The Group Tickling Experience | Film Screening and conversation with Wayne Koestenbaum

THE GROUP TICKLING EXPERIMENT | FILM SCREENING AND CONVERSATION WITH WAYNE KOESTENBAUM
Friday, Oct 13, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
Wege Center for the Arts | Ross Theater
In conjunction with the Wege Gallery exhibition LEG UP, artist/writer Wayne Koestenbaum will host a screening of his recent short films.
REGISTRATION IS ENCOURAGED:
https://forms.office.com/r/cXsFXJDm1h
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Wayne Koestenbaum—poet, critic, fiction-writer, artist, filmmaker, performer—has published over twenty books, including Ultramarine, The Cheerful Scapegoat, Figure It Out, Camp Marmalade, My 1980s & Other Essays, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, Circus, Andy Warhol, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award). He has exhibited his paintings in solo shows at White Columns, 356 Mission, and the University of Kentucky Art Museum, as well as in many group shows, including at Essex Flowers, Gordon Robichaux, Klaus von Nichtssagend, Yossi Milo Gallery, FIERMAN, Jeff Bailey Gallery, Geoffrey Young Gallery, and the Fashion Institute of Technology. His first piano/vocal record, Lounge Act, was released by Ugly Duckling Presse Records in 2017; he has given musical performances of improvisatory Sprechstimme soliloquies at The Kitchen, REDCAT, Centre Pompidou, The Walker Art Center, The Artist’s Institute, the Renaissance Society, the Hammer Museum, and The Poetry Project. His first feature-length film, The Collective, premiered at UnionDocs (New York) in 2021. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a Whiting Award. Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has acquired his literary archive. He is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
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LEG UP brings together the work of artist Laurel Farrin and artist/writer Wayne Koestenbaum. Sharing a sense of figurative humor and a friskiness with material, their work in the exhibition encompasses paintings on wooden and cardboard shapes, film strips, and tablecloths. LEG UP also includes videos by the artists: Koestenbaum’s are cameraless hand-painted 16mm films, and Farrin’s improvisational videos capture found and assembled materials as they come to life.
Many formal and quiet connections take place between the curly-haired artists’ works. Their deep affinity with the silent comedian Harpo Marx is a running theme throughout the exhibition. In LEG UP, Farrin and Koestenbaum nod to Harpo’s comedic leg routine, in which he hands over his leg to a perplexed Chico Marx (and others). In the exhibition, a “leg up” model poses in Koestenbaum’s portraits, while in Farrin’s work, thick painted lines take abrupt L-shaped turns like bent knees. Koestenbaum’s 2012 book The Anatomy of Harpo Marx has served as a manual for LEG UP, which celebrates gestures of colorful, free-form play, and which affirms the pleasures that arise from tactile, witty orneriness.