“A ‘literary review’ premised on verbal embellishment…without sacrificing a genuine love for words and their power to effect and affect.”
Jordan Hruska, Art in America

A verbal varieté strategizing the aesthetics of discourse, Semiospectacle stages sites of exceptional linguistic exchange. The poet’s theater becomes an academic lecture hall fronting as vaudeville house. Its players dispense with disciplinary demarcations, highlighting language-based practices across scholarship, poetics, digital cinema, and visual art performance. Co-curated by Mashinka Firunts and Danny Snelson.

ARTISTS: Alejandro Crawford, Yelena Gluzman, James Hoff, Vaginal Davis (Screening), Danny Snelson, Mashinka Firunts, and Gin Minsky of the Minsky Sisters.

James Hoff reads from the Argot Dictionary, a compendium of new colloquialisms and revised anachronisms. Alejandro Crawford performs a player piano installment of his video organ, the vonome, mixing digital aesthetics with the history of spectacular mechanics. Yelena Gluzman demonstrates her School for Salomés, performed by Amy Huggans, Danusia Roberts Trevino, Cecilia Lynn-Jacobs, Olivia Jorgensen, and Jeffrey Joe Nelson. Danny Snelson presents an ongoing cinema lecture "The Dark Cloud of Dr. Mabuse," exploring haunted technology and criminal dispersion alongside Fritz Lang's 1922 film Dr. Mabuse Der Spieler. Mashinka Firunts delivers micro-lectures on tactics of theatricalized linguistic exchange. Vaginal Davis's performance Hippo Narcissus will be screened, a cantata wherein Davis portrays Theodor Adorno’s mother channeling 1930s opera diva Grace Moore. Intertitular tap by the Minsky Sisters.

Codexkammer, a miniature lending library with texts on loan from the Onyx Reading Room, will be installed in conjunction with Semiospectacle Nº 2.

The first installment of Semiospectacle was presented at Performance Space 122 in March 2010.


CLICK TO VIEW SEMIOSPECTACLE Nº 1