Conversation with Simon Leung and Yvonne Rainer

Tuesday 3/23

Poe after Smithson after Rainer
Tuesday, March 23; 6:00-8:00pm
Film screening, followed by conversation with
Simon Leung and Yvonne Rainer

In 2007 Simon Leung completed POE, an extended video meditation on the figure of Edgar Allan Poe and its relevance to contemporary art and political life. Initially prompted by the position Edgar Allan Poe occupies in literary and theoretical discourses (e.g. Baudelaire, Lacan, Derrida), and in the writings of Robert Smithson, who contended that "Poe's Narrative of A. Gordon Pym seemed to (him) to be excellent art criticism and prototype of rigorous 'non-site' investigations," Leung undertook a three-part diegetic essay on Poe in the form of a single channel 65 minute video installation.

In the video, Leung submits aspects of the writer and his work to a digressional rethinking of the meaning of "Poe": tracing Poe through two former residences he occupied in New York (the Poe Cottage and the simulacral facade of the Poe House) by eliciting the help of choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer (whom Robert Smithson cites in the text where he theorizes the non-site through Pym) to perform as the writer in situ at both sites; sending Poe to Poland (Poe-land, the land of Poe) to further explore Po-e-tic artifice and cliches via forging a composite narrative culled from the setting and tone several of his gothic tales (with the help of writer Warren Niesluchowski); visiting with Gregory Poe, a distant relative, shortly before his death; and working with his students to retell the adventure tale of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as a story of the current American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, facilitated by a collapse of two modalities of special effects--the "green zone" in Bagdad and the green screen in video production. Bordering on theory and fiction, criticism and performance, POE takes up Robert Smithson's challenge for a rigorous investigation of the "site/non-site" dialectic, and in doing so, makes an intervention in much of contemporary art's referential or art-historically thematic receptions of site-specificity.