Garett Strickland’s latest book, A Place Beyond (Inside the Castle, January 2024), designed by Mike Corrao, is “an asemic trip into the bedrock of literature, full of visual writing and collages that shatter the strata of how we read and look at books.” He and Alina Ştefănescu conversed over email, an encounter that developed from a shared interest in contemporary Romanian conceptual artists. It should be noted that Alina talked way too much—and forgot to mention how much she enjoyed Garett’s “vehicle”. She remains grateful to Garett for simultaneously humouring and inspiring her.
AS: I feel fortunate to have read A Place Beyond at this moment in time, a moment made poignant by the sublimity of being ghosted by paratext. I followed the QR code at the back of the book that links to the website with recordings only to find it was not yet populated. It would be a crime against eternity for me to begin this conversation outside that particular absence, or the pre-sense created by my expectations. Tell me about absences involved in this book.
GS: Well I had thought that, when the book was officially released, that there would be a series of finished recordings on the site, but then I felt that it would be more appropriate for those recordings to roll out gradually, since the book’s horizon is perpetually expanding past its publication date. There will be things to hear soon! .. Absence is for sure an important part of the book—the almost total absence of conventional typographical or written language being the most obvious. The book began as a monument to a friend who passed, who gifted its title. What I wanted it to be evolved these past years pretty dramatically when I discovered words on a page were not alive enough for the tribute I had in mind. So there’s a few different absences at play there.
“At play,” yes. The element of play is striking, Garett. And I’m interested in how much play is permitted when we imagine an elegiac form, or stepping into this space which began as a monument to a friend who passed. I’ve been wandering through Michael Taussig’s writing lately, and this “alive enough” makes me think of how text or letters do two things simultaneously: they tell us how to read an image & they deface it, or suggest that it cannot be read on its own. Does defacement as a strategy or method enter your recent work? If so, how? If not, how would you describe the setting-apart of the image?
There’s an effort toward a sort of petroglyphic rewilding in my recent work. Gestural is the word I use most often. … For the past half-decade I’ve labored in the gallery spaces of a contemporary art museum, and, although some of the works have been on display for over five years and I’ve cohabitated with them for the duration, I still have only read the didactics for many of the pieces on accident. I’m not especially interested in knowing who made them or what they are called, because I think in some ways it disrupts their integrity as objects. If the artist works with text or provides one themselves, that’s a little different. With my own work, textual or otherwise, I really believe that polyvalence is one of its greatest strengths, and part of what really does make it a living thing. /// “Images can be like windows pushed open for us into a world of the unearthly, the sheer imagination, as if aliens had come upon us in the form of a strange visitation; and at the same time we recognize the visions as something not foreign, but belonging to us – born hundreds of years later – as if they had been dormant deeply within us.” – Werner Herzog
On the side reel, I love the video pieces you share on twitter. “Dormancy” makes me think of a place beyond, as does the word you used, “cohabitation”— the sense that a piece lives in us, or we live with it, we coincide for a particular duration. Did any musicians or composers inform the recent work?
Music is very important. With my first book, Ungula, I was listening to a lot of dark soundscapes, noise tapes, and Scott Walker’s late work, which is baroquely nightmarish and appropriate to the existential situation of that book. Then the world ended and I needed more uplifting genres of music to keep me alive. If something’s going to be sad, it also demands celebration. I began singing and writing songs as part of the practice of writing this new book and alongside it. It needs living breath behind it … Also, the composer Eliane Radigue, whose medium is Time, has been a big influence. My production studio is releasing an album later this year that shares a partial title with A Place Beyond, duets for viola for which I provided a graphic score. So that’s another instance of the book overflowing itself! It just keeps going.
Ungula blew me away. The way it refused to settle into something solid, something monumental—there was this continuous sense of abradement—and maybe abradement is a better word for what I was thinking when I said defacement. There is no face to nonument: there is no neoliberal subject that can be isolated in the interaction of the ongoing encounter. This idea of facing situates the viewer in the face-to-face of private space; it is bounded somehow in my mind; it has boundaries. And there is no boundary between me and the book when I meet it, encountering you and the others in it. When you quoted Herzog’s analogy of the image as a window, I thought of how the image is the threshold for the imaginary, where the imaginary actualizes the impossible. To meet there, in the co-imagined, is the poem’s secret wish. But that wish gets lost in the dross of taming and disciplining it. I’m interested in the “pushed-open”-ness. I’m interested in how your polyphony, or plurivocality, connects (or doesn’t connect) to what Jose Esteban Munoz called the “performatively polyvalence” of the queer image. In refusing to be grounded or held in place, the queer image commits itself to “fundamental indeterminacy.” More importantly, it resists analysis and excavation— it refuses to be a disciplined subject. It is rigorously anti-rigor and anti-evidence. Against interpretation, it offers “decipherment,” as best articulated by Caribbean novelist and critic Sylvia Wynter:
Rather than seeking to “rhetorically demystify,” a deciphering turn seeks to decipher what a process of rhetorical mystification does. It seeks to identify not what texts and their signifying practices can be interpreted to mean but what they can be deciphered to do, it also seeks to evaluate the “illocutionary force” and procedures with which they do what they do.
I feel as if your recent work asks me to meet in a queer imaginary, where queering describes the act of resisting interpretive models, and imaginary is the “overflowing” of what keeps going when illocution is not limited to text?
This is so astute! Thank you for your close reading(s). I think however porous the work can ever be is to its benefit, inviting a continuous approach, since what is encountered will always be different no matter what! You look at the membrane of what reading is and you zoom in on it and all these other world(ing)s spring up or are concomitantly created with your own noticing; you are always this station through which the noumena passes into signal. This would be true of even the crudest things—if you polish the mirror enough you can see just about anything in it. I’m sure there’s someone out there who has understood the entire universe by rewatching the same reality tv show over and over. The work I’m involved with aspires to open out the encounter in widening spirals so that its open circuit of creation has the freedom of unmediated experience, hopefully disarming all of us in increasingly beneficial ways.
Ah ha, you’ve expanded my audience, Garett. Next time I finish a poem draft and sit with that excitement of leaving the world of the poem for the world of the imagined audience, I will imagine one of its readers to be the “who has understood the entire universe by rewatching the same reality tv show over and over.” Audience is interesting in this way, I think. But your conception of the audience involves co-creation, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on my response to Agate, beginning with the title. An agate is a stone, of course, but I kept hearing it as a She, as a woman (perhaps related to Musil’s woman). I read physical descriptions (a face upholstered in gold and purple; chandelier eyes never settling on anything), articles of clothing (lace-up boots only halfway-tied; broken zipper on a jacket; the hem of a rayon skirt moving; jacquard-patterned tights and green fabrics), and the way a person can move to rearrange the image returned from a bakery window. There is a sense of motion. I found myself wanting to stop her, to prevent this re/arrangement from becoming a habit before any window becomes a mirror blocking her view out. And this is the thing with art: we cannot never entirely erase our associations in relation to it. We “read” our ghosts into hue, palette, syntax, etc?
I’m all for an egalitarian sublime! I have watched the HBO series Deadwood, for example, no less than a dozen times all the way through, and although there is nothing that changes in the dialogue, the associations I’ve dreamed into it have been a form of scrying. There’s a way that eternal return—like the gloomy one portrayed in Beckett’s Play (and its film) — is still free to evolve through the lens we create through repetition. In my choice to bring song into the work, I enjoy how inflection and tone can enhance and change the meaning of a text in a way that isn’t one-to-one, and one can imagine any number of performances and interpretations of such a text. I enjoy your reading of Agate, seeing how abstraction travels into representation as the peripheral details of a garment we build in remembering, memories always something worn, something we fondle open. A set of worrybeads, a string of pearls adored into shape by its oysters.
“Adored into shape.” You bring so much tenderness to your work, Garett, and the work of language—the saying-into-being. To “fondle” is to rub a fondness, and perhaps to make fonder through rubbing. What should we be fondling with eyes, ears, and screens right now?
“Should” ?! I wouldn’t presume to speak for anyone but myself, though I definitely recommend Pascal Quignard’s new book in translation, The Unsaddled. Quignard is a lot like Maurice Blanchot, except hornier. Both are concerned with writerly disappearance, but the vanishing point for Quignard is conception rather than death. Winter is so heavy I’m going to implant myself in the sun, I’m thinking. Everyone is welcome to join me.
A Place Beyond is available now from Inside the Castle.
Garett Strickland is a writer & artist currently based in the midwestern United States. He is the author of Ungula, Scrims, and A Place Beyond. Further work can be found at Portology. He is the director of Dromedary Studios & Production in St. Paul, Minnesota. Twitter: @grotstricken
Alina Ştefănescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama. Her most recent poetry collection will be published by Sarabande in April, 2025. Twitter: @aliner
minor literature[s] 