Today on Jacket 2, I am delighted to present a guest post from Gerald Janecek on the work of the conceptual artist and writer Dmitri Prigov, whose work is the focus of one chapter of A Common Strangeness. Some time ago, Jerry shared with me an extraordinary video of Prigov performing with the musician Vladimir Tarasov in the apartment studio of Ilya Kabakov in Moscow in 1986. Below (and on Jacket2), I present part of this video: Prigov and Tarasov’s performance of the 49-aya azbuka or 49th Alphabet from Prigov’s Azbuki or Alphabets series (you can read the Russian text here). Jerry’s commentary on the work and its performance can be read here. Together I hope they will serve as an introduction to a writer and artist who deserves to be far better known in the English-speaking world.
Jacob Edmond is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He is author of A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature (Fordham UP, 2012). His articles have appeared in journals such as Comparative Literature, Contemporary Literature, Poetics Today, The China Quarterly, the Slavic and East European Journal, and Russian Literature. He is editor (with Henry Johnson and Jacqueline Leckie) of Recentring Asia: Histories, Encounters, Identities (Brill / Global Oriental, 2011), and editor and translator (with Hilary Chung) of Yang Lian’s Unreal City: A Chinese Poet in Auckland (Auckland University Press, 2006).
For more, see:
http://www.otago.ac.nz/english/staff/edmond.htm
http://otago.academia.edu/JacobEdmond
http://commonstrangeness.wordpress.com/
