Lytle Shaw, Lecturer, SAUL

Address: English Department, New York University, 13 University Place, Rm. 537, NYC 10003

Telephone: 212 998 8818

Email: Lds2@nyu.edu

Radical Description:

The idea of context—inescapable in architecture—is also fundamental, in various ways, to philosophers, literary critics, historians and other thinkers in the humanities. Usually events and ideas (like buildings) are better understood when their relation to a relevant context is described. But what authorizes one descriptive mode over another? Are contexts primarily a matter of space (built or found environments that have social and/or physical implications)? Or are they a matter of time (a sequence of social or intellectual events)? This class will analyze these questions by looking closely at the history and theory of description. The first two sessions analyze spatial descriptions; the second two, temporal. We will read the work of Enlightenment philosophers and natural historians including Robert Hooke, Carl Linnaeus and Denis Diderot alongside contemporary intellectual historians commenting on them; fiction by Poe, philosophical writing by Merleau-Ponty and Barthes, and art criticism by Michael Fried, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson and Miwon Kwon. In the two sessions on time our readings will include Marx, Nietzsche, Carl Becker, Henri Bergson, and Rem Koolhaas.

Experimental Research:

Considering a wide array of research processes from the classically scholarly to the wildly unconventional, this class will analyze the relationship between inquiries into archives, sites and objects and the genres of writing used to organize the results. We will read anthropologists, historians, urban journalists, architects, scientists, literary historians, poets and philosophers—and make a case study of Cabinet magazine. Beyond introducing key concerns in the history of the humanities (evidence, documentation, the status of the observer) the class is designed to familiarize students with new, more capacious modes of research that, if pursued with gusto, focus and diligence, will be anything but mundane or tedious. Instead, we will uncover research’s power both to make strange the world of neat certainties and to become an essential resource in the design process.

Each student will develop a portfolio of writings and be responsible for presenting some of the material of the module. Readings include Clifford Geertz, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Restif de la Bretonne, Henry Mayhew, Louis Aragon, The Situationists, Francis Bacon, Mary Ward, Louis Agassiz, Peter Galison, Bruno Latour, H. D. Thoreau, John Clare, Francis Ponge, Walter Benjamin, Fernand Braudel, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Paul Veyne.

American Literature; Contemporary Poetry; Art History; Theory; Urbanism

Critical Books and Edited Volumes:

2013 Specimen Box. Periscope Publishing (forthcoming)

Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics. University of Alabama Press (forthcoming)

2010 Printed Project 14: The Conceptual North Pole, 11 Interviews, ed./Intro

2007 19 Lines: A Drawing Center Writing Anthology, ed./Intro. New York: The Drawing Center/Roof Books

2006 Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (reviewed in Artforum, Parkett, American Literature, GLQ, Criticism, Journal of Modern Literature, Poetry Project Newsletter, and Oxford’s The Year’s Work in English Studies) Paperback edition forthcoming, spring 2013.

Selected Poetry Books and Art Catalogues:

2012 The Moiré Effect, novella (New York and Zurich: Cabinet and Bookhorse). Distributed by DAP (Distributed Art Publishers)

Selected Shipwrecks, catalog with essays by Lisa Robertson, Valerie Imus, Kevin Cook (Zurich and San Francisco: Bookhorse and Southern Exposure)

2011 The Clifford Chadwick Clifford Collection, novella (Birmingham, England: An Endless Supply)

2008 The Chadwick Family Papers (A Brief Public Glimpse), with Jimbo Blachly, essays by Frances Richard and Sina Najafi, (Pittsburgh: Periscope)

2002 The Lobe, (New York: Roof)

1999 Cable Factory 20, (Berkeley: Atelos)

Essays (selected):

2012 “Van Goyen’s Puddles” AA Files

“The Master’s Voice,” Between Walls and Windows. Architektur und Ideologie. Berlin: Haus de Kulturen der Welt, Hatje Cantz (English and German Translation)

“Madder Lake,” Colors Column, Cabinet, 45

2011 “Fieldwork in New American Poetry,” The Oxford Companion to Modern and Contemporary Poetry, ed. Cary Nelson

“He Disappeared into Familiar Art Historical Discourse: On the Receptions of Bourgeois and McCarthy,” Museum de Hallen, Haarlem, Netherlands

“The Art of Renouncing Poetry,” CAA Reviews

“The Utopian Past,” reprinted in Ruins, ed. Brian Dillon, as part of the series, Documents of Contemporary Art (London: Whitechapel Gallery)

2010 “Unsettling Time at the Falls,” in Zoe Leonard: You See I Was Here After All. New York/New Haven: DIA Center/Yale University Press

“Whitman’s Urbanism,” The Cambridge Companion to New York Writing, eds. Bryan Waterman and Cyrus Patell

“The Powers of Removal: Interventions in the Name of Urbanism,” in Mixed Use, Manhattan, eds. Lynne Cooke/Douglas Crimp. Madrid/Cambridge, MA: Museo Nacional Centre de Arte Reina Sofía/MIT University Press

2010 “Everyday Archaic: The Space of Ethnopoetics,” The Sixties,

2009 “Unlashed from the Mass: Susan Philipsz in and around Silos,” in Susan Philipsz: Appear to Me. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centre de Arte Reina Sofía, 2009. English and Spanish

“Smithson’s ‘Judd,’” Textual Practice, 23: 5

“Docents of Discourse: The Logic of Dispersed Sites,” boundary 2 (special issue on poetry since 1975, guest edited by Charles Bernstein)

2008 “Gesture in 1960: Toward Literal Situations,” in New York Cool, ed. Pepe Karmel (New York: Grey Art Gallery); reprinted in Frank O’Hara Now: New Essays on the New York Poet, eds. Will Montgomery and Robert Hampson (University of Liverpool, 2010)

2007 “The Utopian Past,” in The Present Tense Through the Ages: On the Recent Work of Gerard Byrne (Cologne: Koenig Books)

“Plotto’s Pharmacy,” Cabinet, 24

“Bashford’s Grotto” Cabinet, 26

“Dion’s Things,” feature review, Artforum (Summer)

2005 “The Didactic: Learning at Goethe’s Knee,” Poetry & Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary, eds. Juliana Spahr and Joan Retallack (New York: St. Martins)

“Orgies of Modernization: Nördstrom’s Exemplary World,” Parkett, 74

“Smithson, Writer,” Robert Smithson Spiral Jetty, eds. Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly (New York/Berkeley: DIA Center for the Arts/University of California)

2003 “Withdrawn Authority: The Royal Art Lodge,” Catalog essay, New York: The Drawing Center

2002 “Linnaeus: Pruning Names,” Cabinet, 6

“The Life of Ernst Moiré,” Cabinet, 7

2001 “The Moral Storm: Henry Darger’s Weather Notebooks,” Cabinet, 3

“Proximity’s Plea: O’Hara’s Art Writing,” Qui Parle, 12: 2

Education:

2000 Ph.D. English, University of California, Berkeley

1991 B.A. English, Magna Cum Laude, Cornell University

Selected Art Exhibitions (all in collaboration with Jimbo Blachly) :

2012 Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art, Group Exhibition, Denver Museum of Contemporary (also traveling to the Powerplant, Toronto, and The Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University), curated by Andrea Andersson and Nora Burnett (catalog)

Selected Shipwrecks, Solo Exhibition, Southern Exposure, San Francisco, Spring 2012 (catalog)

2011 MärklinWorld, Group Exhibition, Kunsthal Amersfoort, The Netherlands, September 2011-January 2012 (catalog)

Furling the Spanker: Masterworks from the Chadwicks’ Nautical Collection, Solo Exhibition, Winkleman Gallery, New York City, June

Otherworldly, Group Exhibition, Museum of Art and Design, New York City (catalog)

2010 EV+A, Group Exhibition, Limerick, Ireland, March (catalog)

Companion, Group Exhibition, Elizabeth Foundation Gallery, New York, curated by Marisa Jahn

2009 Anthropology, Group Exhibition, Central Booking, Dumbo, Brooklyn

Slough, Group Exhibition, David Nolan Gallery, New York, curated by Steve Dibenedetto

2008 The Genretron, Solo Exhibition, Winkleman Gallery, New York City

Media Matters: Friedrich Kittler and Technoculture, The Tate Modern, London, curated by Seth Kim-Cohen

2007 Foreground Floor Debris, Pulse Miami Art Fair, Winkleman Gallery

Summer School, PS122, New York, curated by Artwurl

Fort Chadwijk, Poets House, New York City, Performance/Walking Tour

2006 Garden Improvement, Wave Hill, New York, Installation/Performance (“Bashford’s Grotto”) (Catalog)

Soft Sites, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia/Bartram Museum, curated by Sara Reisman, Installation (“Bad Seed”)

2005 Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates,” Queens Museum and White Columns, curated by Cabinet Magazine, Performance/Bus Tour (“Wandering Plots”)

2004 Romantic Detachment, PS1/MoMA, curated by Grizedale Arts and the Henry Moore Foundation, Performance (“Errant Walker”)

Grants, Honours:

2012 Visual Arts Initiative Grant, NYU

2010-2012 Visiting Lecturer, Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen

2010 Elizabeth Agree Prize, University of Alabama Press, for Fieldworks

(Awarded annually to the best ms in American literature)

2008 Holloway Poet, Visiting Professor, University of California, Berkeley, Spring

2003-4 Getty Post-Doctoral Grant in Art History

2001 Millay Colony Residency, September

2001 MacDowell Colony Residency, June/July

Invited lectures and readings over the last fifteen years at institutions including Yale, Cornell, Berkeley, University of Chicago, Columbia, Cambridge, Simon Fraser, Fordham, University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern, Sussex, Bennington, Syracuse, California College of Arts, School of Visual Arts, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Drawing Center, and the De Hallen Museum.