Critic, scoundrel, artist Felix Bernstein, all of 22 years old, is skewered, roasted, and bloodied on the fragile evening that launches his debut book, Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry into the art and poetry world that it viciously deconstructs. The horrific festival finds Cecilia Corrigan, Trisha Low, Merrie Cherry, and Adam Fitzgerald, conspiring to bind and gag skinny little Felix and proceeding to read him for filth. Then we’ll all cool off with a DJ set by fashion icon Brian Whatever of Whatever 21. Hosted by Alex Fleming, with music by Cammisa Buerhaus. Books dispensed by hunk Rify Royalty. Pre-show jams by James Hoff.
Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry is an aggravated survey of contemporary culture; compounded by compulsive archaeological digging in to the relics and ruins of Language poetry, Conceptual poetry, and his own familiar familial corpus. Bernstein shows how millennial postpostmodernism (Gaga feminism, Alt lit, New Sincerity, Queer Theory, Post-Conceptual poetry, Speculative Realism, Metamodernism, Post-Internet Art) has brought a decline in incisive/dialectical criticality, an overemphasis on slapdash viral social media stars, and a hypermediation of affect. Repressing their latent (modernist) structuralism and (postmodernist) irony, young millennials claim to forge an Ur-romantic turn to the sheer materiality of the great outdoors—where authorial singularity & hierarchical distinction allegedly melt away into an ecologically abundant queer utopia—but Bernstein is there to spoil the potlatch.
– Insert Blanc Press
“It seems unfair that Felix Bernstein should both be born into the position of heir to a famous poetry surname and be something of a genius—should such a slim boy be burdened with both? It’s enough to make one flap one’s humid veil like a frog-duenna. Yet this book is one of sheer pace and fitful pleasures, post-conceptualism’s ‘death of the work’ a reinvention of zero, as intrepid Felix nimbly parries with the spectre of Kenny Goldsmith, with various twentieth-century proper nouns, with family/literary history, and, always, with himself, a tail-chasing enterprise which traces another zero which is also an infinitesimal stage.”
— Joyelle McSweeney
Author of Percussion Grenade (Fence) and Salamandine: 8 Gothics (Tarpaulin Sky Press)
“Bernstein attempts the most explicit and energetic deconstruction of prevailing avant-garde social minutiae I’ve yet encountered. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever read a text more intelligibly self-aware. Drawing on thinkers from Deleuze to Lacan to Love to Ngai to Badiou to Barthes to Perloff, and combining a Zizekian X-ray vision with the biting “you can’t scare me” of youth, Notes constitutes Bernstein’s irruption into / refusal of the institutional avant-garde.”
— Monroe Lawrence, The Capilano Review
Felix Bernstein debuted on YouTube with his disarming and satirical coming out video in 2008, going on, in later videos, to play Amy Winehouse, Lamb Chop, and Leopold (Peter) Brant. With Gabe Rubin, he made the films Unchained Melody and Boyland. Together they directed and starred in Red Krayola’s opera Victorine at the 2012 Whitney Biennial. Bernstein's critical and uncritical writings have appeared in Bomb, the Awl, Hyperallergic, and the Believer. In Fall 2015, his operetta Adonis or Bieber Bathos Elegy will have its premiere at the Whitney, and his poetry collection Burn Book will be out from Nightboat.
Cammisa Buerhaus is a sculptor and composer. She is a founding member of the performance group Full Disclosure, the band Daikyo Furoshiki, and runs the record label Wild Flesh. She recently joined the NYC Players as an actress, and has performed at The Kitchen, The Walker Art Center, and On The Boards. One of her newest compositions, Private Lives, will premier at the Kitchen May 22nd.
Cecilia Corrigan is a writer, comedian, and performer. Her debut book, Titanic was one of Flavorwire’s “Best 50 Books of the Decade.” In addition to writing for television, film, and theater, including HBO’s Luck, she has been published in n+1, Bomb, Interview Magazine, Opening Ceremony, and Adult. She has selections in the forthcoming edition of Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University Press).
Adam Fitzgerald is the author of The Late Parade, and edits the poetry journal Maggy. Recent work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, BOMB and elsewhere.
Trisha Low is the author of The Compleat Purge (Kenning Editions, 2013), which Vice Magazine called a "portrait of the Marquis de Sade as a young female hacker."
Merrie Cherry went from coat check girl at a dive bar in Williamsburg to being the drag queen ambassador of Brooklyn. She is the creator of the annual Brooklyn NIghtlife Awards and assisted with the creation of Bushwig.
