How does materiality matter to you?
How is what matters made material?

Wednesday | May 9, 2012 | 7:00 p.m.

MAK Center for Art & Architecture at the Schindler House
835 N. Kings Road
West Hollywood, CA 90069

Featuring Michael du Plessis, Brian Teare, and Lincoln Tobier. Moderated by Vanessa Place.

$7 General; Free for Friends of the MAK Center and Members of Les Figues Press with RSVP(office[at]makcenter.org).

Q.E.D. is a short series of long conversations on queer art and literature. The series includes three events over the course of three months (April 11, May 9 & June 13, 2012); each evening features a writer, an artist and a critic in a conversation about contemporary issues and conditions of queer art and literature. The series is hosted and moderated by Les Figues Press Co-Director Vanessa Place, and will be recorded and made available online. The program is curated by Les Figues Press and supported through a Cultural Resource Development Grant from the City of West Hollywood.

Q.E.D. takes its name from a novel by Gertrude Stein; Q.E.D. (Quod Erat Demonstrandum, or Things as They Are) was one of the earliest coming stories, written in 1903 though not published until 1950, after Stein’s death.
About the Participants

Michael du Plessis teaches Comparative Literature and English at the University of Southern California, where he is also completing a masters degree in Professional Writing. His novel, The Memoirs of JonBenet by Kathy Acker, is forthcoming from Les Figues Press. He has written about a wide variety of subjects, from Goth culture to the French fin-de-siècle and has also performed, amongst other venues, at Highways and at the Schindler House.

A former National Endowment for the Arts fellow, Brian Teare is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. He is the author of The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, the Lambda-award winning Pleasure, and Companion Grasses, forthcoming from Omnidawn in 2013. An Assistant Professor at Temple University, he lives in Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

Lincoln Tobier’s projects embrace a variety of media including sculpture, photography, painting, video, radio, and theater. Much of his work explores the limitations of the public sphere and communication. His recent play The Orchestra Pit Theory By Roger Ailes has been presented in Los Angeles and Leipzig and will be staged in London this summer. He has had solo exhibitions at Martos Gallery in New York, Daniel Hug Gallery in Los Angeles, the Pat Hearn Gallery in New York, Galerie Maisonneuve in Paris, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others, and been included in group exhibitions at such institutions as MoCA, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig, the Venice Biennale; the MAK Center Los Angeles.

Of Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman’s Notes on Conceptualisms, Mary Kelly said, “I learned more about the impact of conceptualism on artists and writers than I had from reading so-called canonical works on the subject.” Kenneth Goldsmith said Vanessa Place’s work was “arguably the most challenging, complex and controversial literature being written today.” Rae Armantrout said, “Vanessa Place is writing terminal poetry.” Bebrowed’s Blog said Vanessa Place is “the scariest poet on the planet.” Anonymous on Twitter said, “Vanessa Place killed poetry.”