Books by Renee Gladman
Agnes Denes: Absolutes and Intermediates
by Klaus Ottmann, Dan Mills, Lynn Gamwell, Timothy Morton, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Emma Enderby, Agnes Denes, Giampaolo Bianconi, Renee Gladman, Caroline Jones, Lucy R. Lippard
"Agnes Denes, the queen of land art, made one of New York’s greatest public art projects ever in 1982. Now, the world might be catching up with her." –Karrie Jacobs, New York Times
Agnes Denes: Absolutes and Intermediates accompanies the largest exhibition of the artist’s work in New York to date, held at The Shed in fall 2019 as part of the arts space’s opening season. Presenting more than 130 works, this comprehensive publication, presented in an embossed slipcase, spans the 50-year career of the path-breaking artist dubbed “the queen of land art” by the New York Times, famed for her iconic Wheatfield―A Confrontation (1982), for which she planted a two-acre wheatfield in Lower Manhattan on the Battery Park Landfill, in the shadow of the then recently erected Twin Towers.
A major undertaking, this superb catalog includes a comprehensive text by the exhibition’s curator, Emma Enderby, an interview with Denes by Hans Ulrich Obrist, essays by prominent scholars and curators including Caroline A. Jones, Lucy R. Lippard and Timothy Morton that examine Denes’ multifaceted practice in new ways, writings by the artist and reflections by curators who have worked with Denes over the course of her career. New works by Denes commissioned by The Shed for the exhibition are presented in a special insert.
Budapest-born, New York–based artist Agnes Denes (born 1931) rose to international attention in the 1960s and 1970s as a leading figure in conceptual, environmental and ecological art. A pioneer of several art genres, she has created work in many mediums, utilizing various disciplines―such as science, philosophy, linguistics, ecology and psychology―to analyze, document and ultimately aid humanity.
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To After That (TOAF)
A warm-spirited elegy to an abandoned work, brilliantly comic and wryly contemplative, by one of the great artist-investigators of our time.
Originally published in 2008 in the groundbreaking Atelos series, To After That (TOAF) introduced a new kind of writing—somewhere between criticism and memoir and philosophy—that Renee Gladman has continued to explore in books like Calamities and My Lesbian Novel.
TOAF is a recuperative song, an effort to give space and life to an abandoned project, but it is also, itself, a beautiful meditation on process and distance and duration, and a reminder that time is the subject of any writing.
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To After That (TOAF)
Poetry. Fiction. A true account of a fictional work. Renee Gladman is the author of four previous books, most recently NEWCOMER CAN'T SWIM, prose installations published by Kelsey St. Press in 2007. Gladman is editor and publisher of Leon Works, an independent press for experimental prose and other thought projects based in the sentence, and teaches fiction in the Program in Literary Arts at Brown University. She lives in Jamaica Plain.
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My Lesbian Novel
The latest in writer and visual artist Renee Gladman’s ever-expanding body of imaginative investigation is a sui generis novel of queerness and art-making, philosophy and sex.
The narrator of My Lesbian Novel is Renee Gladman, an artist and writer who has produced the same acclaimed body of experimental art and prose as real-life Renee Gladman, and who is now being interviewed by an unnamed interlocutor about a project in process, a seeming departure from her other works, a lesbian romance.
Between reflections on art making and on the genre of lesbian romance—“though aspects of the formula drive me crazy . . . people who write these stories understand how beautiful women are”—a romance novel of her own takes shape on the page, written alongside the interview, which sometimes skips whole years between questions, so that time and aging become part of the process.
The result is a beautifully orchestrated dialogue between reflection and desire, or clarity and confusion, between the pleasures of form and the pleasures of freedom in the unspooling of sentences over time.
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MORELIA
Fiction. "How does Renee Gladman manage to make language different from itself? How does she make space different from itself too? In this short novel there is an expansive mystery, but I don't think it exists to be solved. There is 'Bze,' but there is also fried fish. There is a city with structures in it that multiply or are 'half-articulated,' where climate dictates how the city's inhabitants move. MORELIA is exquisite. And Gladman is, easily, one of the most intriguing and important writers of our time."--Amina Cain
"I read this book as a gift to fiction writers. It maps my reality as a person whose daily experience is made simultaneously by the immediately sensory, the aftermath of dream, and the constant sense of narrative at work. MORELIA is an immaculately constructed, entirely fictive landscape, a story of the adventure of detection in its every aspect. No one writes prose like Renee Gladman."--Lucy Corin
"Strange and brilliant, a mystery, an adventure, a mad escape: this story is all Gladman, shimmers with Gladman, sings. Every page is a song."--Deb Olin Unferth
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Ben Rivers: Ways of Worldmaking
by Ed Halter, Renee Gladman, Melissa Gronlund, Andrea Pickard
Ways of Worldmaking is the first comprehensive monograph on British experimental filmmaker Ben Rivers (born 1972). Often following people who have in some way separated themselves from society, the raw film footage provides Rivers with a starting point for creating oblique narratives imagining alternative existences in marginal worlds.
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Calamities
WINNER of the 2017 Firecracker Award for Nonfiction from CLMP
A collection of linked essays concerned with the life and mind of the writer by one of the most original voices in contemporary literature. Each essay takes a day as its point of inquiry, observing the body as it moves through time, architecture, and space, gradually demanding a new logic and level of consciousness from the narrator and reader.
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Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge
“In Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, it’s the sentence that is alive and that is also a kind of architecture or landscape.” —Amina Cain
“Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge is the third volume of Renee Gladman's magnificent, melancholy series about the city-state of Ravicka, or about the architectures of its absence. It is tempting to read the Ravickian books as an extended allegory—of architecture itself, perhaps, except that architecture is already half-allegorical, its every element raised to prefigure whatever meanings can make their way to them. If any can. In Ravicka, meanings—indeed most contact of any kind—remain in abeyance, building, in absentia, the constitutive negative spaces of the narrative. There is a plot; it lays out zones of sheer ambience. Experiences, of which there are many, unfold as a redolent lingering in the structures of immateriality, the radical realities of the insubstantial. Gladman is a philosopher of architecture, though not that of buildings. Rather, she thinks (and writes) the drifts, partitions, and immobilities of identity, affect, communication, the very possibility of being human. Profound, compelling—haunting, even—the story of Ravicka is astonishingly ours.” (Lyn Hejinian)
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The Ravickians (Dorothy, a Publishing Project)
The second volume of Gladman's acclaimed Ravicka trilogy continues the author's profound and fantastical meditation on translation, architecture, and the ephemeral.
The Ravickians narrates the day-long odyssey of Luswage Amini, the Great Ravickian Novelist, who journeys through the city to attend the reading of an old friend. Where the earlier volume, Event Factory, explores Ravicka from the outside, via a visitor's attempt to understand and interpret that city's irreducible strangeness, The Ravickians faces the problem of translation from the perspective of an insider who struggles, throughout her account, to make plain the political and personal crises of Ravickian life that she knows to be untranslatable.
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Prose Architectures
"Renee Gladman has always struck me as being a dreamershe writes that way and the dreaming seems to construct the architecture of the world unfolding before our reading eyes."
Eileen Myles
A book of ink drawings that regards language as an exposed nervous system, uncovering the moment whereby architecture emerges out of prose, the sentence becomes a drawing, and the act of writing narrative can be examined from bodily movements. Gladman beautifully uses the drawings as an extension of her writing process, as a way to free language from constraint. Afterword by Fred Moten.
Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with lines, crossings, thresholds, geographies, and syntaxes as they play out in the interstices of poetry and prose. She is the author of ten published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, and Calamities, a collection of linked essays on writing and experience. She lives in New England with poet-ceremonialist, Danielle Vogel.
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Newcomer Can't Swim
Written as seven loosely connected pieces, Renee Gladman's NEWCOMER CAN'T SWIM blurs boundaries between poetry and prose. In languages of elegy and splintered consciousness, the book recreates life for the twenty-first century flø¢neur in urban America amid a confusion of aims, identities and street life of people connected to ipods downloaded with personalized mixes and sets. In a contemporary world of signs that crisscross a global culture, how can one maintain a firm existence and make human connections? Gladman posits a fluid self and parallel existence attuned to being lost. Quote: The / body moves away from living, from the flesh and bone of life, / and becomes regions. I take on / water. I look outward." A tension holds all frequencies together, keeping the contradiction of a life that animates the "I" of this book at the same time that it goes on without her.
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Event Factory
“More Kafka than Kafka, Renee Gladman’s achievement ranks alongside many of Borges’ in its creation of a fantastical landscape with deep psychological impact.” —Jeff VanderMeer
A “linguist-traveler” arrives by plane to Ravicka, a city of yellow air in which an undefined crisis is causing the inhabitants to flee. Although fluent in the native language, she quickly finds herself on the outside of every experience. Things happen to her, events transpire, but it is as if the city itself, the performance of life there, eludes her. Setting out to uncover the source of the city’s erosion, she is beset by this other crisis—an ontological crisis—as she struggles to retain a sense of what is happening.
Event Factory is the first in a series of novels (also available are the second, The Ravickians; the third, Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge; and the fourth, Houses of Ravicka) that Renee Gladman is writing about the invented city-state of Ravicka, a foreign “other” place fraught with the crises of American urban experience, not least the fundamental problem of how to move through the world at all.
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