The Departments of Art; Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies; and English invite you join us for "Pathetic Happening with Eileen Myles and A.L. Steiner"!
Pathetic Happening is a read and performed version of the entirety of Pathetic Literature (ed. Myles, Grove Press, 2023), a nearly 700-page collection of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays from all over the world, and from all eras. The happening, conceived and curated by Myles and Tom Cole alongside ten guest curators and documented by Steiner and Roberto Montes, filled the entirety of Manhattan’s St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery with readings and performances in May 2023.
While Eileen Myles and A.L. Steiner are in Columbus for a brief residency at the Wexner Center for the Arts, we hope you’ll join as they discuss their profoundly collaborative, interdisciplinary, and highly queer process of working together as a visual artist and a writer in the ongoing process of further transforming Pathetic Happening into a discrete work.
Eileen Myles (b. 1949, they/them) is a poet, novelist and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has has made them one of the most recognized writers of their generation. Pathetic Literature, which they edited, came out in Fall of 22. Their newest collection of poems, a “Working Life”, is out now. Their fiction includes Chelsea Girls (1994) which just won France’s Inrockuptibles Prize for best foreign novel, Cool for You (2000), Inferno (a poet’s novel) (2010) and Afterglow (2017). Writing on art was gathered in the volume The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009). Books of poetry include Evolution (2018) and I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014. Their super-8 road film “The Trip” is on YouTube. They live in New York & in Marfa, TX.
A.L. Steiner utilizes constructions of photography, video, installation, collage, performance, writing and curatorial work as seductive tropes channeled through the sensibility of a skeptical queer ecofeminist androgyne. Steiner is co-curator of Ridykeulous, co-founder of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), and a serial collaborator. She is based in New York and is Faculty at Yale University's School of Art. Her works are featured in permanent collections such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Brandhorst Collection, Centre Pompidou, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Marieluise Hessel Collection of Contemporary Art at CCS Bard College, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Julia Stoschek Collection and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Steiner is recipient of awards such as the Art Matters Foundation Grant, Tiffany Foundation Award, The American Academy in Berlin Prize, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, Presidential Visiting Fellowship in Visual Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work is represented by Deborah Schamoni.