Marina Tëmkina & Michel Gérard
Boys Fight
$25.00 | July 2023 | ISBN (N/A)
In stock
Boys Fight—an artists book by poet Marina Tëmkina and sculptor Michel Gérard—is a response to the emergence of violent factions and nationalist movements over the past decade. These poems and drawings join forces for a “direct hit to the stomach.”
Tëmkina’s fifteen-stanza poem is a rush of language: short, brusque bursts of sentences collapsing into chagrin and exasperated exegesis, conversational asides and digressive laments indexing the traits, facts, and ways in which men, unceasingly, compete. One finds a taxonomy of masculinity in her inventory of big boys, old boys, mainstream boys, golden boys, and girls who look up to boys—all combative, doing intellectual battle, raging and sparring, driven, and treating the world as “a huge fighting ring / an enormous battlefield / an unlimited war zone.”
The poem is paired with mixed-media drawings by Michel Gérard, a sculptor whose large-scale works aim at de-monumentalization and ask us to reconsider the “status of statues.” The drawings included here were inspired by an illustration in the Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustré, a popular and practical French-language encyclopedic dictionary first published in 1905.
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Limited edition of 400 copies printed RISO and letterpress on Reich Savoy and French Poptone papers by Emily Larned at Alder & Frankia.
This book is an artistic collaboration against the refusal to collaborate. Marina Tëmkina’s meditations on agonistic masculinity and Michel Gérard’s color drawings of wrestling and boxing pairs neither illustrate nor explain each other, but rather speak at once together and apart. The texts and the images of this beautiful work share their subject matter and deliberate simplicity of style, but also take advantage of the particular possibilities of their media, showing us that a collaboration is neither competition nor union, but a two-in-one, a duet.
—Eugene Ostashevsky
There is nothing in the world like it—Dada plus autobiography plus chanting cadences plus riddles plus geographies plus histories—in short, a New Thing is born.
—Cynthia Ozick [Praise for Marina Tëmkina’s What Do You Want (UDP, 2009)]
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Marina Tëmkina is a poet-artist whose interdisciplinary practice embodies her multi-national immigrant experience. Her books include the poetry collection What Do You Want? (Ugly Duckling Presse) and the artists book Who Is I? (Content) in collaboration with artist Michel Gérard. She has also published five books of poetry in Russian. Tëmkina has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, among others. She also works as a trained psychotherapist, specializing in refugee resettlement, cultural difference, and gender and identity.
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Michel Gérard’s early works were informed by surrealist idioms and the energy of 1968. Gérard experimented with the demonumentalization of public art. Over the past three decades, he has worked with his memories of childhood during World War II. Gérard has had more than 50 solo exhibitions in galleries and museums in Europe, the United States, Japan, Korea, and Israel. His work has been included in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Berkeley Art Museum, Musée Pierre-Noël, Stadtische Kunsthalle Mannheim, and Fattoria di Celle Sculpture Park, among others.