Publisher's Synopsis
Poetry. Art. Collaboration. Text mixed by John Bloomberg-Rissman, remixed by Lynn Behrendt. With 74 color collages by Behrendt. Poets Lynn Behrendt and John Bloomberg- Rissman seem to be Practicing Hauntology in a Cabinet of the solar plexus. The authors/artists have remixed snippets of text from a multitude of diverse sources: Timothy Martin, WB Keckler, Aimé Césaire, Ian Willms (just to name a few). Mina Loy, Phillip Lamantia, Donna Haraway, Samuel Delany, and Bruce Andrews meet amidst the dust of Breton and Soupault's Magnetic Fields as visualized by Charles Kaufman without any corporate controls.
In a cosmic, yet earthly co-creational web of interlaced language feeds, mixed by Bloomberg-Rissman, remixed by Behrendt, paired with Behrendt's unforgettable, many worlds, multihued, time-travelled collage works, the readerly consciousness is moved by multiplying destructive and ubertoxic situations in the 21st century debris. These ponds currently hold enough toxic waste to fill 2.2 million Olympic-sized swimming pools. Ecstatic multisourced language within the Untitled (Grotto with Cow Horn) and (a baobab trunk or a bombax buttress) under a boiling of loquacious birds and the kisses of meteorites offers palliative and ecstatic rest in a bathtub full of gravity and eucalyptus leaves. You won't be able to stop yourself from crying. And laughing. Feeling blue about our blue planet? Welcome to Pioneer City! Inquiries welcome.
The collage work of Lynn Behrendt is as instantly identifiable as that of Jess or of Joe Brainard--haunted landscapes, autopsied houses, birds & babies & the artist's own visage staring out. With her saturated palette & (winking) nod to Hudson Valley gothic, Behrendt offers an iconography poised midway between Jung & George Romero. I don't think a person dressed in flesh will ever seem nude to me again.--Ron Silliman
The allure in Bloomberg-Rissman's work, which has drawn me to it from the start, is his use of appropriative & conceptual techniques toward the exploration of real if unanticipated meaning--the saying, in other words, of that which is crying to be said. While his work is constructed almost entirely of words appropriated from others, this is done without any sacrfice of coherence or feeling or intelligence in a voice that remains united & 'personal' throughout--a testament to the communal nature of language & thought of which our individualities are a crucial if sometimes questioned part. In this he emerges today as a true master.--Jerome Rothenberg
...the self is various and the mind/heart has many stages, prosceniums, theaters and interweavings, so too the marvelous linguistic visual collaboration of Lynn Behrendt and John Bloomberg- Rissman. What weaves through all the words and images is being-in-the-world, alive and dead at the same time, moving objects by means of creation, as the hands of ghosts, luminosity, and shadows intercede and sometimes overcome the text, changing the collaboration from that of one between two gifed artists/writers to a larger work created by the pressures of being and time (no caps). In a world where the self is inflated and domination too often the medium and form, this democracy of spirit enlightens and opens the reader to another possibility: that art has many doors, all of which are suitable entries to the work. The words are recovered from meaning narrowly by the collages opposing them: naked decomposing humans and incomplete horses stand at a stone wall, whose door leads to darkness while 'Lenin on a bench beside a lake / disturbed / Adrenaline drenched / on a beach at Waikiki / carries a cane' as he wanders into the scene. What more could one want?--Maxine Chernoff
