Monthly Archives: September 2013

Curatorial or Conjured

In the fall of 2023, Burnett, Jo Fiduccia, and others were responsible for “The Third, Meaning,” an exhibition at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. It ran through October of 2023.

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Burnett participated in the curating of a performative exhibition of Fluxus work from the holdings of the Emily Harvey Foundation on April 15, 2012.

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Burnett and fellow Cabinet editor Christopher Turner curated “The Slice: Cutting to See,” an exhibition that, moving across historical moments and disparate fields, examined the peculiar traditions that link the keen eye to the sharp blade. Everything you ever wanted to know about the microtome. The exhibition ran from Friday, November 19, through Wednesday, December 15, 2010, at the Architectural Association School of Architecture Gallery in London. See reviews of the exhibition in BMJ and the Independent. Watch a video walk-through of the exhibition below.

“The Slice: Cutting to See” Walk-Through. Video by Luke Currall. Thanks to Vanessa Norwood and the AA School.

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Burnett had a hand in organizing a show that opened on March 30, 2010: “An Ordinall of Alchimy,” at the Cabinet Space in Brooklyn. It’s about collecting, art, money, and the internet. After Cabinet, it moved on to the Slought Foundation in Philly, where was on view from April 30 until June 14. Click here for more on the project from Cabinet and here for more on its stay at the Slought Foundation.

Collaborations and Projects

Burnett was part of the “Box of Birds” show in Tribeca in the spring of 2024 (reviewed here).

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Burnett helped recover and configure The Milcom Memory Box, a “temporary deinstallation” currently at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in Manhattan.  Special thanks to Federica Soletta, who took the lead on this important ESTAR(SER) project. More information here.

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Burnett worked with the “Always in Threes” Working Group of ESTAR(SER) to prepare the “PAS DE TROIS: THE MUSIC OF ATTENTION AND THE FRYE TRUNK” performance lecture, a new piece of dream-study delving the archival poetics of radical attention. Yes, there is organ music…

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The Milcom Memorial Library and Attention Library featured as an installation at Mana Contemporary from 2018-2023, and hosted programming, events, and exhibitions related to the ongoing work of the research collective ESTAR(SER). A follow-on installation, “The Milcom Memory Box,” is forthcoming later this year…

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Since 2018, Burnett has been working with THE FRIENDS OF ATTENTION, a loose coalition of artists, activists, and others who think about (and practice) forms of attention “resistant to commodification.” Lots of stuff here.

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Stills from Yara Flores’s short film The Kinetics of Textual Immersion appear in the new book from Dispersed Holdings: READING ROOM (2020).

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In addition, Burnett and Loh have a project, “Protocol for Two People and Two Unread Books,” in the volume.

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At the 2019 Spring Break Art Fair Burnett was one of the bootleg artists in Marisa Jahn’s “Rubbings and Bootlegs” installation. He did “bootleg” reinterpretation/knock-offs of selected works in the exhibition on commission.

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Yara Flores did a poster (“Self-portrait by a Friend,” 2018) in the “BB8 after BB8” exhibition, a post-hoc riff on the 2018 Bucharest Biennial.

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Yara Flores has a piece in Navigationedited by Hinrich Sachs and his friends in Eindhoven.

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Yara Flores had work in the group show Please Touch: Body Boundaries at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City.

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The Spring, 2018 issue of CAC Journal features Yara Flores. A tenth Issue release celebration involved a new and celebratory commission — part of a trans-Atlantic mind-over-matter launch event on the 15th of April, 2018.

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Yara Flores has work in Nina and Conny Blom’s new book: Conceptual Art (2017).

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On 2 December 2016 Yara Flores’ solo show Greebles opened at Raygun. More here.

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Yara Flores had work in “Fifteen People Present Their Favorite Book (after Kosuth),” open from 26 October – 11 November 2016 at Škuc Gallery in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

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Yara Flores has new work in Tennis (Stockholm: Drucksache, 2015): a visual essay on the American Marxist artist-illustrator David Johnson Leisk (1906-1975).

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Burnett and a group of collaborators and friends installed a project at the 2015 Ljubljana Biennial. Here is a description (click for a few images):

 

 

 

 

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Burnett has been appointed to the Editorial Committee of the Proceedings of ESTAR(SER). More about the research consortium here, and recent updates on new work in the community here.

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Burnett and his friend/collaborator Mark Dion recently assembled a portfolio piece on the purposes of science for the Chicago-based platform The Point. “What is Science For?” juxtaposes found text and installation views; it kicks off an eponymous “Symposium” section of Issue 8.

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Burnett has been involved with the work of an innovative consulting organization, which works to bring contemporary artists and large corporations together in unpredictable ways.  The CDC/ICD is an ongoing project, with recent engagements at The New Museum and the Sean Kelly Gallery.

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In 2014, Burnett and Yara Flores teamed up to present “Pound vs. Stevens: The Rematch,” an installation in a pop-up exhibition which accompanied the Aesthetics of Information symposium at Princeton University. See more herehere, and here. This represented an outgrowing of work that began in 2009, a conceptual project involving chess and the novel.

For a taste of the earlier work, click here to read an experimental essay in “ludic criticism”; or click here to go right to the first fruit of the collaboration, an online computer program that lets you pit one novel against another in a chess match. The US Chess Federation recently ran a story about this project—click here to check it out.

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In 2012, as part of the IHUM “Pay Attention” workshop, Yara Flores and Burnett produced this short on Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.”

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Burnett and video artist Lisa Young teamed up in 2010 on a multimedia project that premiered as part of “Seeing from Above,” a conference at the Wellcome Collection, London. Part éloge, part montage, the collaborative piece, “Free Fall: The Life and Times of Bud ‘Crosshairs’ MacGinitie,” is an experiment in biographical sky-diving.

 

Poesis and Whatnot

In June of 2014, Burnett and Jeff Dolven organized a night of skew poetical resurrectionism. The dead poet of the night? William Blake. The mission? To unravel (and re-ravel) the Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Razor blades were deployed in studied silence by all. See some of the evening’s returns below.

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Burnett has a longstanding interest in poetry, and he and Jeff Dolven host the semi-regular “Poetry Lab” at the Cabinet Space in Brooklyn. See here for stuff about the Séance with James Merrill; and here for the “Idea of Order on the Gowanus Canal.” A Sappho fan? Look here to see what happened when Anne Carson helped Cabinet shatter a set of terra cotta plates inscribed with Sapphic fragments. Yes, at the Whitman evening there was a naked guy with a prosthetic vagina. Back in the spring of 2003, in conjunction with the Humanities Council, Burnett and Dolven organized a much less crazy symposium on language and philosophy, entitled “Poetry and Knowledge.”

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And he has published some work in this area, including a study of Wallace Stevens (in Southerly) that ends with a Stevensian pastiche/palinode, and an essay about poetry and prayer in the July/August 2008 issue of American Poetry Review. Burnett also has a set of prose poems in the “Underground” issue of Cabinet. Click below to see PDF of this project.

Four Leaves from a Commonplace Book

Minimal Theology meets This Living Hand (2011)