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An intoxicating sui generis novel by “the greatest mesmerist of modern times” (André Breton) The wealthy scientist Martial Canterel guides a group of visitors through his expansive estate, Locus Solus, where he displays his various deranged inventions, each more spectacular than the last. First, he introduces a machine propelled by the weather, which constructs a mosaic out of varying hues of human teeth, then shows a hairless cat charged with a powerful electric battery, and next a bizarre theater in which corpses are reanimated with a special serum to enact the most important movements of their past lives. Wondrously imaginative and narrated with Roussel’s deadpan wit, Locus Solus is unlike anything else ever written.
Arter initiated a new publication series, ARTER BACKGROUND, in 2019 to accompany exhibitions drawn from its collection, which holds more than 1.400 works of art. The fourth book of the series accompanies Locus Solus, which brings together selected works from the Arter Collection with several large-scale installations, including site-specific new productions, with an aim to explore the idea of “nature” through the lens of facts, fictions and emotions. In the book, excerpts of textual and visual contents selected around the ideas active in the curatorial process of the exhibition are complemented by new works produced specifically for this context. While the exhibition curated by Selen Ansen deals with the ways in which nature and culture permeate and affect each other, the accompanying publication, through its distinctive editorial structure, features texts pointing towards extinct territories, subconscious landscapes, foreign lands, fictive rooms, heres, elsewheres and nowheres, wonderlands, heavenly, earthly and subterranean realms, alongside commissioned essays by Sena Başöz, Pascal Janovjak and Su Pola. This book reflects the exhibition which it accompanies, and whose spaces and reflections on the idea of nature it extends. It amounts to a territory the contours of which are fluid, semi-autonomous, inhabited by a variety of spaces and times. One may peruse it while sitting, standing or lying down, in broad daylight or when the night has fallen, in clear or foul weather, in or outdoors – just as one would with any other book that fell into one’s hands. One will probably make one’s way into it unaccompanied, since it is customary to read alone and in silence. Once inside, it will be preferable to keep one’s eyes open in order to understand where one sets foot, yet not to neglect to close them so as to be able to wander off beyond its borders. This neither-too-long, neither-too-short book is also a body: a hybrid body composed of heterogeneous worlds and points of view, assembled according to the “good neighbour” principle, so cherished by Aby Warburg. It compiles fragments of texts uprooted from their original context, some of which are published as a whole, others devised within the framework of the exhibition. It also contains images, some speechless, others quite talkative, which, again, have been deterritorialised – moved out of their original context – in order to become reterritorialised in new surroundings. One will find less theory here than fiction, fewer essays than narrations, versified poetry and free prose, a manifesto, dictionary and encyclopaedia pages, more solitude than crowds, more vegetation than concrete, at least as many unspoken as vocalised thoughts. — Selen Ansen with contributions by Sena Başöz • John Berger • Jen Bervin • Karl Blossfeldt • Richard Brautigan • Charles Burns • Joseph Conrad • Julio Cortázar • Karel Čapek • Evliyâ Çelebi • Ferit Edgü • Helmut Eisendle • Gianni Guadalupi • Marlen Haushofer • Robert Hooke • Pascal Janovjak • Kamo no Chōmei • Gizem Karakaş • Tetsumi Kudo • D.H. Lawrence • Leo Lionni • Lucretius • Maurice Maeterlinck • Xavier de Maistre • Alberto Manguel • Winsor McCay • Claudio Morandini • Murathan Mungan • Barış Pirhasan • Pliny the Elder • Su Pola • Robert Pufleb • Jochen Raiß • Iván Repila • Raymond Roussel • Nadine Schlieper • Carl Seelig • Gertrude Stein • Michel Tournier • Robert Walser • Aby Warburg • Lynd Ward • Volkan Yalazay
Locus Solus borrows its title from a book by Raymond Roussel, first published in 1914, which presented astounding premonitions of future capabilites. In Roussel's book a brilliant (but perhaps deranged) scientist pursues fantastical technological quests, which included the re-animation of the dead and the automated production of art works. Influenced by questions raised by this book, this volume combines the work of artists in the Locus+ initiative, all of whom have exhibited internationally, and amongst whom are Cathy de Monchaux, Stefan Gec, Gregory Green and Mark Wallinger. The sections site, identity' and technology respectively deal with the power within boundaries and the subsequent specificity of site, identity and its demarcation, and the crossing of borders by technology and its mutations.
Poetry has long been thought of as a genre devoted to grand subjects, timeless themes, and sublime beauty. Why, then, have contemporary poets turned with such intensity to documenting and capturing the everyday and mundane? Drawing on insights about the nature of everyday life from philosophy, history, and critical theory, Andrew Epstein traces the modern history of this preoccupation and considers why it is so much with us today. Attention Equals Life argues that a potent hunger for everyday life explodes in the post-1945 period as a reaction to the rapid, unsettling transformations of this epoch, which have resulted in a culture of perilous distraction. Epstein demonstrates that poetry is an important, and perhaps unlikely, cultural form that has mounted a response, and even a mode of resistance, to a culture suffering from an acute crisis of attention. In this timely and engaging study, Epstein examines why a compulsion to represent the everyday becomes predominant in the decades after modernism and why it has so often sparked genre-bending formal experimentation. With chapters devoted to illuminating readings of a diverse group of writers--including poets associated with influential movements like the New York School, language poetry, and conceptual writing--the book considers the variety of forms contemporary poetry of everyday life has taken, and analyzes how gender, race, and political forces all profoundly inflect the experience and the representation of the quotidian. By exploring the rise of experimental realism as a poetic mode and the turn to rule-governed "everyday-life projects," Attention Equals Life offers a new way of understanding a vital strain at the heart of twentieth- and twenty-first century literature. It not only charts the evolution of a significant concept in cultural theory and poetry, but also reminds readers that the quest to pay attention to the everyday within today's frenetic world of and social media is an urgent and unending task.
The first of Roussel's two major prose works, Impressions of Africa is not, as the title may suggest, a conventional travel account, but an adventure story put together in a highly individual fashion and with an unusual time sequence, whereby the reader is even made to choose whether to begin with the first or the tenth chapter. A veritable literary melting pot, Roussel's groundbreaking text makes ample use of wordplay and the surrealist techniques of automatic writing and private allusion.