Join this Friday, September 26th, at 7pm, to celebrate the publication of Mature Themes by Andrew Durbin at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York City.
For the release of his new book, Mature Themes (Nightboat Books, 2014), writer Andrew Durbin has curated an evening of readings and performance with artists Harry Burke, Juliana Huxtable, and Jacolby Satterwhite. Artist Jesse Darling will also premiere a new short film.
A hybrid text of poetry and art criticism, Durbin’s Mature Themes is a memoir focused on the subject of disingenuity. The book explores what constitutes personal experience, both online and IRL (“In Real Life”), when to “go deep” and attempt meaningful connection with someone else in a culture of so many unreliable communications technologies is to resend an unanswered text at 3 a.m. Artist and novelist Chris Kraus writes, “Mature Themes negatively embraces media culture in its dizzying vortex of self-reflexivity, where facts exist only as powered by dreams, and dreams are in fact, malignant intent.” Throughout the book, Durbin’s voice mutates into other personae in order to uncover the fading specters of meaning buried under the pristine surfaces of art and Hollywood, searching their attendant star systems (interrelated in the various discourses struggling to shape both the present and the future) for the other realities that structure our experience of both.