Presentation /
“24/6” with Jeff Dolven, Sally O'Reilly, Amy Jean Porter, David Scher, and friends
Date: Thursday, 30 November 2017, 6:30–8pm
Location: The Center for Experimental Humanities, New York University, 14 University Place, New York
FREE. No RSVP necessary
Facebook Event
Please join us for “24/6”, an evening of word, image, and music organized on the occasion of the publication of Fabian Kastner’s Archive of the Average Swede, the latest volume in Cabinet’s “24-Hour Book” series.
Participants will include Jeff Dolven, Sally O'Reilly, Amy Jean Porter, David Scher, and friends.
Kastner’s book considers a project initiated by Sweden’s National Archive in the early 1980s designed to fully record the life of a typical citizen. The archive’s subject was a randomly selected government worker, at the time an employee of Stockholm’s municipal bus service, who agreed to begin donating his personal papers to the collection. The man, however, turned out to be a very different figure than what the archive had hoped for. Adrift in a society undergoing fundamental transformations, the “average Swede” slowly descended over the years into bitter derangement, overwhelming the institution with masses of indiscriminate materials that the archivists were finally forced to refuse.
The evening will bring together some past contributors in order to present and examine the series as a mode of writerly and artistic production. Hands-on exercises might be assigned.
Our thanks to Sukhdev Sandhu and Lori Cole at New York University’s Center for Experimental Humanities for collaborating on and hosting this event.
About Cabinet’s “24-Hour Book” series
Inspired by literary precedents such as automatic writing, by the resourcefulness of the bricoleur making do with what is at hand, and by the openness toward chance that all artistic production under severe constraint must necessarily incorporate, Cabinet’s “24-Hour Book” series invites distinguished authors and artists to be incarcerated in an unfamiliar space to complete a project from start to finish within twenty-four hours.
About the Series Participants
Brian Dillon is UK editor of Cabinet and teaches writing at the Royal College of Art, London. His books include Essayism (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017), The Great Explosion (Penguin, 2015), and Objects in This Mirror (Sternberg Press, 2014). In Pieces: writings on art, etc. will be published by Sternberg Press in 2018.
Jeff Dolven is a critic and poet who teaches at Princeton University. He is the author of two books of criticism, Scenes of Instruction (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and Senses of Style (University of Chicago Press, 2017), and a book of poems, Speculative Music (Sarabande, 2013). He has written frequently for Cabinet on topics ranging from player pianos to poisoned milk.
Matthea Harvey is the author of five books of poetry, most recently If the Tabloids Are True What Are You? and an erasure, Of Lamb, with drawings by Amy Jean Porter. She has also written two books for children.
Fabian Kastner is a Swedish writer and literary critic based in Berlin. He is the author of the novels Oneirine (Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2006), which consists exclusively of unattributed quotes from one thousand works of world literature, and Lekmannen (Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2013), which took as its point of departure Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Kastner is also a regular contributor to the Swedish daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.
Sally O’Reilly writes for performance, page, and video, interleaving academic research and technical knowledges with the comic, the fantastical, and the psycho-social. Besides contributing to several art magazines and numerous exhibition catalogues, she has written the novel Crude (Eros Press, 2016), the libretto for the opera The Virtues of Things (Royal Opera, Aldeburgh Music, and Opera North, 2015), a monograph on Mark Wallinger (Tate Publishing, 2015), and The Body in Contemporary Art (Thames & Hudson, 2009).
Amy Jean Porter’s drawings and installations have been shown in solo shows in New York, Los Angeles, and Paris, and featured in publications such as Cabinet, McSweeney’s, and The Awl. Her books include Of Lamb, written by Matthea Harvey.
David Scher is an artist living in New York City. He is represented by Pierogi in New York, Galerie Jean Brolly in Paris, and Galerie Ute Parduhn in Dusseldorf. In 1969, he cofounded o.n.e.m., a performance and music group that has persisted.
Cabinet wishes to thank the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for their support of this book series.