GO FORTH (VOL. 14)

(One of the 340,068,392 variations on the first page of Alexandra Chasin’s novella for the iPad, Brief)

It seemed like a good idea to talk to my friend Alexandra Chasin about her novella, Brief, published by Jaded Ibis Press. It’s generally a good idea to talk to Chasin as she’s a good talker and can speak intelligently on any number of subjects. In fact, she’s brilliant, but her brilliance is warm and inviting and inclusive, which seems perhaps more rare than it should be. She wants you to be a part of the conversation and, in fact, relies upon it in her work. Chasin’s fiction is playful and hilarious and at the same time dense and challenging.   

 Alexandra Chasin holds a 2012 Fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at Lang College, The New School. Selling Out (St. Martin’s, 2000) and Kissed By (FC2, 2007) are her previous books. Brief (Jaded Ibis, 2012) is her first work of literary fiction in app form.

 Most of this particular conversation took place over email, though parts were conducted in Park Slope and Clinton Hill living rooms.

—Robert Lopez

I. ART AS A THING FRAMED

ROBERT LOPEZ:  How did Brief get started?  The interest in art vandalism comes from…

ALEXANDRA CHASIN: I’ve had a long-standing interest in art theft, art forgery, and art vandalism—violations of art norms.  I like them because they expose the contradictions that structure the norms.

Maybe Brief started in graduate school, when I took a course in the Sociology of Culture, taught by Ann Swidler.  Suddenly, it was possible to see art as a practice governed by social values, culturally variable values, art as a cipher or a fetish, art as a thing framed—the frame was the thing, and the structures on which art had been hanging all along came into focus.  Suddenly my subjective response to art was predictable according to my race, class, gender, age, education. Suddenly it was acknowledged that art did not operate in isolation from the market, from political life, from the sphere of utility.  Suddenly it all made sense.  And this was in the 1980s, when the museums, curators, dealers, and collectors transformed art into the kind of commodity it still is, with the kind of price tag it still has. Art was an idea, a cluster of ideas that found meaning, or were made meaningful, in institutions that had long histories, sites where value is negotiated.

I was raised to believe in art as the great redeemer, to think that good and...