What is Sic?

anowitz — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 18:13:08 +0000

Written and made in the visual-poetic tradition of Jen Bervin and Tom Phillips, Sic: Deletions and Emendations is a conceptual artist’s book. In between genres and disciplines, Sic is a collection of three different types of “found” documents: some sixty partially erased pages of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, unsigned letters sent from a never-named European city, and a handful of photographic portraits. Presumably, the contents of Sic once belonged to a character named K, the obsessive effacer of Freud’s book and the recipient of the letters and photographs carefully tucked away among its pages.

The constellation of Sic’s textual layers is open-ended: to make sense of it, the reader is invited to step into Freud’s shoes and interpret the texts and images for herself. Sic is at once a novelistic love story examining the un-narrated relationship between K and the sender of the letters and photographs; a collection of lyric poems of increasing formal experimentation in which the act of reading itself must be relearned, if not reinvented; a work of theoretical-philosophical intervention, in which Freud’s hermeneutic methodology is turned on itself with unexpected and unstable results; and a work of visual art—an erasure in which the page is unevenly effaced, leaving behind a ghosted, palimpsestic field that the intact text floats in and through, as if unaware of the things it is being compelled to say.

An Excerpt from the Manuscript

anowitz — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 17:55:22 +0000

About the Author

anowitz — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 19:22:45 +0000

Abraham Avnisan is a poet and visual artist living and working in Minneapolis, MN. His work explores the intersection of literature, the visual arts and digital media. He has been published in the Brooklyn Review, Boog City Reader, eoagh: a Journal of the Arts (forthcoming), and Drunken Boat (forthcoming). His work has been exhibited at Centotto Gallery, Arts in Bushwick’s BETASpace Festival, and the Figment Arts Festival on Governor’s Island, all in New York City. He received his M.F.A. from Brooklyn College.

To contact please email at: Abraham.Avnisan AT gmail.com