Quinn Latimer and Paolo Thorsen-Nagel, Some City, 2014 HD Video, colour, 8 min
In the wake of rampant, market-led nonsense, art is rekindling its fascination with poetry. Recently, galleries such as BHQFU in New York, David Roberts Foundation in London and SALTS in Basel have been throwing poetry events, and art platforms such as Rhizome and 11:11 have been hosting online projects dedicated to verse. Part of the reason for this increase of interest in poesie is due to the revival of performance art as well as the influence of the internet. The web is not only making it easier for poets to distribute their work, but also changing they way we use words and altering poetry’s material – our language. Quinn Latimer is one of the five poets the art world is listening to.
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An American in Basel, Quinn Latimer is an art critic and poet. It is her awareness of the context of the art world that makes her poetic work so progressive. She has written poetry about history, art and artists such as Sarah Lucas as well as subjects including loss, desire and landscape. One formative aspect of her work is the relationship between language and technology. “I’m interested in how words can be formed by technology, and how it transforms how we speak and write and think and imagine our world in the process,” she says. “I’m also fascinated by how certain words can become codes for other things, like empty vessels or signifiers that suggest other meanings. When we use the words “internet” and “technology,” it is often simply shorthand for a discussion about the present. These words signify a kind of contemporaneity because today everything is based around technology. Sometimes I wonder if the art world’s investment in tech is a way to distract itself from the dark abstractions and inviolate injustice of the existing world order.”
Although she won the 2010 American Poetry Journal Book Prize, her writing is largely presented within an art context and she is currently in Athens working on a series of publications for documenta 14, a collection of essays and poems and hybrid texts called “Anthology” and forthcoming collaborative performance projects with Pedro Barateiro at REDCAT in LA, and Megan Rooney at State of Concept in Athens.
“Performance changed how I wrote,” she says. “I’ve always been interested in rhyme and rhythm and the strange spells of syntax, but I suddenly became more interested in the serial ecstasies of the refrain and cinematic narrative structures. It made me think that an artist or artwork can be a kind of form, just like a sonnet or a sestina. You can write through them.”
Text: Francesca Gavin
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