PQRS

Overview

It's one thing to advocate for writing that pushes boundaries, mixes discourses, and transgresses the dominant aesthetic, but it's quite another to actually write it. As a play, PQRS is not just unstageable, it is a monumental failure. That is, it fails with such clarity, indifference, legitimate anger, and abandon that it turns into a kind of monument, marking the point where the intellect's pessimism collapses into the will's optimism. The many models and forerunners for a project this radical include the posthumously published texts of Gertrude Stein, referred to explicitly here as 'the most exhaustive syllabic implosion in prose of any language.' But if Stein's implosion was horizontal, PQRS goes vertical, running up and down the scale of rhetorics: essay, drama, lists of potential performance art projects, lit crit, film crit, music history, autobiography, back to drama, intermission, critique of capital, URL of a Tumblr page of women laughing while holding salads, back to drama (and: scene). 'The text succeeds its own conditions.' In dire and unsuccessful times, that's the hope.--Brent Cunningham

Reviews

"Reminiscent of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, albeit in an intensified and wildly fluid twenty-first century context, Patrick Durgin’s essay-as-poetics script releases a discursive energy typically suppressed in theater. This is a theater of compressed time, bursting within the seams of global capital’s themes. A spooky and illuminating work."--Carla Harryman

Author Biography

Writer, curator, editor, and cultural critic, Patrick Durgin is coauthor of THE ROUTE (Atelos, 2008, with Jen Hofer) and has published numerous chapbooks and artist's books. Durgin is also editor of HANNAH WEINER'S OPEN HOUSE and  The Early and Clairvoyant Journals of Hannah Weiner . He teaches in the Visual and Critical Studies program of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.