CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/30/2018

Ben Lerner & Michelle Kuo launch 'Alexander Kluge & Ben Lerner: The Snows of Venice' at MAST

Friday, September 14 at 7PM, Ben Lerner and Michelle Kuo will read poems and prose from Alexander Kluge & Ben Lerner: The Snows of Venice, followed by a conversation moderated by Anne König, publisher of Spector Books.

ABOVE: Alexander Kluge in conversation with Ben Lerner.

American author Ben Lerner and German filmmaker and writer Alexander Kluge come from two different generations but share a passion for producing unlikely constellations of historical and personal materials. A line from Lerner’s poem “The sky stops painting and turns to criticism” that Kluge was struck by some years ago became the starting point for their first joint book project. Kluge responded to this celestial critique with a story about the technically controlled power of a squadron of bombers bossing the skies over Aleppo, which Lerner answered with a sonnet. Step by step this gave rise to poems, stories, and conversations in which the heavens show their bewitching and threatening qualities. This literary dialogue is published in The Snows of Venice. A series of 21 photographs that Gerhard Richter took in Venice in the 1970s augments the interplay of texts and the principle of interconnecting poetic horizons, as well as images by Rebecca H. Quaytman and Thomas Demand.

BEN LERNER (b. 1979, Topeka, Kansas) is an American poet, novelist, essayist and critic. Lerner was awarded the Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie for The Lichtenberg Figures. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, among other honors.

ALEXANDER KLUGE (b. 1932, Halberstadt) focuses his texts, cinema and TV films, interviews, video collages and numerous hybrid formats on the major themes of the modern world.

MICHELLE KUO is the Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. From 2010-2017, she was the Editor in Chief of Artforum International. She is currently writing a book, based on her PhD dissertation, about the postwar organization Experiments in Art and Technology.

MAST BOOKS
The Snows of Venice launch event
Friday, September 14: 7PM
72 Avenue A
New York, NY 10009
Phone: 646-370-1114
Email: info@mastbooks.com