News & Opinion - Art in America

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Bye Bye Roving Ei

My final rove this month already felt assembled in recollection. We rushed to CUNY on Monday night to hear Sam Ace, a poet from Tucson, read his new work. Sam did the bravest thing in the midst of what felt like a very rangy, sexy, cerebral reading. He showed on a screen a video of himself as a woman, years ago, reading her poems when he was her. I remembered that other friend, her cheekbones, her different reading style. My girlfriend and I were moved to tears by the enormity of his gesture: to stand there as both persons, both poets, still mainly asking questions about love.

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Roving Ei: The Growing Panic

by Eileen Myles 11/18/11

Katy Grannan followed Dorothea Lange's path along Route 99, and Grannan's photos, both black and white and color, are monumental, timeless and sleazy. Hers is an in-your-face nation of bathers and motel signs, the squinty and grand despair of humans looking into the sun. Katy Grannan's content feels almost too large for the photos. It is like the sound was turned off and the resulting silence that you can't pull away from is agonizingly private and political.

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Roving Ei: The Avant-Garde Crowd

by Eileen Myles 11/12/11

My art week was minimal and partial. By the end it turned out grand. I had hundreds of errands to do and only one date circled on my calendar, or clicked, whatever, and it was to get to MPA's performance at Leo Koenig. In September she did the first part of "Directing Light on to Fist of Father" and the buzz is that it was amazing. To date I'd only seen her on film so there was no missing this. So why am I pedaling my damn bike across town about a half-hour later than I planned? The crowd outside of the gallery was dense. Is MPA famous? Yes, and it was Performa, which is like the New Year's Eve of performance art in terms of the amateurs really coming out for it. Tourists, graduate students. Grrr. An amateur audience is good. Right? But in terms of viewing, it doesn't feel good.
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Roving Ei, Part 1

by Eileen Myles 11/4/11

It's been a strangely positive week in America, I can definitely report. I called my mother, who lives in a senior center in Holyoke, MA, where there was a huge storm. She was delighted I got through since she's had no power and no heat, and no calls had gotten through until mine. So I felt lucky.

Slavoj Zizek told the crowd last week at St. Mark's Books that melancholy, the prevailing disposition of our time, is commonly stopped in its tracks by all sorts of prohibitions moral and cultural and I thought, "Well, nobody in the art world is taking that step." Rather, everyone is mixing it up, putting things together that in retrospect should never have been apart. Expanding the message. We want more!!
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