Someone or another said something very modern once about an umbrella and a sewing machine…
Post(card)s: En Dehors Garde Flash Mob
In Summer 2018, dozens of writers, artists, students, and scholars joined a digital “flash mob,” submitting post(card)s that expressed their ideas about the en dehors garde—a term we coined to account for women, people of color, and others who have been marginalized or excluded from histories of the avant-garde. These are their post(card)s:
To select a post(card), check the button in the top, right corner of the card.
Click "View in Lightbox" to see the selected post(card)s combined in a rearrangeable format.
Falling in colour
Last summer, every book I read appeared to be about the colour blue. This year it’s yellow. I’m currently in
Early Flash Mobs
In 1987, Suzanne Lacy directed one of my favorite artworks of all times, The Crystal Quilt, a gathering of over
From The Kingdom of the Letter—The Feminist Movement as Brave Food & Feeling
Created for this project, this piece is a collaborative montage with Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto.” Utilizing some of Loy’s text,
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Visualizing the Unseen
Bulletin from the margins of modernism: twentieth-century art blanked our ability to see and understand ornament as a means of
Black Avant-Garde
Avant-garde scholarship must acknowledge that race cannot be separated from politics. Avant-gardists of the 20th century, in their goal to
A Chthonic Baedeker
A chthonic baedecker guides through wormholes, those openings in the dark leading elsewhere. Come down here and find us if
Feminism: After Spillers
But I would make a distinction in this case between ‘body’ and ‘flesh’ and impose that distinction as the
En Dehors Garde Ballerinas: Emily Dickinson, Mina Loy, and Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven
In her poem “I cannot dance upon my Toes,” Emily Dickinson makes the key connection between being unable to dance—a
“Into the enervating dust”
This painting was made as a reflection on Loy’s 1915 poem, “Human Cylinders.”
Catch the opportunity of your life
This picture [by Jillian Tamaki, 2015] is a part of the MTA art cards in New York City. It shows
From Sibling Mysteries
This is a selection (p.119) from Adrienne Rich’s poem “Sibling Mysteries,” published in the first issue of the feminist magazine
Pay Attention
Any turn outward must include the voices, works, and daily lives of working class individuals. This is my mother,
The Dunes
I float on the waves where the deer drink water The sun at my hand and the moon at feet,
Dear Health “Care”
Dear Health “Care” – What does it look like to care about cures, diagnoses, and medical technologies, ignoring care that
Nella Larsen, avant-garde? Modernist, yes, but avant-garde? Her writing is hardly in the vein of a Gertrude Stein or a
Unmapping the Caribbean
Unmapping the Caribbean What would a map of sanctuary look like? As artists and educators we, Tao Leigh Goffe and
Afghan Bands
en dehors is the line bending away but let it twist yet once before returning home inner and outer now
en dehors Moby Dick
To go beyond the usual avant-garde suspects, we must go beyond nationalism. I have included the concrete poem and video
alphabets that build themselves
Language is kinetic, geometric, recombinant, and open to mutation. Loy understood this. Do we yet understand this? May we not
Outside of the Air
Stills from a collaborative dance + poem composed of, and in response to, quotations from and “exposures” (questions found letter-by-letter
Margin/Center
Every margin is a new center. Every center is an old margin. There is no outside text; there is only
A language of Deafish
Deaf listening produces fleeting words in a language here called Deafish. Collage of face in Roman fresco with mouth and
Can you, here?
What is poetry's worth in prison? This vertical postcard is a poly-vocal expression of the women writers at Whitworth Women's Facility in Hartwell, Georgia. It is a collage created from lines of our individual poems and prose reflections on poetry's value in our lives. It is also our greeting to you. Can you hear?
Why Won’t You Talk to Me When the World is Ending
I spend my days working for the richest man on Earth Draining bags of blood and dreaming of a robot
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You Carry the Weight of Narcissus
“Charles Henri Ford and Pavel Tchelitchew,” photograph, by Cecil Beaton. “Narcissus,” photograph, by Charles Henri Ford. “You Carry the
The Beautiful Mind of Hedy Lamarr
The Beautiful Mind of Hedy Lamarr Beauty is as mind doesn’t: That’s how to look glamorous. That’s how everyone
Making Something from Modernism
Virginia Woolf talks about the loose, drifting material of life, describing how she would like to see it sorted and
Envisioning En Dehor Garde Poetics
* Marinetti coins a new mode of writing verse: ‘Parole-in-Libertá’ in a 1913 Essay. Parole-in-Libertá will free poets. There will
Backward Glances
Shawna Ross considers Katherine Mansfield’s plan for her final book of short stories as a means of speaking about the
Crisis in Consciousness
Fans of Mina know this as a now-time rousing NOW-citation of absolute NOW-ness typical of the manifesto mode.
RealEmma.jpg (1) – Copy.jpg
A reflection on the nature of fame in the digital age. Source image is a picture of Emma Watson,
Mina Loy
This ‘postcard’ came about while I was working on the Brooklyn Art Library’s sketchbook project. I have always been energized
Everyday En Dehors Garde
This wallpaper sample is of a pattern that once hung in a suburban kitchen (c. 1960-1970). It is the product
Dear Papa
Dear Papa: I know you are dead and all, but I came across this lovely book with you in it,
Notes on the en dehors garde
Here’s a bit of what I was thinking in July, from my notebook.
Wrenches
Careful close reading of Mina Loy’s “Are you prepared for the Wrench?” will note that it is addressed in none-too-flattering
Jean Toomer’s Refusal
Jean Toomer refused to be classified, and it cost him. When he rejected his classification as a black writer, when
On the “dehors garde”: some thoughts
Outside is inside, I once misread Bachelard’s French. In terms of notions of the poetics of space, that misreading was
Queens Liberation Front
The en dehors garde remembers the moments, places, and things that happen outside the academic that spark the hearts of
My Body Has One Job
My body does not look the way society says it should. It does not walk the way I wish it
Stolen Science
Nobel laureates May-Britt and Edvard Moser work together, and they publish both together and separately. They won along with another
Fall 2018
The Fall of 2018
Questions for the Academic Job Market
I kept asking Tipsy Tullivan, my heteronym, “What do you think of Mina Loy?” and Tipsy kept saying, “Who the
Translatio Amicorum
Inspired by this flash mob’s form, three friends circulated a series of postcards, with each person creating, adding, and responding
Fruta Bomba
This video presents a multimedia view of concentrated Miami hyperku as filtered through an Australian lens which allows them to
Death Could Be Kind
We tend to subconsciously associate darkness with fear and isolation. We tend to stay away from subjects that speak of
mad about you
Art by Marcus Krips. https://www.kripskunstspam.de
Teenage Collage
I have a rough idea of when I made this: 1993 – 1995. I was 17, 18, or 19 years
CRAFT AS NEGATIVE SPACE
Background: Tapestry needlework by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) in negative. Foreground: H.D.’s thimble, my finger inside cropped out. Unboxing H.D.’s archive
Reproductive Circus
Once upon a time, you read that Mina Loy did the worst thing a woman could do: abandon her children
A Spatial Theory
When we are turning away from the center, does the direction in which we turn matter? Lately, and rightly, society
Mona Lisa Corrected
I was lucky to have found an already tampered-with image of this icon.
The Lure of Salome:
Embodied, naked and overdressed, subject to the gaze, extracting its profits
“After an Election” by Tiffany Austin
A tribute to the work of feminist poet-critic Tiffany Austin (1975-2018), whose unbridled spirit lives on.