Boycott

by Vanessa Place

Vanessa Place’s arresting poetic imagination always makes it genuinely New! This, her latest “Book of Surprises” will make you laugh, weep, nod in agreement (or disbelief), but, most of all, it will make you THINK. —Marjorie Perloff

As if one of Barnett Newman’s zip paintings had been vandalized, cut open along the vertical run of the canvas, Vanessa Place’s Boycott Projects (2013) is a work of art rendered through mutilation. A literal slit, an invitation to enter, serves as cover art for this collection of canonical feminist texts. But Place has redacted other evidence of the feminine, replacing all feminine pronouns and gendered terms with their masculine equivalents. What is remaindered is damaged, like the work's cover, a violence made visible through excision. —Andrea Andersson [Wall text for Boycott]

In 1971, American conceptual artist Lee Lozano began her Boycott Piece, refusing to speak to women as a protest against patriarchy; in 1975, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan stated, “La femme n’existe pas” to note the failure of the symbolic order. Vanessa Place's Boycott Project (of which Boycott is part) takes iconic feminist texts and eliminates all reference to women and that which is exclusively female. For only through the sex that is one can one fully grasp the truth that one is not born, but rather becomes, one—l’on qui ne s’existe pas.

[excerpt]

I shall speak about men’s writing: about what it will do. Man must write his self: must write about men and bring men to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies—for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Man must put himself into the text—as into the world and into history—by his own movement.

…I write this as a man, toward men.

120 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2013

About the author

Vanessa Place is a writer, a lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues Press. She is author of Dies: A Sentence (Les Figues Press, 2006), La Medusa (Fiction Collective 2, 2008), and Notes on Conceptualisms, co-authored with Robert Fitterman (Ugly Duckling Press, 2009). Her nonfiction book, The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and Law is forthcoming from Other Press/Random House. Information As Material will be publishing her trilogy: Statement of Facts, Statement of the Case, and Argument. Statement of Facts will also be published in France by éditions è®e, as Exposé des Faits. Place is described by critic Terry Castle as “an elegant vessel for experimental American writing of an extraordinarily assured and ingenious sort.”

Author Interviews:

--http://avantwomenwriters.blogspot.com...

--http://www.joshmaday.com/2009/04/blak...

Reviews

[Nate D]

Perhaps more artifact than book, as Place suggests by setting up the back of the slip-case like a card identifying an artwork on a museum wall. A bizarre, fascinating one at that, excising all reference to the female from excerpts of classic feminist manifestos from Cyborg to S.C.U.M. A true boycott, then, to conceptual effect, familiar yet jarring. Would anyone put something like this out other than Ugly Duckling? A recent highlight of the dollar racks at the Strand.

[⏺ · Rating 5 out of 5]

The substitutions made in this book create some effects:

• First, some mild or logical nonsense. Sentences like "The masculine/masculine binary" or "both men and men" etc., but also much bigger short circuits, for example in the SCUM Manifesto, where substitutions were made in the first text; the result is absurd: "males as well as males think men are men and men are men." This text in particular becomes a satire of a satire.
• The text becomes exquisitely queer too: it becomes full of homoerotic undertones, like in the poems in The Stereotype (Ontic volume), where we read "My master's hair were gold, / And in his lock my heart I fold" or "His cheeks like apples which the sun hath rudded, / His lips like cherries charming men to bite, / His breast like a bowl of cream uncrudded..."
• But the most important thing is that this book makes you think. How come some of the sentences look so odd with a man as a subject, but wouldn't look so with a female one? Reading that a man finds it hard to have the same job opportunities with a house/son to attend is strange, but is it right that is should be strange? (Spoiler alert: no).

The texts Vanessa Place appropriated have a great range: aforementioned Solanas, Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, Cixous, de Beauvoir... Anyway, Marjorie Perloff said: "This [book] will make you laugh, weep, nod in agreement (or disbelief), but, most of all, it will make you THINK." And she's right (no, I didn't weep, but that's the exception).

(And, by the way, the physical product itself is gorgeous: thanks UDP!)

[in8 · Rating 2 out of 5]

engaged w/ it here: http://www.5cense.com/14/393.htm