Programs

Opening reception: Friday, February 10, 7–9 p.m.
After-hours viewing: Thursday, February 16, 7–9 p.m.

Triple Canopy is pleased to present Crisis and Critique, a video and audio-sculptural installation by Norwegian artist Per-Oskar Leu. The exhibition considers the distance between historical truths and fiction and asks: What role can or should the artist play during watershed political moments?

Leu takes as his point of departure German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s appearance in 1947 before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Using Brecht’s plays, screenplays, films, and signature leather jacket as touchstones, Leu orchestrates a theatrical presentation of archival recordings and audio-sculptural objects. The centerpiece of the installation is a new video edited by Leu, weaving together German films of the 1930s and 40s that dramatize the trial format, including Fritz Lang’s M (1931) and Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (1933); Brecht’s Kuhle Wampe, oder: Wem gehört die Welt? (1932) and Hangmen Also Die! (1943); and the film adaptation of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera (1931). In combining archival recordings of the 1947 testimony with excerpts from period films, Leu investigates the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt (“distancing effect”) as it relates to the playwright’s personal experience of this critical moment in American history.

Crisis and Critique is Leu’s first solo presentation in the US and his third collaboration with Triple Canopy. In 2010, Leu staged the performance “A Forcing of Barriers” as part of Triple Canopy’s Sender, Carrier, Receiver series of programs in Berlin. An iteration of this work was later published in the the tenth issue of the magazine; like Crisis and Critique, it investigates the historical role of artists in relation to politics.

A poster publication featuring the first translation into English of the essay “The Artist and the Economic Crisis,” by the late German-Jewish artist Otto Freundlich (1931), will be available free to visitors. (Download PDF.)

Per-Oskar Leu (b. 1980) lives and works in Oslo, Norway. In 2009, he graduated from the Städelschule, Frankfurt. He has recently presented solo projects at Dortmund Bodega, Oslo; 1/9 Unosunove, Rome; Vanish, Frankfurt; and Johan Berggren Gallery, Malmö. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Malmö Konstmuseum; Entree, Bergen; Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato; and SWG3, Glasgow. Leu has contributed to LISTE Performance Project, Basel, and Frieze Projects, London.

With generous support from:

In celebration of the opening of 155 Freeman, Triple Canopy is pleased to present a marathon reading of Gertrude Stein’s enormously long and allegedly unreadable novel The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress. Over one weekend, an invited list of New York–based artists, writers, publishers, scholars, and other collaborators will gather in Greenpoint to perform the entirety of Stein’s text in a continuous read-in, expected to last 48 hours, more or less. (A list of participants has been posted here.)

Gertrude Stein and The Making of Americans have been central to conversations between literature, art, and publishing for more than a century; and those histories and connections are, in turn, central to Triple Canopy’s publishing and programming in Greenpoint, online, and elsewhere. Stein composed The Making of Americans from 1903 to 1911, though it remained unpublished until 1925, in an edition of 500. The novel wasn’t reprinted in full until 1966, by Fluxus artist and poet Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press (New York), making the book available to a new generation of writers and artists. From 1975 to 2000, Paula Cooper Gallery hosted marathon readings of The Making of Americans around New Year’s Eve, including Higgins, Alison Knowles, and John Cage, among many others. Triple Canopy’s read-in will revive and update that tradition, marking the continuing, branching (if largely subliminal) course of Stein’s book through our culture.

The current edition of the novel, published by Dalkey Archive Press, will be available for borrowing or purchase throughout the read-in. Refreshments will be available, seating will be comfortable, and walk-ins are welcome.

Passive Recreation
A salon with Triple Canopy and the Paris Review
The New York Society Library, 53 East 79th Street, New York, NY
Wednesday, January 18, 6:30 p.m.
$10, tickets are now sold out
RSVP to join the waitlist: events@nysoclib.org

The New York Society Library holds its third annual salon, featuring food and wine, conversation, visual presentations, and readings. Editors of Triple Canopy and the Paris Review will discuss literature old and new, on the page and on the Web. Triple Canopy will present its first literary—or not not literary—issue, Counterfactuals. Editors, along with contributor Tan Lin, will read and play audio and video selections from the issue. They will speak to Triple Canopy’s effort to cultivate new forms of literary work online and to undermine generic conventions. They will also present Triple Canopy's first book, Invalid Format: An Anthology of Triple Canopy, which explores how works produced for the screen might fully inhabit the page. 

The Paris Review will present its Winter 2011 issue, featuring interviews with Jeffrey Eugenides and Alan Hollinghurst and fiction by Roberto Bolaño and Clarice Lispector. Paris Review contributor Avi Steinberg will share the colorful and peculiar history of the airline safety card, with accompanying slides. A casual conversation with the audience about how literature evolves—or fails to evolve; or should resist evolving—along with shifts in the way we read and write, and the machines we use to do so, will follow. 

Tan Lin is the author, most recently, of Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004 The Joy of Cooking and Insomnia and the Aunt. The recipient of a Getty Distinguished Scholar Grant and a Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writing Grant to complete a book on the writings of Andy Warhol, he is also working on a novel called Our Feelings Were Made by Hand. Lin contributed “The Patio and the Index” to the fourteenth issue of Triple Canopy.

How to Print an Internet Magazine
An Evening with Triple Canopy and Project Projects
McNally Jackson Books, 52 Prince Street, New York, NY
Thursday, January 19, 7–8:30 p.m.
Free and open to the public

How to print an Internet magazine is the problem addressed by Invalid Format: An Anthology of Triple Canopy. Triple Canopy editors Alexander Provan and Peter J. Russo will read selections from Invalid Format and discuss its genesis and form with the book’s designer, Prem Krishnamurthy, and Adam Michaels of the firm Project Projects. Krishnamurthy and Michaels will, in turn, discuss how Project Projects makes productive use of the tension between new and old print technologies and design conventions in its work, which ranges from exhibitions to pamphlets, websites to catalogues.