Felix Bernstein in Conversation with Vanessa Place

I first met Vanessa Place a year ago, when I performed alongside her and Cecilia Corrigan at a reading. The grouping couldn’t be odder: Corrigan started the evening out, playing a bubbly femme David Letterman with Place and me as her guests. Then I came on cloaked in black, and perversely sang along to a collection of strange YouTube videos that projected behind me. And finally Place dryly read from The Scum Manifesto, changing the words “woman” to “man.” After the show, I went over to Place, offering an eager compliment for her brilliant, fastidious study of criminal law, The Guilt Project. In response she seemed indifferent, superior, and cold—as sinister as her mythic press photos: Conceptual poetry’s dark woman, Vanessa Place CEO, never smiles in pictures, dresses sleekly in black, and speaks only in Lacanian riddles.

Place is, without a doubt, dark: her magnum opus Statement of Facts is made up of appropriated material from the kind of rape cases for which she serves as a defense attorney. This work was controversial both with critics and sensitive audience members, who walked out during performances. Corrigan must have gotten the same vibes as I did: soon after that night we both published critiques of Place’s work. Many critiques of Place dismiss her instantly, finding her appropriation tactics to be point blank: hostile, sexist, racist, classist, or masculinist. But Corrigan and I were both intrigued by Place as a powerful and complex innovator, whose breadth comes with interesting and generative flaws. Many works that we pass over as morally acceptable and progressive never have us thinking a thing, but Place forces even her sharpest critics to think, and forces all of us to wrestle with our complicity with negative social values. We are too quick, on the left, to think ourselves free from oppressive systems (i.e., capitalism, patriarchy, rape culture, the prison industrial complex, coterie, name dropping, social climbing, media whoring) and Place won’t let us off so easy.

Even as, in my Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry, I critically spar with many of the proclamations she and Fitterman espouse in Notes on Conceptual Poetry, I do it not merely with that old proverbial “love” or wide-eyed reverence or coterie-building friendliness but, more crucially than any of that, with respect for an ingenious provocative mind. Which is why Place and I decided to take what started as a private Facebook chat into another agora, one which could also prompt another kind of phobia.

—Felix Bernstein

I. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING AFTER THE ORGY?”

FELIX BERNSTEIN: I’ve always had a campy fascination with your presence, though I’ve had many serious critical reservations....