Credits:
By Eileen Myles, poet, novelist and art journalist and Alison Burstein, Curator, The Kitchen. Published as part of the exhibition Lines of Distribution.
January 9, 2025
The exhibition Lines of Distribution, on view through January 25, 2025, marks the culmination of a cross-institutional dialogue between The Kitchen and the Lofoten International Art Festival – LIAF (Lofoten, Norway) and its organizer North Norwegian Art Centre. The partners collaborated to establish a temporary distribution channel between the 2024 edition of LIAF, titled SPARKS (curated by Kjersti Solbakken, on view from September through October 2024 in Lofoten), and Lines of Distribution at The Kitchen.
In tandem with Lines of Distribution, I invited Cuthwulf Eileen Myles to revisit the project they presented as part of SPARKS, Cuthwulf Eileen Myles considers the poem to be a tiny institution (1949 – ). For this project, Myles staged readings in Lofoten daily for one week, including during the opening programme of LIAF 2024: SPARKS. During these short events, they read passages from a one-thousand-page novel they are working on, called All My Loves, and discussed global politics. In addition, each day they posted what they called “handwritten telegrams” of their work in one of the venues where the exhibition SPARKS was installed.
Revisiting this project for the context of The Kitchen ON MIND, Myles has penned a contextualizing introduction, shared here alongside documentation of how the handwritten telegrams appeared in SPARKS. This presentation of the work in a digital form sets Myles's words into motion along new paths, transmitting the messages beyond Lofoten and creating additional points of exchange between LIAF 2024 and The Kitchen.
-Alison Burstein, curator of Lines of Distribution
These sheets are a calendar of the days I spent at Lofoten. Which is now a bumper sticker on my truck in Texas. When I was initially invited Kjersti Solbakken encouraged me to do some kind of installation and since I was the only “non-visual” artist in the festival it seemed I should also be present. And of course there’s no such thing as non-visual. Right? So I did my official reading one day but based on the photographs Kjersti had sent of the various spaces I could occupy I chose this one - that I forget – no thank god for Instagram the space was called gangen which sounds like it just means hall. I gave mini readings in gangen like 10 minutes each day from my novel in progress and also just kind of daily poem things about the genocide in the middle east and a poet’s relation to that I guess in history and I posted a bit of these things on the wall in these nice plexi slots that somehow reminded me of Canal Street. One day no one came to the mini reading and I wondered if I should read aloud anyhow but I didn’t couldn’t. It felt too hollow.
-Cuthwulf Eileen Myles
BIO
Cuthwulf Eileen Myles (b. 1949, they / them) is a poet, novelist and art journalist. They were educated at St. Marks Poetry Project in New York, ten years later became Artistic Director. a “Working Life” and Pathetic Literature (editor) are their most recent books. Their fiction includes Chelsea Girls which won France’s Inrockuptibles Prize for best foreign novel in 2023. Writing on art was gathered in the volume The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009). They received a Guggenheim fellowship, the Clark Prize for excellence in art writing, and they are a member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters. They live in New York & in Marfa, TX.
RELATED
Lines of Distribution
On View
As Part of Lines of Distribution
Two Moon July: Screening and Panel Discussion with Judith Barry, Johanna Fateman, and Kit Fitzgerald
On View