The Brooklyn Rail Reviews The Poetics, a Collaborative Project by Lucy Ives and Matthew Connors

In the July-August issue of the Brooklyn Rail, Chris Campanioni reviews Lucy Ives and artist Matthew Connors's collaborative publication, The Poetics (Image Text Ithaca Press, 2019). The organizing principle, "poetics as the continuation of poetry by other means," "produces a break that is capable of altering our very relationship to space: a mobility predicated on the breakdown of the lines separating the logic of life and the logic of its recording." More about this "strange project," as the publisher puts it:

In its examination into “the way in which reading is distributed in our present,” The Poetics is most inspiring when the text attempts to perform its own theoretical inquiries. Connors’s photographs perform here as a series of high-resolution feedback, a visual rejoinder to the prose that pushes the analysis by testing it out. These 130 images, each one blown up at a consistent ratio to fill three-quarters of the page (the remaining space: a bar of white, which serves as both caption and scroll-stroke), re-present the materials of capitalism’s waste, a zoomed-in record (restaurant receipts, parking meter tickets, used napkins) of spending and use, or alternatively, of future services to be rendered (a Sichuan restaurant ad, an oil change appointment): propped up against the corner of a white wall (a bathtub? a sink?) to be reconsidered, and at times—as when a two-page receipt is unfurled to resemble a floating bowtie—defamiliarized. In the narrative’s task of accounting for time, and its residue, readers are also tasked with asking themselves when—or how—does a thing aspire to the status of object. Within our sensorium of junkspace, Connors’s magic trick is to redeploy the artifactual aesthetic of the museum alongside the melodramatic minimalism and self-conscious staging of Instagram while subverting the anesthesia prevalent in both arenas.

Indeed, if The Poetics is about loss and the trauma of the unrecoverable, it is also about what one finds through collaboration and a certain form of surrender, as when Connors invites Ives to remove everything not bolted down to his car; what does The Poetics find if not the redemptive desire, that through citing and reciting loss...

Find the full review at the Brooklyn Rail.