Alan Gilbert received his BA in humanities and creative
writing from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his PhD. in English
literature from SUNY Buffalo. Aside from being a widely published poet,
Alan Gilbert’s
writings on art, poetry, culture, and politics have appeared in a variety
of publications, including Artforum, Bomb, Bookforum, Boston Review,
Publishers Weekly, Time Out New York, etc. Gilbert was the co-founder
and co-editor of the literary journal apex of the M, a venue for independent
and experimental poetry. He is currently the editor of NYFA Quarterly,
an arts and culture magazine published by the New York Foundation for
the Arts. Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight, a
selection of Gilbert’s critical writings, is to be published in
2006 by Wesleyan University Press.
Over the past year, his poetry has been engaged by ideas of the “grotesque” as
represented by the Neue Galerie’s Comic Grotesque exhibition and
Robert Storr’s Site Santa Fe Biennial Disparities and Deformations:
Our Grotesque exhibition. In his poetry, these ideas have manifested
themselves in attempts to undermine notions of common sense, in a focus
on absurdity, and in an approach to form and meaning as excessive and
disproportional.
INTERVIEW
Name: Alan Gilbert Where are you from: New York, NY Where do you live/work: New York, NY
Is there any recurrent motif that appears in your works? What is
it and why?
Loss. Why? That’s difficult to say. Without at all intending to
sound anti-intellectual, I think it’s impossible to completely explain
the fundamental issues at the heart of anyone’s writing or art. At
the same time, as a way of offering a partial explanation for this motif
in my work, I’d propose that loss is inherent to language and its
dream of a past and a future to which it’s impossible to return
or finally arrive at, and which never existed and will never exist in
the first place.
Do you have an unrealized dream project? (no matter how improbable,
absurd, costly, etc. it might seem)
I remember watching Martin Scorsese’s Casino in the theater
in 1995 and thinking to myself that I wanted to make big-budget Hollywood
films. A couple years later, a friend and I even spent a handful of somewhat
inebriated late nights at St. Dymphna’s bar in the East Village sketching
out the opening scenes of a screenplay. I’m normally goal-oriented,
but the possibility of making big-budget Hollywood films seems way, way
beyond me for every conceivable reason. In the meantime, my “unrealized
dream project” is the same as any other writer or visual artist:
to not have a job and to spend every day at the desk/in the studio. I
was actually able to do this for the first couple months of my LMCC Residency.
It was fabulous.
What is your solution to artist’s or writer’s block?
Clean my apartment, take a hot shower, and sit quietly at my desk. Writer’s
block rarely occurs while I’m working, only when I’m not working.
Thus, for me at least, the key to overcoming writer’s block is
to work consistently.
What is your favorite work of art and why? (doesn’t have to
be visual or fine arts)
When I was twelve years old and living in Washington, D.C., I was walking
through a park and heard blasting from a boombox what at that point in
my life was the most amazing music I’d ever encountered: Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet
Rock.” It both expanded and demolished my consciousness at once.
I’ve never recovered, and it remains a favorite to this day. More
recently, I’m a fan of Gregory Green’s “M.I.T.A.R.B.U.” (2000;
the acronym stands for “Mobile Internet, Television, and Radio Broadcast
Unit”), a 1967 Volkswagen Westfalia Campmobile that contains fully
functioning television and radio stations, along with providing access
to the Web. It’s a roving information analysis, production, and dissemination
unit with built-in site-specificity. (http://www.feigencontemporary.com/index.php?mode=artists&object_id=32&heading_id=&project_id=94&show=image&pid=802)
Also, as someone interested in political art, I’m awed by Philip
Guston’s 1975, fall-of-Saigon, large painting of Richard Nixon.
(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/graphics/2004/01/28/baguston28.jpg)
