Hannah Weiner’s Open House

Like recent editions of work by relentless innovators like Cecilia Vicuña and Yi Sang, Hannah Weiner’s Open House provides an aperture on a whole cosmos of making, a signal relayed from word to eye to brain to nerve to fingertip to typewriter key to ribbon to paper to page to script to voice to event to transcription to transmission to limitless ambient circulation. As Weiner herself proclaims, ‘How have our heads turned inside out, fashioned places for our bodies.’ Reflecting decades of exuberant curation and advocacy by Patrick Durgin, this new, expanded edition resonates with the pragmatically expansive impulse of Weiner’s own work and initiates an alert and expanded audience to an everyday world alight with radiant potential.

To experience Hannah [Weiner]’s clairvoyant writing as a reader is to be fascinated, overwhelmed, inundated. It’s to be involuntarily plunged into an ink-blotty Rorschach test tossing its light-source back, upon yourself, blinding. To be flooded by the presence of objects to touch and taste, by other beings you feel but don’t know. It’s to be projectively immersed in the colors and energies that make up the texture of Hannah’s world, before she slams the door shut in our face . . . How much does she allow you to see, of her or yourself? Which then begs the question: In transcribing life does Hannah Weiner write herself into being? Is it through her writing that we can understand Hannah Weiner’s life?