Programs

Triple Canopy and Dalkey Archive Press present an afternoon of failure to celebrate the release of The Review of Contemporary Fiction's "Failure" issue, guest-edited by Joshua Cohen and available here. The program will include attempted readings from the issue by Eileen Myles, Helen DeWitt, Sam Frank, Travis Jeppesen, and Keith Gessen; a malfunctioning tribute to the classics of American literature by the theater group Elevator Repair Service; mangled covers of pop songs by US Girls; and an effort by Derek Lucci to resurrect William Gaddis.

Joshua Cohen's most recent novel is Witz (2010). He is the guest editor of The Review of Contemporary Fiction's "Failure" issue.

Eileen Myles's Inferno (a poet's novel) is just out from OR books. For the essay collection The Importance of Being Iceland (2009), she received a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation grant. Sorry, Tree (2007) is her most recent book of poems. In 2010, the Poetry Society of America awarded her the Shelley Prize.

Helen DeWitt is author of The Last Samurai (2000) and, with Ilya Gridneff, coauthor of Your Name Here (2007).

Sam Frank is an editor of Triple Canopy. His essay for the issue, "The Document," has been reprinted by Triple Canopy here.

Travis Jeppesen is a novelist, poet, and art critic based in Berlin. His books include Victims (2003), Poems I Wrote While Watching TV (2006), Wolf at the Door (2007), and a collection of art criticism, Disorientations: Art on the Margins of the "Contemporary" (2008).

Keith Gessen is an editor of n+1. His translation of Voices from Chernobyl won the National Book Critics Circle award for nonfiction in 2005. His first novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, was published by Viking in 2008.

Elevator Repair Service, a theater ensemble, was founded by director John Collins and a group of actors in 1991. At MoMA PS1, ERS presents a sneak preview of a new collaboration with installation artists Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen. They will playfully mine several of their past shows—including the acclaimed Gatz, a six-hour enactment of The Great Gatsby—and reimagine the material as it falls apart and reforms itself into unexpected new scenes. The work will feature Mike Iveson Jr., Vin Knight, Scott Shepherd, Susie Sokol, Victoria Vazquez, and Ben Williams.

US Girls (Meg Remy) has released two albums, Introducing and Go Grey, both on Siltbreeze, and singles and CD-Rs on Chocolate Monk, Not Not Fun, Hardscrabble Amateurs, Cherry Burger, and Atelier Ciseaux.

William Gaddis (1922-1998) was the author of five novels, two of which won National Book Awards. He taught a course titled "Literature of Failure" at Bard College in 1979.

Actor Derek Lucci, in collaboration with director Ain Gordon, light designer Jennifer Tipton, sculptor Reed Barrow, and documentary film and television maker Scott Boggins, are experimenting in a series of four workshops with the text of Agapē Agape by William Gaddis. The piece, adapted by Lucci, will have its second workshop at Yale Repertory Theatre this spring, followed by a third in New York in early summer.

The Review of Contemporary Fiction was launched in 1981 to provide a critical discourse around innovative literary works of the highest caliber that have largely been ignored by the mainstream media. Over the years, the Review has provided an alternative canon for contemporary fiction and has introduced such writers as David Foster Wallace, David Markson, and Gilbert Sorrentino, well before they were embraced by the critical establishment. (Wallace served for a time as an editor of the journal, and guest-edited a "Future of Fiction" issue, in 1996.) The Review has also published numerous anthology issues dedicated to new writing from foreign countries, special issues dedicated to innovative publishers (Grove Press, Editions P.O.L), and special topic issues, including the present "Failure" issue.

"I went from being surrounded by things—dealing with how we name them and how we experience our environment through naming—to the opposite end of the spectrum: starting with nothing, then calling the objects into being."

—Matt Mullican, "Planetarium"

For Triple Canopy's tenth issue, And Yet It Moves, Matt Mullican collaborated with computer programmer Patrick Smith to create "Planetarium," a navigable scale model of the solar system. Mullican first experimented with digital environments in 1991, when he made Five into One, a virtual city constructed in accordance with his personal visual vocabulary and cosmological order. Exploring that city, Mullican was transfixed by his ability to leave the earth's surface and travel into nothingness. "I would fly upward," he says, "farther and farther into the sky, beyond the stratosphere, into pure, white, infinite space. I would go on forever, so far away from this city I had created that I couldn't find my way back. I became curious about where, exactly, I was when I was out there, in the middle of nowhere." This experience of unbounded space became a leitmotif in later works. At Artists Space Mullican will present and discuss his many explorations of virtual space—and the strange space between the virtual and the real—and examine their relationship to his iconographic sculptures, prints, and installations, as well as his performances under hypnosis.

Matt Mullican was born in 1951, in Santa Monica, California, and currently lives in Berlin. His work has been exhibited extensively in the US and internationally. Recently, his work was included in "The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2009) and the 2008 Whitney Biennial; it has also been exhibited at the Drawing Center, New York (2008); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2005); Ludwig Museum, Cologne (2005); and Museu Serralves, Porto (2001). Mullican's work is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at the STUK Kunstencentrum in Leuven, Belgium, which will be traveling to de Appel, Amsterdam, and Haus der Kunst, Munich.

In mid-December Triple Canopy will be in residence at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, where it will host a number of public programs: a screening of films by Robert Breer; a discussion of the role of design in the development of emerging forms of publication; and a conversation between artist and Triple Canopy contributing editor Adam Helms and artist Taylor Baldwin.

Thursday, December 16: 3-7:30 p.m.
Triple Canopy will hold open office hours from 3:00 till 6:00, discussing the work of the magazine with museum visitors and presenting work from issue 11, which we'll be assembling while in residence. At 6:00 we'll hold Print & Demand #3, the third in an ongoing series of conversations exploring how print culture is being changed by the manifold forms of online publication, and how public spaces are being constituted around those forms. The event will be open to the public and will feature Triple Canopy Web developers Adam Florin and Seth Erickson discussing their work.

Friday, December 17: 7-8:30 p.m.
At 7:00, we'll present a screening of the work of legendary animator and filmmaker (and Tucson denizen) Robert Breer. Triple Canopy senior editor William Smith will introduce the program and, afterward, will be joined in conversation with MOCA Tucson director Anne-Marie Russell.

Saturday, December 18: 6-10 p.m.
From 6:00 till 10:00, MOCA Tucson and Triple Canopy will co-present the museum's annual winter solstice party. Admission to the party, which will include drinks, food, and music, is $10 for museum members (who are invited to a special reception at 6:00) and $20 for non-members (for whom the party begins at 7:00). As part of the members-only reception, Triple Canopy contributing editor Adam Helms and artist Taylor Baldwin, both of whom were included in MOCA's inaugural show last year, will discuss their work and their shared interest in contemporary iconography. Triple Canopy will also present a video program and Matt Mullican's "Planetarium," a navigable scale model of the solar system published in issue 10.