Art Talks: The Arcades Project in New York | Kenneth Goldsmith, David Kishik, Eric Jarosinski | Art and Literature Series Event

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Two writers, Kenneth Goldsmith and David Kishik, unbeknownst to each other, wrote books reimagining Walter Benjamin's unfinished masterpiece about Paris in the 19th century, The Arcades Project, as being completed in New York in the 20th. While Kishik wrote a history of Benjamin's "new" work, Goldsmith actually completed it. Their restylings of Benjamin's book are at once strikingly similar and radically different.

Please join the authors as they read excerpts from their books and discuss their approaches to their own work and to the work of Walter Benjamin. Their talk is moderated by Eric Jarosinski of NeinQuarterly. 

Capital is Kenneth Goldsmith’s thousand-page beautiful homage to New York City. Here is a kaleidoscopic assemblage and poetic history of New York: an unparalleled and original homage to the city, composed entirely of quotations. Drawn from a huge array of sources—histories, memoirs, newspaper articles, novels, government documents, emails—and organized into interpretive categories that reveal the philosophical architecture of the city, Capital is the ne plus ultra of books on the ultimate megalopolis. It is also a book of experimental literature that transposes Walter Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus of literary montage on the modern city, The Arcades Project, from nineteenth-century Paris to twentieth-century New York, bringing the streets and its inhabitants to life in categories such as “Sex,” “Central Park,” “Commodity,” “Loneliness,” “Gentrification,” “Advertising,” and “Mapplethorpe.” Capital is a book designed to fascinate and to fail—for can a megalopolis truly ever be captured in words? Can a history, no matter how extensive, ever be comprehensive? Each reading of this book, and of New York, is a unique and impossible project.

In The Manhattan Project, David Kishik dares to imagine a Walter Benjamin who did not commit suicide in 1940, but managed instead to escape the Nazis to begin a long, solitary life in New York. During his anonymous, posthumous existence, while he was haunting and haunted by his new city, Benjamin composed a sequel to his Arcades Project. Just as his incomplete masterpiece revolved around Paris, capital of the nineteenth century, this spectral text was dedicated to New York, capital of the twentieth. Kishik's sui generis work of experimental scholarship or fictional philosophy is thus presented as a study of a manuscript that was never written. The fictitious prolongation of Benjamin's life will raise more than one eyebrow, but the wit, breadth, and incisiveness of Kishik's own writing is bound to impress. Kishik reveals a world of secret affinities between New York City and Paris, the flâneur and the homeless person, the collector and the hoarder, the covered arcade and the bare street, but also between photography and graffiti, pragmatism and minimalism, Andy Warhol and Robert Moses, Hannah Arendt and Jane Jacobs. A critical celebration of New York City, The Manhattan Project reshapes our perception of urban life, and rethinks our very conception of modernity.

The writings of Walter Benjamin, the influential German Jewish philosopher and cultural critic, are the basis for a contemporary art exhibition at the Jewish Museum from March 17 through August 6, 2017. The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin examines themes in the author's magnum opus The Arcades Project via contemporary artworks, in media ranging from photography and video to sculpture and painting, and annotations by poet Kenneth Goldsmith.

Copies of Capital (Verso Books, 2015), The Manhattan Project (Stanford University Press, 2015), and Nein: A Manifesto (Grove Press, Black Cat, 2015) are available for purchase and signing at the end of the event.

Kenneth Goldsmith's writing has been called "some of the most exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry" by Publishers Weekly. Goldsmith is the author of fourteen books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb, and the editor of "I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews," which was the basis for an opera, "Trans-Warhol," that premiered in Geneva in March of 2007. An hour-long documentary on his work, "Sucking on Words" was first shown at the British Library in 2007. He teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive. He held The Anschutz Distinguished Fellow Professorship in American Studies at Princeton University for 2009-10 and received the Qwartz Electronic Music Award in Paris in 2009. In May 2011, he was invited to read at President Obama's "A Celebration of American Poetry" at The White House, where he also held a poetry workshop with First Lady Michelle Obama. In 2011, he co-edited, "Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing" and published two books of essays, "Wasting Time on the Internet" and "Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age," which won the 2011 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Award. Goldsmith participated in dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, Germany (2012). dOCUMENTA(13) published his "Letter To Bettina Funcke" as part of their "100 Notes - 100 Thoughts" book series. In 2013, he was named as the inaugural Poet Laureate of The Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

David Kishik's latest book, The Manhattan Project: A Theory of a City (Stanford University Press, 2015, paperback 2017), is a study of a text that was never written, a sequel of sorts to Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. His previous books are Wittgenstein's Form of Life (Continuum, 2008, paperback 2012) and The Power of Life: Agamben and the Coming Politics (Stanford UP, 2011). He is also the co-translator from Italian of Agamben's What Is an Apparatus? (Stanford UP, 2009) and Nudities (Stanford UP, 2010). He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College.

Eric Jarosinski received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 2005 after studies in Bonn, Frankfurt, Utrecht, Madison, and Berlin. His dissertation, “The Rhetoric of Transparency in the New Berlin: A Critical Genealogy,” is an interdisciplinary examination of one of the most dominant metaphors in the city’s current political, aesthetic, and rhetorical confrontation with its past: Transparenz. He is currently revising the project for book publication while co-editing a collection on reading and touch, The Hand of the Interpreter, and beginning a new project on the theory of the German radio play, past and present. Jarosinski’s research focuses on literature and thought of the Weimar period, the cultural politics of German fascism, and the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and its intersections with deconstruction and postmodernism. He has published on figures such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, and Vladimir Nabokov. He has also been active as a translator, primarily in the fields of psychoanalysis, Jewish studies, and German studies. He is the founding editor of Nein. Quarterly and his writing has also been featured in numerous publications, including the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the Wall Street Journal.

Conceived and organized by Arezoo Moseni, and in its sixth year, Art and Literature Series events bring forth pollinations across the literary and visual arts with readings and discussions by acclaimed artists, authors and poets.

The event is free and advanced registration is recommended. 

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