Kreider & O’Leary
FIELD POETICS, 2018
Field Poetics explores five different places, each with a story to tell, each with a unique mode, form, and vocal register through which to tell it. The writing journeys through a sequence of Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘film images’, the multi-dimensional, interconnected space machine of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, maritime pockets on the edge of the city of Lisbon, a history of silence and surveillance in a derelict wing of the Cork City Gaol, and the transposition of a centuries-old landscape aesthetic through video, performance, and pop in fourteen locations across the Kansai region of Japan. Sometimes documentation, sometimes score, and sometimes the work of a poet and an architect engaging with these sites, Field Poetics spins, suspends, and extends a relation to place.
Field Poetics is the second volume from this longstanding partnership between a poet and an architect. With fluidity and thoughtfulness it uses what such a meeting may enable. Through sparse and precise poetic pieces and diagrammatic ink sketches, this work operates like a dystopian travel journal, making up a universe of flat lines and temporary stations through a series of real and unreal places. Architexture of un-dwellings.
-> Caroline Bergvall
The field here features buildings, waste, trees, pools, deadliness, aliveness, the real, the unreal, a watch, bees, and the smell of roses; in other words, it maps the wilds of everyday being-in-the-world. The poetics concern the making, taking, sharing, layering, writing, and invention of the field’s images. Field Poetics is a work of (and primer for) firsthand, politicised, transformative observation for looking closely at complexity that is so exacting and so exciting at the level of the line, and so expansive in its thinking and its forms, it quite took my breath away.
-> Kate Briggs
Kristen Kreider and James O’Leary’s Field Poetics makes reference to a book entitled Wild Fields: Looking Closely at Complexity—a book that might be entirely fictitious, but whose sub-title might equally be applied to Kreider and O’Leary’s text. Field Poetics presents close observations of cultural ruin, loss, and hope by straddling the formal boundaries among lyric poetry, theoretical discourse, and visual image. The text echoes Charles Olson’s notion of composition by field, to the extent that Kreider and O’Leary recast poetic activity as an alterative mode of research on form, history, and the mythologies of contemporary culture.
-> Peter Jaeger
Combining performance, installation, documentary, poetry, fiction, and image-making, the work of Kreider & O’Leary interweaves the complexities of place into a fabrication of the real. Their work has been exhibited widely, including at Tate Britain, the Whitechapel Gallery, and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale. Their book Falling was published by Copy Press, London, in 2015. Kristen Kreider is a poet and Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London. James O’Leary is an architect and Senior Lecturer of Architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.
Field Poetics is the second volume from this longstanding partnership between a poet and an architect. With fluidity and thoughtfulness it uses what such a meeting may enable. Through sparse and precise poetic pieces and diagrammatic ink sketches, this work operates like a dystopian travel journal, making up a universe of flat lines and temporary stations through a series of real and unreal places. Architexture of un-dwellings.
-> Caroline Bergvall
The field here features buildings, waste, trees, pools, deadliness, aliveness, the real, the unreal, a watch, bees, and the smell of roses; in other words, it maps the wilds of everyday being-in-the-world. The poetics concern the making, taking, sharing, layering, writing, and invention of the field’s images. Field Poetics is a work of (and primer for) firsthand, politicised, transformative observation for looking closely at complexity that is so exacting and so exciting at the level of the line, and so expansive in its thinking and its forms, it quite took my breath away.
-> Kate Briggs
Kristen Kreider and James O’Leary’s Field Poetics makes reference to a book entitled Wild Fields: Looking Closely at Complexity—a book that might be entirely fictitious, but whose sub-title might equally be applied to Kreider and O’Leary’s text. Field Poetics presents close observations of cultural ruin, loss, and hope by straddling the formal boundaries among lyric poetry, theoretical discourse, and visual image. The text echoes Charles Olson’s notion of composition by field, to the extent that Kreider and O’Leary recast poetic activity as an alterative mode of research on form, history, and the mythologies of contemporary culture.
-> Peter Jaeger
Combining performance, installation, documentary, poetry, fiction, and image-making, the work of Kreider & O’Leary interweaves the complexities of place into a fabrication of the real. Their work has been exhibited widely, including at Tate Britain, the Whitechapel Gallery, and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale. Their book Falling was published by Copy Press, London, in 2015. Kristen Kreider is a poet and Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London. James O’Leary is an architect and Senior Lecturer of Architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.