D. Graham Burnett's Other Stuff and Event Archive
EVENT ARCHIVE
2012
Burnett contributed an essay (“In Lies Begin Responsibilities”) to the catalog of “More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness,” currently at SITE Santa Fe.
Marisa Jahn’s new book project is out, Pro+agonist—a study of the pains and pleasures of opposition. She has reprinted Burnett and Cornel West on the scary world of Melville's Confidence Man.
Listen to an interview Burnett did with Carla Nappi on The Sounding of the Whale here.
Burnett's stuff on dolphins and drugs and the mind recently came out in Japan, in the science magazine Kagaku.
On the 26th of May, Burnett participated in the Machete Group's "Dictionary of the Present" series at the ICA in Philadelphia. More on the series here and on the specific event here.
Burnett and friends ran a set of "Attention Labs" at the Emily Harvey Foundation in SoHo—workshop meetings in February, March, and April.
On April 21st, Burnett spoke at the Philadelphia Book Festival. A full program for the event is here.
On the 18th of April, Burnett (with Sal Randolph, Helen Mira, and a special disruptive guest) presented at the Sert Gallery of the Carpenter Center at Harvard University. Title of the talk (part of the BYO series for contemporary art): "The Order of the Third Bird: Further Research on the Fascicle of E." A practicum at the Sackler got things rolling. More here.
Burnett was at Labyrinth Books in Princeton on Wednesday, March 28, to read from his new book, The Sounding of the Whale. More info here.
On Monday, 12 March, Burnett did the MIT Colloquium in Science and Technologies Studies. The title is "History of Science: Why and Wherefore?" and the commentator is Gregg Mitman. Click here for more.
On March 11th, Burnett spoke at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. The subject? Don't want to shock you here... Whales! Click here for details.
On Thursday night, March 8th, Burnett joined Swedish artist Mats Bigert for a little end-time madness at the Spring Break show in NoLIta—part of the Armory Arts Week. Check out the doomsayers in the act:
Burnett did an hour on NPR's "On Point" with Tom Ashbrook on Monday, 13 February, talking about whales, whale science, and whale fantasy. To listen, go here.
On February 11th, Burnett joined Ed Eigen and Paulo Tavares to discuss "Hard and Soft Evidence" at "The Geologic Turn: Architecture's New Alliance," a symposium at the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. More here.
On Sunday the 29th of January, Burnett and Sina Najafi performed an apocalyptic soapbox reading from The Last Calendar at PS1’s winter open house. Details here.
On 28 January, at the Cabinet space in Brooklyn, 5-7 p.m., Burnett and friends celebrated the release of The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century, just out from Chicago. There was whale song, whale pics, whale talk, and … whale hors d'oeuvre (mock whale, that is, conjured by the culinary genius Kiel Borrman). Click here for the skinny on the party and an audio recording of the evening’s talk. Check out the excessively generous recent reviews: NYT, FT, Telegraph, and WSJ! The event was picked up by the bloggers at Smithsonian—read more here.
On 25 January, Burnett and Sal Randolph donned their "ethereal chapeaux" to present "The Order of the Third Bird: Documents and Considerations" at the Bard Graduate Center. More info here. Watch a video of the presentation here:
On the 12th and 13th of January Burnett participated in an NEH-sponsored charette organized around plans for the 38th voyage of the Charles W. Morgan. The last nineteenth-century wooden whaleship will set sail again in 2014, as part of an artistic, historical, and scientific carnival centered on the sea. Click here for more.
2011
On Friday the 9th of December, Burnett presented the final installment of the “Hark, the White Whale” series at the Providence Athenaeum. The event launched the publication of Burnett’s new book, The Sounding of The Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century, which is just hitting bookshelves in time for X-Mas (and at 815 pages, it hits with a thud…).
Burnett and Jeff Dolven were at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia on Thursday, November 17, to give a lunchtime lecture entitled, "Critique and Its Discontents: Notes toward a Post-Critical (?) Pedagogy." More on the Society of Fellows here.
On November 12th, Burnett keynoted "Institutionalizing Interdisciplinarity" at Columbia University, sponsored by the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. More info here.
Check out this essay (from Lapham's Quarterly): Burnett on Hayden White, Heraclitus, Guatemala, Hegel, and a haircut.
Burnett and collaborator Sal Randolph showed work at the “Utopia” exhibition at CS13 in Cincinnati (through October 15). The editorial sub-committee of the Order of the Third Bird recently issued a pair of letters which appear to be from 1848, and published them as “The Clermont Connection: Evidences Bearing on Associationist Associations of the Order at Midcentury (The Robinson/Fairwright Correspondence).” Copies of the offprint were given away freely in the gallery, where one of the original texts is on display. For more on the exhibition, click here.
On Saturday, November 5, at BAM, Burnett will moderate “Antarctic Voyage,” a panel related the concurrent production 69°S by the artist group Phantom Limb. The panel features Jessica Grindstaff and Erik Sanko, Phantom Limb’s co–artistic directors, and Daniel P. Schrag, professor of geology and environmental science at Harvard University. For more on the event, see here.
Burnett presented on the "Laboratories of Risk" at the European Culture Congress in Wrocław, Poland, on the 10th of September. More on the whole event here.
Burnett and friends kicked off the 2011 Warhol Foundation “Arts Writers Convening” with a performance/practice of “The Order of the Third Bird” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the evening of Thursday, August 4. For more, see here.
On Wednesday, July 27, Burnett joined McKenzie Wark and Ali Dur at Cabinet in Brooklyn for a discussion of Wark’s new book on the Situationists, The Beach beneath the Street. For more, see here.
Burnett and a group of his collaborators and friends were in residency at Mildred’s Lane for the week of July 11–17, presenting on “The Order of the Third Bird,” a cult-like group of art-oriented theorists-practitioners with a mysterious history. For more, see here.
Burnett participated in the "Festival of Ideas for the New City" that took place in NYC, May 4–8. He worked a booth (Saturday, May 7, 5–7 pm) at "The University on the Bowery," a pedagogical street project put together by Cabinet magazine and the New Museum.
On the 6th of May, Burnett and the artist Lisa Young screened a video collaboration at a joint session of the Philadelphia Cinema and Media Seminar and the Philadelphia Area Center for the History of Science. Click here for more info.
Burnett had a hand in organizing "Curiosity and Method," a symposium on April 9 celebrating ten years of publication of Cabinet magazine. The all-day event took place at Princeton and featured a diverse group of writers and thinkers on some keywords that have been important in framing the Cabinet project. For more information, see here. Click here for a PDF of the poster for the symposium.
On Friday, March 18, Burnett hosted "Clipping, Copying, and Thinking," a panel and launch event for A Little Common Place Book. Historian Ann Blair and poet Kenneth Goldsmith joined him for a ranging conversation on textual practices and the life of the mind. For more information, click here.
Does a poem have parts? Organs? Systems? How do they fit together? And can they be teased apart? On Friday, March 11, seeking to answer these questions, Burnett and Jeff Dolven hosted "William Carlos Williams: Anatomy of a Poem," the latest installment of Cabinet's Poetry Lab series. For more information, click here. See a write-up on the New Yorker's blog Book Bench here.
Burnett presented (with J. Dolven) a "Dream Talk" in San Francisco on the 3rd of March. The venue? "After Dark at the Exploratorium." The event was part of "Art as a Way of Knowing"—a two-day symposium on knowledge and creativity. Click here for more.
On the 12th of February, in Toronto, Burnett was in conversation with David Gissen at the symposium "Architecture Is All Over" at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. Sponsored by Work Books and OCAD. Click here for a PDF of the program.
Burnett and David Kaiser (MIT) co-hosted this year's Princeton Workshop in the History of Science. The subject was the relationship between science and the counter-culture, 1955–1975. Feburary 4–5, at Princeton; pre-circulated papers. Click here for more information. Click here for a PDF of the poster for the workshop.
On Thursday the 27th of January Burnett hosted "Art, Truth, Lies: The Pleasures and Perils of Deception," a panel discussion in the NYPL "Live!" Series. Guests included Glenn Lowry and Carrie Lambert-Beatty. Click here for more information. See a write-up in Artforum online here. Watch a video of the discussion here.
2010
Burnett contributed to The New City Reader, part of the exhibition "The Last Newspaper" that ran at the New Museum in Lower Manhattan during Fall and Winter 2010/11. The NCR is a project that re-conceived the newspaper as a public space. It was part of a performance-based editorial residency running concurrently with the show on contemporary art and paper-based news media. Burnett did a piece on "Outsider Science" for the issue edited by David Benjamin and Livia Corona.
Burnett and fellow Cabinet editor Christopher Turner curated "The Slice: Cutting to See," an exhibition that, moving across historical moments and disparate fields, examined the peculiar traditions that link the keen eye to the sharp blade. Everything you ever wanted to know about the microtome. The exhibition ran from Friday, November 19, through Wednesday, December 15, 2010, at the Architectural Association School of Architecture Gallery in London. See reviews of the exhibition in BMJ and the Independent. Watch a video walk-through of the exhibition below.
"The Slice: Cutting to See" Walk-Through. Video by Luke Currall. Thanks to Vanessa Norwood and the AA School.
Burnett wrote the introduction to Cabinet Books' recently published A Little Common Place Book. Part pocket-sized filing cabinet, part indexing guide, this hardcover notebook includes an essay on the art of commonplacing as practiced by John Locke and 144 blank pages for collecting your thoughts. For images or to purchase, go here.
Burnett has an essay in the catalog of the 2010 Mark Dion show at the Oakland Museum. Click here for more information about the show, and here for a link to the book, The Marvelous Museum: Orphans, Curiosities & Treasures, with contributions from Lawrence Weschler, Rebecca Solnit, and others.
In 2009, Burnett and a friend began working on a conceptual project involving chess and the novel. For a taste, click here to read an experimental essay in "ludic criticism"; or click here to go right to the first fruit of the collaboration, an online computer program that lets you pit one novel against another in a chess match. The US Chess Federation recently ran a story about this project—click here to check it out.
Burnett and video artist Lisa Young teamed up in 2010 on a multimedia project that premiered as part of "Seeing from Above," a conference at the Wellcome Collection, London. Part éloge, part montage, the collaborative piece, "Free Fall: The Life and Times of Bud 'Crosshairs' MacGinitie," is an experiment in biographical sky-diving.In celebration of 10/10/10, on Wednesday October 6, 2010, Burnett hosted a discussion and screening of Charles and Ray Eames's short film Powers of Ten. The screening took place in Elebash Recital Hall at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue in New York, at 7 pm. For more information, click here.
Burnett had a hand in organizing a show that opened on March 30, 2010: "An Ordinall of Alchimy," at the Cabinet Space in Brooklyn. It's about collecting, art, money, and the internet. After Cabinet, it moved on to the Slought Foundation in Philly, where was on view from April 30 until June 14. Click here for more on the project from Cabinet and here for more on its stay at the Slought Foundation.
On June 8, 2010, Burnett convened a discussion between Lawrence Weschler and Lena Herzog at the NYPL-Live series. The occasion: Herzog’s new show (at the ICP until September 12)—Burnett did an essay for the catalog, Lost Souls.
On the 7th of June, 2010, Burnett showed an installation version of NovelChess at WhiteBox on Broome Street. Music by Les Chauds Lapins! Here's the invite.
On Thursday, the 27th of May, 2010, Burnett chaired a post-performance discussion of Cynthia Hopkins' The Truth: A Tragedy at the Soho Rep Theater in Manhattan. Dave Herman was there from the City Reliquary Museum.
“Military Dreams and the Deep-Sea Mind.” On May 15, 2010, at 6 pm, at the Cabinet Space, Burnett screened some old Navy propaganda films concerning its Marine Mammal Program; he was in discussion with Laurel Braitman afterwards. More here.
On Saturday the 8th of May, 2010, at 3 pm, Burnett read “Two Bubbles, and a Third” at Art in General, and talked with Italian artists Hilario Isola and Matteo Norzi about their new project, Liquid Door, realized in conjunction with the New York Aquarium. For more, click here.
On the 5th of May, 2010, at the Natural History Museum in NYC, there was a screening of Ric Burns' new documentary on American whaling: Into the Deep. Burnett is one of the talking heads in the film, and he also served on the board of advisers for the project, which was funded by the NEH and WGBH Boston, where it broadcast on May 10. More here.
On Sunday, April 11, 2010, at the Cabinet Space in Brooklyn, Burnett joined in conversation the distinguished Swiss critic and historian of neuroscience Michael Hagner, who screened Pudovkin's creepy 1926 documentary The Mechanics of the Brain. This event was been supported in part by the Mellon Foundation. Click here for more.
Burnett wrote a catalog essay for a gallery show that ran from January 15 to April 5, 2010, at the Drawing Center, in Soho. The show, curated by Nina Katchadourian, was entitled "Sea Marks," and it featured three contemporary artists whose work deals with the ocean.
2009
For PERFORMA 2009, Burnett contributed to "Speed Reading," an event that featured texts on speed read from treadmills: that's him on the right, performing a suite of historical fragments on the nineteenth-century reception of the Velocipede.
OTHER STUFF
Burnett has a longstanding interest in poetry, and he and Jeff Dolven host the semi-regular “Poetry Lab” at the Cabinet Space in Brooklyn. See here for stuff about the Séance with James Merrill; and here for the “Idea of Order on the Gowanus Canal.” A Sappho fan? Look here to see what happened when Anne Carson helped Cabinet shatter a set of terra cotta plates inscribed with Sapphic fragments. Yes, at the Whitman evening there was a naked guy with a prosthetic vagina. Back in the spring of 2003, in conjunction with the Humanities Council, Burnett and Dolven organized a much less crazy symposium on language and philosophy, entitled “Poetry and Knowledge.”
And he has published some work in this area, including a study of Wallace Stevens (in Southerly) that ends with a Stevensian pastiche/palinode, and an essay about poetry and prayer in the July/August 2008 issue of American Poetry Review. Burnett also has a set of prose poems in the "Underground" issue of Cabinet. Click below to see PDF of this project.
Four Leaves from a Commonplace Book
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