Hi friends,
The day after I sent out my last transmission, on Jean Toomer’s Cane and the sun (& time, imprints, impressions, various shades of dusk…), I got an email invite from Lieven Lahaye for a reading/talk of his at Air Berlin Alexanderplatz, where he’d just completed a residency. I wrote him back to say I would be there, and he responded that it “was a nice coincidence to see/hear your newsletter, minutes after I sent out that e-mail, and recognize some of the same things I’ve been busy with myself the last few months.”
I was also struck by the overlap in our respective recent obsessions after hearing him read about impressions, exposure, and sun-bleached paper, among other things. Lieven does a project called Catalog, along with designer Ott Metusala, a serial publication in which each single-essay issue is printed on the large printer sheets that, when folded, create a 16-page ‘signature.’ At the end of the project, all of these issue-signatures will be bound together into a book. The most recent of these essay/issues is called “Hard Sun,” borrowing its title from a piece by artist Duncan Smith.
I asked Lieven if he wanted to record “Hard Sun” for this newsletter, as a kind of ‘response,’ in the loosest sense, to the last one. Lieven’s writing is also a really nice example of fragmented writing, and of connecting various unrelated things to “reveal a larger whole” (Dodie Bellamy) — what he might also term “accretion” (from another issue of Catalog!). I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
As always, references from the recording are below.
by for now,
Meg
Catalog, a serial publication about cataloging written by Lieven Lahaye and designed by Ott Metusala
Waking into weird weather as a list…
Francis Alÿs’ “In Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing)” (1997)
“This is another instance of the use of blindness as a pejorative metaphor….” Joseph Grigely Instagram
Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field
Duncan Smith, The Age of Oil
Dodie Bellamy, Bee Reaved
