Repetition and Difference: LTTR

Julia Bryan-Wilson
Artforum
Summer 2006
(re-published in Art Practical, December 4, 2013)

Excerpt:
In a political climate tinged by anger, defeatism, and the persistent shaming of unruly forms of queerness, LTTR objective is a generosity based in exuberance. It is, in other words, with a purposeful critical promiscuity that LTTR puts itself forward…

LTTR’s critical promiscuity emphasizes bringing different bodies together across race, gender, and generation. Likewise, the contents of the journals do not conform easily to categories, and often blur the lines between art, criticism, and fiction. In the four issues produced to date (each produced in a limited edition of one thousand copies and distributed mostly in independent bookstores), contributors have included emerging artists, transgender activists, punk musicians, and established scholars. Authors have ranged from Eileen Myles to Lisa Charbonneau, Anna Bloom to Matt Wolf; and artists from Mary McAlister and Zara Zandieh to Gloria Maximo and Lynne Chan. To get a concrete sense of the publication’s wide-ranging forms of production, consider the second issue (called “Listen Translate Translate Record”), which included a CD with audio tracks by Sarah Shapiro, Wikkid, and Boyfriend, as well as an altered tampon by Fereshteh Toosi, a poster by Silka Sanchez, “mood charts” by Leah Gilliam, poetry by Mary DeNardo, an essay by Craig Willse, and a small, stand-alone exam book, complete with a reproduced sticky note and scrawled notes to the instructor, by Astria Suparak. With every issue, LTTR draws on the resources of friends and colleagues, sharing the labor according to skills and energies; as much as the journal stems from do-it-yourself impulses, it is always a finely wrought object.

Read full article on Art Practical: http://www.artpractical.com/feature/repetition-and-difference-lttr