Books by Patrick Greaney
The essays of Austrian documentary poet and photographer Heimrad Bäcker (1925–2003), collected he... more The essays of Austrian documentary poet and photographer Heimrad Bäcker (1925–2003), collected here along with a selection of his photographs and two of his documentary poems, explore the poetic, philosophical, and political stakes of representing the Holocaust, and constitute a crucial source for considering the critical potential of contemporary literature.
A prominent member of the Austrian avant-garde, Bäcker devoted decades to the development of a singular documentary style. For most of his adult life, Bäcker directed a publishing house for avant-garde literature, collected materials for the four books of documentary poetry that he began publishing at age 60, and took thousands of photos of the memorial site and ruins of Mauthausen, Austria’s largest concentration camp, a short drive from his home in Linz. The essays collected here for the first time in any language systematize his thinking about documentary poetry and photography and their relationship to history and memory.
"Rarely has documentary poetry been so stark or so relevant. Heimrad Bäcker’s appropriated language is irrefutable in its presentation of realities that any other approach would soften. His reflections on historical utterances are apt for thinking about the distortions of reality proliferating in our current moment. This short collection sinks into consciousness with terrifying force and provides a wake-up call for anyone engaged in poetic or linguistic practice—which is all of us."
—Johanna Drucker
An Austrian Avant-Garde, 2020
A collection that re-visions the Austrian avant-garde, translated and published for the first tim... more A collection that re-visions the Austrian avant-garde, translated and published for the first time in English.
After 1945, a vibrant literary avant-garde emerged in Austria that has remained mostly unknown outside of the country. Their first publications appeared in a cultural and political environment still largely determined by seven years of Nazism (1938-1945) and four years of Austrofascism (1934-1938). Its writers drew on traditional and experimental methods to hollow out existing literary conventions and propose new ones, using montage, appropriation, satire, irony, and nonsense. Despite many shared intentions, though, the Austrian avant-garde was far from unified. Some of its writers repeated the authoritarian gestures and practices of the fascist period; others contributed to the creation of feminist and queer counterpublics by creating alternative presses, new kinds of literary events, and political writers’ collectives.
An Austrian Avant-garde offers a critical survey of experimental writing from Austria that captures the tensions inherent in the history of the avant-garde. Starting with texts from the 1950s by the Vienna Group, the anthology offers a survey of the complex, contested landscape of post-1945 Austrian literature, with an emphasis on the work of women writers. The editors’ preface and their introductions to individual texts offer contextualization and commentary that make the anthology accessible to a wide readership.
With texts by:
Friedrich Achleitner
Ilse Aichinger
H.C. Artmann
Heimrad Bäcker
Konrad Bayer
Ann Cotten
Carola Dertnig
Elfriede Gerstl
Elfriede Jelinek
Ilse Kilic
Margret Kreidl
Florjan Lipuš
Friederike Mayröcker
Andreas Okopenko
Julian Palacz
Kathrin Röggla
Gerhard Rühm
Lisa Spalt
Herbert Wimmer
“An Austrian Avant-garde profoundly expands our understanding of what experimental writing is and what it can do. This fantastic collection recalls to mind the premise of the radical avant-garde—its utopian potential to bridge the distance between art and life. No one can read these writers and remain the same.”
—Fatima Naqvi, Yale University
Fashion Fiction A New Genre
In Eduardo Costa's Fashion Fictions, a series begun in 1966, he has objects made that look like j... more In Eduardo Costa's Fashion Fictions, a series begun in 1966, he has objects made that look like jewelry (including ears, toes, and strands of hair, all in 24k gold), but that are not actually meant to be worn. Instead, they function as props intended to trigger a reaction in the fashion media. It works: first in Argentina, where it was covered in the press in 1966 or 1967, and, later, in the United States, where Richard Avedon photographed the model Marisa Berenson wearing one of Costa’s creations for the March 1968 edition of Vogue and where the photographer Hiro’s images of the same object appeared on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar in October 1968. In 2019, Alessandro Michele's fall/winter collection for Gucci reactivated Costa's Fictions. This document includes a few of Costa's texts about the Fashion Fictions.
"Conceptualism and Other Fictions" brings together Argentine artist Eduardo Costa's essays, lette... more "Conceptualism and Other Fictions" brings together Argentine artist Eduardo Costa's essays, letters, interviews, reviews, scripts, and other texts published in Spanish and English over the past fifty years. The writings collected here reconstruct Costa’s creative development from the early 1960s until the present, and they show the importance of dialogue, friendship, collaboration, and history for this key figure in global conceptualism.
Essays by Andrea Giunta and Patrick Greaney. Catalogue for exhibition "Guido Ignatti: Setup" at M... more Essays by Andrea Giunta and Patrick Greaney. Catalogue for exhibition "Guido Ignatti: Setup" at MCA Denver, June 30-September 11, 2016.
Literature and art have always depended on imitation, and in the past few decades quotation and a... more Literature and art have always depended on imitation, and in the past few decades quotation and appropriation have become dominant aesthetic practices. But critical methods have not kept pace with this development. Patrick Greaney reopens the debate about quotation and appropriation, shifting away from naïve claims about the death of the author. In interpretations of art and literature from the 1960s to the present, Quotational Practices shows how artists and writers use quotation not to undermine authorship and originality, but to answer questions at the heart of twentieth-century philosophies of history.
Greaney argues that quotation is a technique employed by art and philosophy to build ties to the past and to possible futures. By exploring quotation’s links to gender, identity, and history, he offers new approaches to works by some of the most influential modern and contemporary artists, writers, and philosophers, including Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, Marcel Broodthaers, Glenn Ligon, Sharon Hayes, and Vanessa Place.
Ultimately, Quotational Practices reveals innovative perspectives on canonical philosophical texts as well as art and literature in a wide range of genres and mediums—from concrete poetry and the artist’s book to performance, painting, and video art.
This highly original book takes as its starting point a central question for nineteenth- and twen... more This highly original book takes as its starting point a central question for nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and philosophy: how to represent the poor?
Covering the period from the publication of Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857 to the composition of Benjamin's final texts in the 1930s, "Untimely Beggar" investigates the coincidence of two modern literary and philosophical interests: representing the poor and representing potential. To take account of literature's relation to the poor, Patrick Greaney proposes the concept of impoverished writing, which withdraws from representing objects and registers the existence of power. By reducing itself to the indication of its own potential, by impoverishing itself, literary language attempts to engage and participate in the power of the poor.
This focus on impoverished language offers new perspectives on major French and German authors, including Marx, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Rilke, and Brecht; and makes significant contributions to recent debates about power and potential in thinkers such as Agamben, Deleuze, Foucault, Hardt, and Negri. In doing so, Greaney offers significant insights into modernity's intense philosophical and literary interest in socioeconomic poverty.
Dossier by Patrick Greaney
Sueños y pesadillas Dossier, 2019
Dossier published by Les Figues Press to accompany the publication of Dalia Rosetti (Fernanda Lag... more Dossier published by Les Figues Press to accompany the publication of Dalia Rosetti (Fernanda Laguna), "Sueños y pesadillas," translated by Alexis Almeida. Includes a letter from Les Figues Editors-in-Chief Kim Calder and Evan Kleekamp, Alexis Almeida's interview with Fernanda Laguna (trans. by Kit Schluter), a bilingual excerpt from "Sueños y pesadillas," and essays on Rosetti/Laguna by Andrew Moszynski and Patrick Greaney.
Articles and book chapters by Patrick Greaney
A Pavilion for a Counterpublic: Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl’s Invitation of the Soft Machine and Her Angry Body Parts, 2023
The artists Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl represented Austria at the 2022 Venice Bienn... more The artists Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl represented Austria at the 2022 Venice Biennial, and they gave their exhibition an enigmatic title: The Invitation of the Soft Machine and her Angry Body Parts. The Pavilion's official website explains that the phrase "soft machine" comes from William Burroughs' description of the body, but only mentions the title's main term in passing, saying that the artists "invite" visitors in (Austrian Pavilion). What is invitational about this Invitation? An invitation is what J.L. Austin calls a 'performative utterance' or 'speech act'; it does something "rather than merely saying something." Someone who issues an invitation assumes a set of conventions and initiates a set of actions: I invite you, and you can accept, decline, or ignore my invitation, which is another speech act that creates effects for you and me. Knebl and Scheirl issued their invitation in the form of an exhibition, which might seem to diminish its performativity, since Austin explicitly excludes from his consideration of performative utterances any lines "if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy" or, one assumes, if expressed in an exhibition title (Austin, 1962: 22). Knebl and Scheirl perform, stage, enact, and play out an invitation; all of these English verbs are captured in the German verb inszenieren, which appears frequently in Scheirl's and Knebl's texts and interviews. The staged aspect of their exhibition does not make its invitation entirely fictional, since it seems to be linked to the actual lives of the artists, who are featured prominently in photographs in the exhibition. But it is also not entirely nonfictional, since the exhibition also contains many fantastic and science fiction elements. As an Inszenierung, the exhibition joins real, imagined, and fictive elements to manifest something that cannot be conceptualized as an object or a stably existing condition.
Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art, 2018
The urge to rescue the past as something living, instead of using it as the material of progress,... more The urge to rescue the past as something living, instead of using it as the material of progress, has been satisfied only in art. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment Readers of Thus Spoke Zarathustra must wait until the third part of the book for Zarathustra to explain his doctrine of the eternal return, and even then they receive not a theoretical explication, but, instead, what Zarathustra calls a "vision" and a "riddle." 1 He feels compelled to tell these in response to a clichéd account of the eternal return offered by one of his followers, a dwarf: "All that is straight lies. All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle." 2 Zarathustra protests this jingoistic trivialization of his doctrine and suggests as an alternative image for the eternal return his vision of a gateway with the word "Moment" inscribed on it: From this gateway Moment a long eternal lane stretches backward: behind us lies an eternity. Must not whatever can already have passed this way before? Must not whatever can happen, already have happened, been done, passed by before? And if everything has already been here before, what do you think of this moment, dwarf? Must this gateway too not already-have been here?
Repeating the Future in Contemporary Art, 2014
Repeating the Future in Contemporary Art, 2014
Chiachio & Giannone, "Monobordado," at Pasaje 17, Buenos Aires, published in Journal of Modern Cr... more Chiachio & Giannone, "Monobordado," at Pasaje 17, Buenos Aires, published in Journal of Modern Craft 9.3 (2016).
This chapter examines the place of quotation in the works of Belgian artist and poet Marcel Brood... more This chapter examines the place of quotation in the works of Belgian artist and poet Marcel Broodthaers and, in particular, in his 1973 artist’s book "Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes" (I Hate the Movement that Displaces Lines), which does little more than quote Baudelaire’s poem “Beauty.” The chapter offers a close reading of "Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes" and focuses on how quotation and irony function in Broodthaers’s critique of conceptual art. (Published as Chapter 3 of "Quotational Practices: Repeating the Future in Contemporary Art," University of Minnesota Press, 2007.]
Art History, Sep 2014
This essay presents works by Eduardo Costa as critical imitations, and it proposes that their spe... more This essay presents works by Eduardo Costa as critical imitations, and it proposes that their specific form of imitation be used as model for understanding the relation of Latin American conceptualism to European and North American conceptual art. At the centre of the argument is Costa’s work A piece that is essentially the same as a piece made by any of the first conceptual artists, dated two years earlier than the original and signed by someone else (1970). Originally printed in the catalogue for the exhibition Art in the Mind, it proposes the creation of a backdated copy of a canonical work. Imitation determines Costa’s work in an additional way: he intended the work to be a critique of conceptual art, which he perceived as an ossified style. The essay places this work in the context of Costa’s Fashion fictions series and his participation in the Argentine avant-garde of the 1960s.
Germanic Review, 2014
This article examines the tensions between expression and expressionlessness in the works of the ... more This article examines the tensions between expression and expressionlessness in the works of the artist Luis Camnitzer, with special attention to these four works: "Selbstbedienung"
(Self-Service), "Patentanmeldung" (Patent Application), "Uruguayan Torture Series," and "Last Words."
The introduction to the English edition of Michalis Pichler's appropriation/erasure of Max Stirne... more The introduction to the English edition of Michalis Pichler's appropriation/erasure of Max Stirner's 1844 manifesto of individual anarchism, "The Ego and Its Own." On appropriating texts and book formats, and on the racialized and nationalist defense of originality against the evils of appropriation.
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Books by Patrick Greaney
A prominent member of the Austrian avant-garde, Bäcker devoted decades to the development of a singular documentary style. For most of his adult life, Bäcker directed a publishing house for avant-garde literature, collected materials for the four books of documentary poetry that he began publishing at age 60, and took thousands of photos of the memorial site and ruins of Mauthausen, Austria’s largest concentration camp, a short drive from his home in Linz. The essays collected here for the first time in any language systematize his thinking about documentary poetry and photography and their relationship to history and memory.
"Rarely has documentary poetry been so stark or so relevant. Heimrad Bäcker’s appropriated language is irrefutable in its presentation of realities that any other approach would soften. His reflections on historical utterances are apt for thinking about the distortions of reality proliferating in our current moment. This short collection sinks into consciousness with terrifying force and provides a wake-up call for anyone engaged in poetic or linguistic practice—which is all of us."
—Johanna Drucker
After 1945, a vibrant literary avant-garde emerged in Austria that has remained mostly unknown outside of the country. Their first publications appeared in a cultural and political environment still largely determined by seven years of Nazism (1938-1945) and four years of Austrofascism (1934-1938). Its writers drew on traditional and experimental methods to hollow out existing literary conventions and propose new ones, using montage, appropriation, satire, irony, and nonsense. Despite many shared intentions, though, the Austrian avant-garde was far from unified. Some of its writers repeated the authoritarian gestures and practices of the fascist period; others contributed to the creation of feminist and queer counterpublics by creating alternative presses, new kinds of literary events, and political writers’ collectives.
An Austrian Avant-garde offers a critical survey of experimental writing from Austria that captures the tensions inherent in the history of the avant-garde. Starting with texts from the 1950s by the Vienna Group, the anthology offers a survey of the complex, contested landscape of post-1945 Austrian literature, with an emphasis on the work of women writers. The editors’ preface and their introductions to individual texts offer contextualization and commentary that make the anthology accessible to a wide readership.
With texts by:
Friedrich Achleitner
Ilse Aichinger
H.C. Artmann
Heimrad Bäcker
Konrad Bayer
Ann Cotten
Carola Dertnig
Elfriede Gerstl
Elfriede Jelinek
Ilse Kilic
Margret Kreidl
Florjan Lipuš
Friederike Mayröcker
Andreas Okopenko
Julian Palacz
Kathrin Röggla
Gerhard Rühm
Lisa Spalt
Herbert Wimmer
“An Austrian Avant-garde profoundly expands our understanding of what experimental writing is and what it can do. This fantastic collection recalls to mind the premise of the radical avant-garde—its utopian potential to bridge the distance between art and life. No one can read these writers and remain the same.”
—Fatima Naqvi, Yale University
Greaney argues that quotation is a technique employed by art and philosophy to build ties to the past and to possible futures. By exploring quotation’s links to gender, identity, and history, he offers new approaches to works by some of the most influential modern and contemporary artists, writers, and philosophers, including Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, Marcel Broodthaers, Glenn Ligon, Sharon Hayes, and Vanessa Place.
Ultimately, Quotational Practices reveals innovative perspectives on canonical philosophical texts as well as art and literature in a wide range of genres and mediums—from concrete poetry and the artist’s book to performance, painting, and video art.
Covering the period from the publication of Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857 to the composition of Benjamin's final texts in the 1930s, "Untimely Beggar" investigates the coincidence of two modern literary and philosophical interests: representing the poor and representing potential. To take account of literature's relation to the poor, Patrick Greaney proposes the concept of impoverished writing, which withdraws from representing objects and registers the existence of power. By reducing itself to the indication of its own potential, by impoverishing itself, literary language attempts to engage and participate in the power of the poor.
This focus on impoverished language offers new perspectives on major French and German authors, including Marx, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Rilke, and Brecht; and makes significant contributions to recent debates about power and potential in thinkers such as Agamben, Deleuze, Foucault, Hardt, and Negri. In doing so, Greaney offers significant insights into modernity's intense philosophical and literary interest in socioeconomic poverty.
Dossier by Patrick Greaney
Articles and book chapters by Patrick Greaney
(Self-Service), "Patentanmeldung" (Patent Application), "Uruguayan Torture Series," and "Last Words."
A prominent member of the Austrian avant-garde, Bäcker devoted decades to the development of a singular documentary style. For most of his adult life, Bäcker directed a publishing house for avant-garde literature, collected materials for the four books of documentary poetry that he began publishing at age 60, and took thousands of photos of the memorial site and ruins of Mauthausen, Austria’s largest concentration camp, a short drive from his home in Linz. The essays collected here for the first time in any language systematize his thinking about documentary poetry and photography and their relationship to history and memory.
"Rarely has documentary poetry been so stark or so relevant. Heimrad Bäcker’s appropriated language is irrefutable in its presentation of realities that any other approach would soften. His reflections on historical utterances are apt for thinking about the distortions of reality proliferating in our current moment. This short collection sinks into consciousness with terrifying force and provides a wake-up call for anyone engaged in poetic or linguistic practice—which is all of us."
—Johanna Drucker
After 1945, a vibrant literary avant-garde emerged in Austria that has remained mostly unknown outside of the country. Their first publications appeared in a cultural and political environment still largely determined by seven years of Nazism (1938-1945) and four years of Austrofascism (1934-1938). Its writers drew on traditional and experimental methods to hollow out existing literary conventions and propose new ones, using montage, appropriation, satire, irony, and nonsense. Despite many shared intentions, though, the Austrian avant-garde was far from unified. Some of its writers repeated the authoritarian gestures and practices of the fascist period; others contributed to the creation of feminist and queer counterpublics by creating alternative presses, new kinds of literary events, and political writers’ collectives.
An Austrian Avant-garde offers a critical survey of experimental writing from Austria that captures the tensions inherent in the history of the avant-garde. Starting with texts from the 1950s by the Vienna Group, the anthology offers a survey of the complex, contested landscape of post-1945 Austrian literature, with an emphasis on the work of women writers. The editors’ preface and their introductions to individual texts offer contextualization and commentary that make the anthology accessible to a wide readership.
With texts by:
Friedrich Achleitner
Ilse Aichinger
H.C. Artmann
Heimrad Bäcker
Konrad Bayer
Ann Cotten
Carola Dertnig
Elfriede Gerstl
Elfriede Jelinek
Ilse Kilic
Margret Kreidl
Florjan Lipuš
Friederike Mayröcker
Andreas Okopenko
Julian Palacz
Kathrin Röggla
Gerhard Rühm
Lisa Spalt
Herbert Wimmer
“An Austrian Avant-garde profoundly expands our understanding of what experimental writing is and what it can do. This fantastic collection recalls to mind the premise of the radical avant-garde—its utopian potential to bridge the distance between art and life. No one can read these writers and remain the same.”
—Fatima Naqvi, Yale University
Greaney argues that quotation is a technique employed by art and philosophy to build ties to the past and to possible futures. By exploring quotation’s links to gender, identity, and history, he offers new approaches to works by some of the most influential modern and contemporary artists, writers, and philosophers, including Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, Marcel Broodthaers, Glenn Ligon, Sharon Hayes, and Vanessa Place.
Ultimately, Quotational Practices reveals innovative perspectives on canonical philosophical texts as well as art and literature in a wide range of genres and mediums—from concrete poetry and the artist’s book to performance, painting, and video art.
Covering the period from the publication of Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857 to the composition of Benjamin's final texts in the 1930s, "Untimely Beggar" investigates the coincidence of two modern literary and philosophical interests: representing the poor and representing potential. To take account of literature's relation to the poor, Patrick Greaney proposes the concept of impoverished writing, which withdraws from representing objects and registers the existence of power. By reducing itself to the indication of its own potential, by impoverishing itself, literary language attempts to engage and participate in the power of the poor.
This focus on impoverished language offers new perspectives on major French and German authors, including Marx, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Rilke, and Brecht; and makes significant contributions to recent debates about power and potential in thinkers such as Agamben, Deleuze, Foucault, Hardt, and Negri. In doing so, Greaney offers significant insights into modernity's intense philosophical and literary interest in socioeconomic poverty.
(Self-Service), "Patentanmeldung" (Patent Application), "Uruguayan Torture Series," and "Last Words."