by its multitude of conflicting voices, its deflation of sincerity and its juxtaposition of serious and profane content.

Like internet search engines, Gardner’s poems make no distinction between “serious” information (“news”), personal asides and pop gossip: it’s all potential material to add to the mix. In Petroleum Hat, political figures mix it with celebrities in a flattened virtual world, and this may in fact be less of a literary construct than simply a reflection of the “real” contemporary America (the Governator of California, for example, springs to mind). While there are no consistent narratives or tones in Gardner’s work, the language all seems to be culled from the virtual world – what K. Silem Mohammad calls a poetry with internet “flavors”. At times, it feels as if Gardner is “drowning in the porridge of upload” – and, rather than distilling the information overflow into clear, rational packages of consumable data, he leaves it messy and thick with absurdity, cynicism and ambiguity. In “The Key and the Carrot”, Gardner writes:

I walk my room
looking for a destination,
only finding poets who love form and content
I have nonetheless found myself
walking to the receiver
as arsonist
with the new situation in quantum furrow
let it suffice with this:
the ground beef is still nothing received

The absence of punctuation makes it difficult to make “sense” of this poem, its initial autobiographical mode is disrupted by random appearances from quantum furrows and ground beef, as if our arsonist is burning the conventional autobiographical tone in which he (?) begins. If poets “love form and content”, Flarfists have instead fallen for relations and surface. Thus it does seem a little futile to be digging into the depths of these poems (what is “quantum furrow”? why “ground beef” here?) as they are less metaphoric than metonymic, establishing relations across a surface rather than mining a tradition (again, no evidence of ancient Greeks here).

A major theme of the book is the Iraq War, or more specifically, the images and language of the war as it is being consumed in contemporary America (or least on its computer screens). Gardner plays with War on Terror doublespeak, exposing its absurdity and deflating its seriousness. In this sense, it is worth considering the fragmented language and imagery of Petroleum Hat as a corrosive disruption to the sanitized feeds of information presented by mainstream American news sources. Gardner’s now-infamous poem, “Chicks Dig War”, for example, begins “Story time: Trojan Oil War (part 2)”, a pithy summation of the war, but he goes further than just the war with his repeated phrase “chicks dig war”. While it has been described as an anti-war poem, Gardner is actually dismantling the warped logic and propaganda that justifies war, and ultimately satirizes contemporary American gender and power relations. Joyelle McSweeny, in her excellent review in The Constant Critic, described the poem thus: “Fear of feminism, female strength and male weakness are conflated with each other and with the antithetical heterosexism of militaristic propaganda to create frightening, porny ideations: "God Made Girls Who Like War."” The foundational American trinity of miltarism, religion and patriarchy are all wittily deflated by Gardner’s satire.

In Gardner’s “John Denver Wawa Shadow Puppet Government”, he again mashes up key contemporary themes – the war, politics, celebrity and religion:

the NBC/Wall Street Journal doesn’t understand
the God of Isaac and Ishmael
soon we’ll all be praying to John Denver
if we don’t allow right-wing poor people to feel happy
ALL the time,
teach their kids how to pray in the direction of pizza
yet see no problem
with having the Lord’s Prayer printed in ghostly pubic hair

the president has become newly stressed-out
with the profound equality of all human beings
knocking over stone walls onto Avril Lavigne
as Abraham Lincoln once did

Here, Isaac and Ishmael, both sons of Abraham (though with different mothers), underline the common ancestry of Christianity and Islam (the former religion traces a lineage through Isaac, the latter through Ishmael). Mainstream news “can’t understand” that both religions have the same father. In a contemporary America where more people vote for TV pop stars than politicians, John Denver, bland country/pop singer of the 1970s and 80s, may be both a worthy idol and a worthy political candidate. However, unlike contemporary bland pop stars, and despite the potential patriotism of hits such as “Take Me Home, Country Roads” and “Rocky Mountain High”, Denver was also known for his political outspoken-ness, and was particularly critical of various (particularly Republican) governments.

In the following stanza, Gardner flattens the space of the poem to conflate Avril Lavigne and Abraham Lincoln. Beyond simply a curious juxtaposition, Gardner is also skating across the surface of language, with ALL as a key refrain from the last stanza – both bland contemporary pop singer and former president contain those letters in their names, underlining the equality of all. However, more seriously, equality is stressful for the president, with the resonance of “stone walls” recalling 1969’s Stonewall Riots, and suggesting that equality here is not just referring to the rights of America’s Pizza-eating poor but also the president’s “knocking over” gay rights proposals.

There certainly appears to be something sinister going on behind the scenes of the “shadow puppet government”, though Gardner does not offer a clear ethical stance on any of these issues – the poems force combinations or conflate discourses that do not usually belong in the same space. Another poem, “in this otherworldly quiet”, for example, begins:

in this otherworldly quiet
i heard the piercing cry of agony rent the air
dear little bird, why this shipbuilding?
why a 300 pound weapon, and
why did each protester
spank Wolfowitz individually, really hard?

administration has been made between
clauses relating to internet surveillance
and radioactive toys made of lint

Here again, Gardner presents a mashup of contemporary news issues – the war, internet surveillance, weapons – in a creepy silent otherworld (the silent distance created by the mediating screen?). But the messiness only allows the reader brief moments of empathy. By creating a space where prayer meetings meet celebrity porn and the war’s principle architect, Paul Wolfowitz is spanked by protestors, Gardner’s warped visions are certainly infused with an absurd humor. As spam aims to escape filters and spread virally, so too Gardner’s language escapes rational communication in unfiltered streams of the American collective unconscious, and the results are both humorous and frightening. Petroleum Hat is a collection of odd fragments that takes on the glittering surfaces of mediated culture in a combination of chance-generated spontenaeity and constructedness, resulting in a poetics which tries to take on contemporary media culture on its own terms rather than from the position of “poetry” that expresses “sincere emotions”. If not sincere, then serious? With the constant stoppages, voice changes and erasures, the reader is never really sure. As Gardner writes in “Skylab Wolverine Bunny Cage Nub”:

That last paragraph has to go—
I think that’s the wolverine bunny cage of
our problem—not counting the last paragraph
made of paper maché nub replicas.

FURTHER LINKS:

Drew Gardner reads "Chicks Dig War" at the 2006 Flarf Festival in NYC (YouTube video).

Drew Gardner reads from an earlier book, Sugar Pill, to the accompaniment of his own piano playing, in a duo with bass player Damon Smith (Ubuweb, sound only).

Drew Gardner's blog, Overlap.

The latest on Flarf, a National Poetry Foundation podcast. A good introduction and overview.

Starchitect Condos update

Following my last post, take a brief walk here through a new apartment at Herzog & de Meuron's 40 Bond St (really a promotional tour by a real estate agent, courtesy of New York magazine). Although the development is barely open, an owner is already trying to "flip" an apartment for $3.6 million. But before you pull out your checkbook, bear in mind that you may be the only resident of 40 Bond who doesn't "own their own plane". But you will have access to all the amenities, including "personal lifestyle management" (provided, that is, you have a lifestyle worth managing).