Patrick Durgin

Patrick Durgin is the author of PQRS (2013), and a collaboration with poet, translator, and language justice organizer Jen Hofer: The Route (2008). From 2015-2017 he co-curated the Festival of Poets Theater in Chicago, and since 2007 he has taught literature, philosophy, art history, and visual culture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He's currently at work on a second, expanded edition of Hannah Weiner's Open House, to be published by Nightboat Books in 2026. The first edition was published by Kenning Editions, which Durgin founded and ran for over 25 years.

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from Tournament

I take this bleached scrim knotted for escape

I clutch and climb hugging and think

I may be choking on the drawstring

But I used to be leashed

Two alone should muster the courage

And assemble the reasons

To make the sacrifice sufficiently easy for three

But that brand of ethical clarity is a bygone trope

When everyone’s a kleptocrat

Slaves can’t have friends

And can’t make promises

Oh my puny remit is not

As portrayed

Just rectified subroutines

Rivals for low cost goods

Nature cooperates with saints

Nature comes whole

Nature never betrays

We do

It’s a martyring or a buddy flick

We put the or in foreground

But flow charts falter once

The treats are meted out

The war decides and not the mind

Never mind it’s war to try

To fill crevasses in a slippery slope

With the careless versatility of sermonic drool

Its air of gravity in which air sinks

So they immutably will say when ever never

Facts have their adversaries

Until the least hated wisdom wins

Perhaps

But cannibals carouse when

The treats are meted out

So I do refuse to compete

Over loyalty to a cheat

As we once refused ownership

At large yet which conspiracy

Is which or one system of

Cooperation I cannot freely

Affirm nor deny and even

Telling you this story

Making you too privy

To the secret is

Disloyalty

Twice

My legendary love triangle

Mooted tentatively

When one passed but then

Two confessed they had hatched

A suicide pact and that I should

Stand back for love to wait for more

Of less than the lesser loved’s plight

Mine but in the coming war

Everyone’s a kelptocrat

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from Exegeses

On the Abattoirs of Toulouse

Any worthy media history of mimesis in “the occident” will more or less address meat—not as a stand in for nudes (how the flesh ripples, who looks and upon whom), not as matter’s understudy (always intending and even informing stuff). Not even “man” as “meat”—flesh in strict correlation to bone, as Gilles Deleuze spoke of the role played by meat in the “derisory athletics” of Francis Bacon’s portraits—which leads to all sorts of anguished angles on today’s articulated corpus of subject positions: “the” body. Although less now than today’s corpses careening through one’s doom scroll. Dead again, again, still and once more, scroll as one does. Starvation is reversible only to a point—unlike the cycle of hunger. It’s not a question of degrees. Worth minding this July 24, 2025, on the eve of my visit to the abattoirs of Toulouse. Effectively one quarter of a century old, to the day, the contemporary art museum is hosted by a giant, pink brick slaughterhouse in the guise of a basilica. An honorific designation, but also an architectural “profile.” A salutary complexion (redolent of the earthy erotic surface value of all architecture in la ville rose. A massification of brutality, proto-Fordist in spirit, yet also brutalist with porous tentacles like many contemporary “hub” airports. All of these. Three and a half (of my) lifetimes it rendered livestock cuts. The river Garonne ran with blood and entrails. In the city’s municipal bulletin of February, 1937, celebrating the “complete transformation” of 100 years as a “hideous eyesore” in just a few months following the denouement of Europe’s great war (the next one will simply be the war), one finds a photo1 of some youngsters. On what looks like a chilly day, three boys leer into the lens as excitable folks who might never again turn in a chemical likeness to remember themselves by were wont to do in newsprint contexts then. A rather less eager and scrawnier man leans on the handle of what could be a pick or a spade, at the head of the row that spans a moment, for an instant bluntly foregrounded, of a workaday routine. It’s got an Anton Corbin shoots Joy Division vibe. The caption tells us nothing of man or boy: “From their stables to the slaughter rooms, the young lambs are transported on special carts on which they are heaped after being tied up.” Their limpid faces just the frontal pitch in no particular direction of various but indistinct, pallid ends of the organism. What they call a pile. They must be out cold already, but what if they are fully conscious and totally hopeless? Also known as a humorist grace à son Cri de Toulouse (purveyor of “actualités fantaisists”—whimsical, satirical takes on current events), I wonder if the photographer wrote his own caption. That is, if he was an exegete too. Or the image of one, since in French they call a photographer a photograph. July 25, 2025, art sings straight from the tomb, including a clutch of young prize-winning new voices on the French visual arts scene. But the bulk of the space is dedicated to a mid-career survey by Mikalene Thomas, All About Love, which emphasizes the artist’s use of multi-medi photo and video-collage, sourced largely from 1970’s Jet Magazine pin-ups. Lush, eroticized interiors and bookish domestic scenes populate the main hall. A note taped to the side of a shelf reads, in ballpoint pen, “What is feminist art? ‘The female black body’[.]” A note of encouragement, too, but in someone else’s hand; “You got this.” A pair of heels lean on silver shag carpet at the foot of an unoccupied easy chair. Bodies are missing. Tiny reminders shout from the floors of the museum, “MERCI DE NO PAS TOUCHER [.]” Cruelty or tease, who can say? A vintage tri-directional floor lamp features one garishly incongruous ultra-high lumen bulb, which feels like a touch of authenticity, aside from or because of the anachronism. These establishing hots center a certain void in “domestic memory”—museological décors, gorgeous bodies bisected by various impositions, lots of paint, tinsel, glitter, wallpaper-like patterns, gleaming and washed out or hypersaturated ptels, drop-shadow-like phantom limbs. A gorge is a void, actually. In one room called “Les lutteuses,” two black women are depicted wrestling one another, piling on, in spandex tiger- and zebra-skin printed, sheer body suits. That and the commemorative iron reliefs of bulls’ heads in the stairwells haphazardly echo (the building and the exposition as tandem and vying—struggling—sites). It’s hard not to allegorize the lover’s body via lambs to slaughter in the twilight moment of gaze and gazeless rows, piles, and “chariots” Bergé captured in the abattoirs’ former glory. There’s even a collage late in the show that reprises Bow Wow Wow’s infamous LP cover for See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang Yeah, City All Over! Go Ape Crazy! (1981); lead singer Annabella Lewin cites Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), all of 14 years old. Lewin, the English-Burmese protégé of punk mise-en-scène Malcolm McClaren, in Thomas’ Afrocentric2 rendition, is identifiable by the bunched up mohawk at vanishing point. Exoticism so belabored it sneers in return. The leopard-skin rug that blocks view of her tits on the sleeve of their hit single “I Want Candy” (1982) is a dead giveaway that all lutteuses of color consider meat as the adaptive technology that it is. The abattoirs’ adaptation itself makes for a becoming-medium of the building; as the song says, “She’s a brick house.” Tucked in the corner of the prize-winners wing is 2017 laureate Cindy Coutant’s video Télédésir, a dramatically soundtracked close up of a pair of snails engaged in different sorts of parallel play. The climax finds the two piling atop and curling around each other. Are they wrestling or copulating? Here in France, they eat snails. They are harvested and cooked in their shells. But Deleuze’s definition of meat: flesh in correlation with bone, is no good here. A snail’s shell isn’t bone. It is skin.

On Naperville

This is an exurb of diaphanous sods and fountains clogged with goose shit. The outlots of Super

H Mart befuddle GPS. Purgatorial adolescents waylaid by “developments.” Etc.

On Mika Rottenberg

Before I went to see the Mika Rottenberg show, I was thinking about print and digital reading

environments, and what sort of reading matter best suited either. The way I use my poetry books, for example, like any other reading matter prone to cynicism or non-sequitur demands the body longs to withstand, glad-handed push notifications have just as much pretense as print, with its bespoke theories and obsolete elegies, but of course the pretense is to something much less obtuse: an alert. Digital alerts cannot be repurposed or “reframed” by even the most alacritous conceptualist. A book can be a sponge, a towel. The demeaned fascinations of “the book” are good for something after all. At the Rottenberg show, I met a friend. Images of maquiladoras and Chinese restaurants in a US-Mexico border town danced at one end of a black box theater nested in the white cube gallery and attached with a sort of faux-limestone cavern. One senses encryption algorithms at work in the air between us as we chat, and sentiments of retribution, as scenes of lop-sided production and consumption stoke strange, unhappy moments of elation. The space was sober and gaudy at the same time. Rottenberg’s narrator is really just a camera somehow snuck into what’s real. The real inauthenticity of things. Watching No Nose Knows, I had a déjà vu. Bunny Glamazon is a professional wrestler and porn actress. The camera follows her as she scoots through an attenuated recollection of my own childhood (although I think the piece is set in a Chinese industrial metropolis). As a child, it seemed to me that all of the downtown structures were as vacant as the suburban lawns. Traps that hold nothing but demarcate, like a blueprint, what might take place. I used to imagine how I would put every last corner of every building to use, how to furnish every inch of its spaces, whom too admit or house or employ there, etc. She enters a building and passes through small rooms and corridors, echoey, disused ones. Smoke-filled bubbles chase Bunny along the way, or they await her as she enters a room. They punctuate the design parameters of this labyrinth, help us decrypt the ordained but invisible escape route. Pac Man, I guess; the way is dotted (with cultured pearls). Occasionally they burst and foul up the air. One trap traps another. I took home a copy of the exhibition catalogue, Easypieces, just to get it all in writing. The philosopher Diane Coole writes of the true thrill of corroboration she receives from Rottenberg’s work; Rottenberg materializes Coole’s philosophical precepts. All about claims, logics, and processes, the author confesses to being a follower. It’s vaguely sentimental. Finding corroboration is meeting a friend. I am repurposing these pages, as a souvenir of a friend I met and have yet to ever see again. Peel back the process of how things are made and you can do a kind of “spiritual Marxism” that gives “social Surrealism.” Narrative is the phantom engine of our affections, because without it we would know that every unspooling of an us is a grafting of isolate events, and we couldn’t complain a whit about alienation without a story of what we deserve.

On the Equator

“Moonlight in the valley is before and after history.” Reading the Groupo de Arte Callejero’s

memoirs, you notice these militant street artists of Argentina’s 1990’s-early 2000’s popular

rebellion do not define themselves as countercultural. Like Gertrude Stein, an iconoclast is always on behalf of the people. The Group’s images, in their words, “come from a ‘political being.’” There is every reason this worrisome analogy between postmodern artivists and a modernist hermeticist, hemispheres apart may yet be exact, until we can really say what distinction there is between a deserter and a fugitive. How you answer is the answer. An iconoclast is asking what counterculture can only refute. What distinction is there between extermination and justice? Take the example of Stein after the liberation of France. As the premise for and predatory architecture of the Marshall Plan is contrived and handsome G.I. Joes mingled in the meadows and staggered over cobblestones, she who festooned her imponderables with images of a phenomenological being then makes two texts: one translation of speeches with forward full of oblong praise for the Vichy collaborationist general Pétain; the other, “Reflections on the Atomic Bomb.” Taken together, they could constitute the prediction of a new era—an era of flaccid nationalism—compared to parodic but faithful hero worship, in which she had long indulged—soft nationalism underpinned by mutually assured destruction—could constitute a critique of this new heading without destiny, this diffuse metropole that laments as well as it forgets, this unlikeable consumptive: Paris, United States. Could Stein’s finale constitute a critique of constitutions? All just to say that once the great temper of experiment detonates the next phase is its inevitable dwindling, only spent embers for heat. All sorts of things become possible amongst the ruins. The money can flow tastefully out of view of the innocent. You wake up one morning and the street signs are altered. There are twice as many, all point in one direction and reading “Here live genocidists.” The Groupo de Arte Callejero has been here, preparing for an “escrache,” creating a “living map” of the neighborhood’s power. Federal pardons cannot assure the impunity they seek to award to those responsible for the disappeared. Those responsible remain, hidden in plain sight. Former clandestine detention centers are tagged with mock signage and the genocidists’ neighbors informed and organized to finally oust the beasts. The logics of social condemnation and workaday traffic flows are linked by an icon. (A red octagon cannot mean go.) Flushing out genocidists is the future of the north, too. We will need to know all about both seaming together the remains and circling the war pigs. The whole world will need to know soon.

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1 Taken by local newspaper man Marius Bergé, a great booster of the local rugby team who would, in fact, take the world cup for its own in 2023.

2 When I use the term “Afrocentric” I am thinking of Afrocentricity: the various ways cultural production tries to counterbalance Eurocentric (or “Euroethnic”) world-views, perspectives that, in the words of Lorenzo Thomas, add up to “an unexamined aberration purporting to be universal.”

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