Call for papers
PERFORMANCE PARADIGM (#6), Special Issue, 2010
Interruptions: Letters to Jimmie Durham
Edited by Stephen Muecke
‘One reason I always interrupt is that this is a book against architecture. Against the narrative line. Against linearity to a point. Against the State and its structures, (Belief and Truth) just as we might be against the wall (of a train station, waiting for the 3:10 to Yuma). An interruption can sometimes bring a more interesting direction.’ (Jimmie Durham, Between the Furniture and the Building (Between a Rock and a Hard Place) Köln: Walther König, 1998, p. 39.
Dear Jimmie
I thought you might like to see a few friends and acquaintances gather under the rubric of a performance journal. We all know that you tell stories and write as a kind of performance, in conjunction with your other art work, which is sometimes also a kind of performance: these are all events, they keep things alive in their places, they take time, and give a lot back too.
Would it be alright if we asked a few people to contribute to this journal? Friends like Mick Taussig,* Katie Stewart,* Jean Fisher, Laura Mulvey, John Berger, Nikos Papastergiadis*, myself. Others who maybe you don’t know so well, but wouldn’t mind seeing there. In any case, they will all write in a performative manner, sometimes what we call fictocritical writing. ‘Fictocriticism,’ says Mick Taussig, ‘is humorous and playful and suspicious of authority and therefore in its own way political, nowhere more so than in its cockeyed wink at the necessary fiction of the fiction/nonfiction divide.’
I will ask a friend, Noel King, with whom you had roast lamb at my place (I noticed that you gave tidbits to our dog, Jackie) to do a catalogue raisonné of your writings, since you told me you don’t always know where they all are.
This journal issue will be about writing with Jimmie Durham, rather than about you. So it will have your writing in mind, I guess. There are a lot of interesting things happening in writing which are not governed by that familiar fiction/nonfiction divide, a writing that is about making and making things up, not to transcend this world and find some more imaginative one, but to plug into its power sockets and make words and ideas crackle with energy.
This special issue will be devoted to that kind of thing, and when we say devoted, we mean it. We mean writing with an attitude of care and astonishment that respects all kinds of things: human, animal, objects, wisps of smoke…
Stephen Muecke
*only these have agreed so far…
Performance Paradigm is seeking contributions to a special issue of writings on and around the creative practices of the artist Jimmie Durham. We would like to see a range of creative responses especially to those ‘performances and impermanent indoor or outdoor installations that sometimes blur into the artist’s writings’ that Lucy Lippard describes (Art in America, Feb, 1993). The idea of directly addressing a letter to Jimmie Durham is the point of departure for a meditation on performative experiments in art and writing with forms that are not only imaginative, but eventful and politically charged and which interrupt the predictable business of academic writing.
To that end we will welcome contributions which feature:
•Performative writing—storytelling, fictocritical writing, or analysis of such performative writing
•Other contemporary performative art practices
•Performance across cultures, including indigenous cultures
Abstracts should be submitted for consideration by November 30th, 2009, and final contributions due by the end of March 2010.
Please send proposals by email, including a short abstract or description to:
Professor Stephen Muecke
School of English, Media and Performing Arts
University of New South Wales
Sydney, Australia
(s.muecke@unsw.edu.au)
Performance Paradigm is a refereed journal published by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UNSW and edited by Helena Grehan, Peter Eckersall and Edward Scheer.