Archival Program Information
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Performance


Figure making sound / Larionov
 
Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Reception and Exhibition Viewing
5:00–6:45 p.m.
Getty Research Institute Exhibition Gallery

Russian Futurist Zaum' and Contemporary Sound Poetry
7:00–8:30 p.m.
Museum Lecture Hall

Admission is free. Reservations Required

This event provides a rare opportunity to hear both dramatic readings by the Russian scholar Oleg Minin of Russian Futurist zaum' ("beyonsense") and performances by the experimental poets Christian Bök and Steve McCaffery of their own sound poetry. Gerald Janecek, an expert on twentieth-century Russian avant-garde poetry, will introduce the evening. By bringing together sound poetry of the historical and contemporary avant-gardes, the program will chronicle the singular influence of poets Velimir Khlebnikov, Alexei Kruchenykh, and Vladimir Mayakovsky on subsequent experimentation, particularly that of Bök and McCaffery, including the use of invented words, the sensical and nonsensical, and the creation of "meaning" through sound.

Oleg Minin
 
Oleg Minin
Born and raised in Russia, Oleg Minin received his PhD from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California. Minin's research and interests include turn-of-the-century Russian literary and visual modernism, art and literature of the early-twentieth-century Russian avant-garde, as well as periodical political satire of the first Russian Revolution. He recently authored an article on the writings of Pavel Filonov, one of the key artists of the Russian avant-garde. Minin's passionate interest in Russian experimental arts have led him to take part in USC productions of modern dance and poetry, most notably an interpretive staging of Filonov's classic Futurist text Chant of Universal Flowering at the Getty Research Institute in the fall of 2006. Currently, Minin is working on a book about periodical political satire in late Imperial Russia.

Christian Bök
 
Christian Bök
Christian Bök is the author of not only Crystallography (1994), a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, but also of Eunoia (2001), a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley's Amazon. Bök has also earned many accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry (particularly the Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters). His conceptual artworks (which include books built out of Rubik's cubes and Lego bricks) appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique (2001). Bök is currently professor of English at the University of Calgary.

Steve McCaffery
 
Steve McCaffery
Steve McCaffery is the author of twenty-seven volumes of poetry, theory, and criticism. He was a founding member in 1970 of the internationally renowned sound poetry ensemble The Four Horse Men, as well as a founding member of the Toronto Research Group, the Canadian College of Pataphysics, and (with Fluxus artist Dick Higgins) The Institute for Creative Misunderstanding. His most recent book is Slightly Left of Thinking: Poems, Texts, and Postcognitions (2008). The Zebras' Progress, his collected correspondence with Dick Higgins (housed at the Getty Research Institute), is forthcoming. Born in England, McCaffery emigrated to Canada in 1968 and moved to Buffalo, New York, in 2004, where he is now the David Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters at the University at Buffalo.

Gerald Janecek
 
Gerald Janecek
Gerald Janecek is professor of Russian at the University of Kentucky. He was born in New York in 1945 and received his PhD at the University of Michigan. He has published translations of Andrey Bely's Kotik Letaev (1971; rev. ed. 1999) and The First Encounter (1979; with Nina Berberova), and of numerous contemporary Russian poets such as Gennady Aigi, Dmitri Prigov, Vesevolod Nikolaevich Nekrasov, Lev Rubinstein, Vladimir Aristov, Aleksandr Ocheretyansky, Elizaveta Mnatsakanova, Rea Nikonova, and Rafael Levchin. Janecek is author of over fifty scholarly articles and several books on twentieth-century Russian avant-garde poetry, including The Look of Russian Literature (1984), ZAUM: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism (1996), and Sight and Sound Entwined: Studies of the New Russian Poetry (2000). Janecek is currently completing a book on Moscow conceptualism.