Pretty Woman
“Pretty Woman” is an editorial project by Pablo Marte published by consonni involving a fiction essay and ten interventions.
The fiction essay has a 2-3-3 structure.
2: at a merely fictional level, this is the story of the last years of Leni Peickert’s life told by the already deceased Leni Peickert. As if there were two hands, one of which recounts the other.
3: these are the parts the book is divided into, where the first and third parts deal with Leni’s narrative and the central part comprises a second fictional level that stands as the bulk of the essay. They are made up of fragments of texts that Leni wrote, along with comments by way of scholia to the main text.
3: the book forms the third station on a circuit whose purpose is to pose questions about the strange (and not so strange) act of re-writing, beyond simply asking “what is rewriting?”. How do you report back at the end of a journey? Probably by taking it up again from the beginning, so as to at least confirm that through questions one changes place. That beginning is a film that in itself already constitutes something rewritten: “Pretty Woman and other stories, a film with Alexander Kluge” (2011-12), or how “Pretty Woman” would have run if the German director Alexander Kluge had shot it. The book’s relation to the film is that of another rewriting, since they both revolve around the same character: Leni Peickert. Leni who has the face of Vivian (Julia Roberts) in the film, Leni in first person in the book. The way station between these two planks came about as the result of consonni’s inviting Pablo Marte to participate in their HPC programme, under the rubric of “The problem lies in the medium”, which was in turn made up of three sessions, in which a possible dialectic for rewriting was posed: Correspondence - Displacement- Performativity.
The editorial project is made up of ten interventions, all of them entitled “Pretty Woman”, carried out by the following artists: Susana Talayero, Jorge Núñez de la Visitación, Raúl Domínguez, Pernan Goñi, Sahatsa Jauregi, Daniel Mera, José Manuel Sanz and Grace Livingston. The remaining two are the work of the theoretician of the copy and the original, Walter Benjamin, and the writer and film-maker Alexander Kluge.
These interventions are shaped in a notebook that can buy exclusively on this website, and in some close bookstores, together the 10 notebooks and the book of Pablo Marte for 35€.
Pablo Marte (Cadiz, 1975) is an artist. His work revolves around the way that processes of image significance and discourse production are articulated –and rearticulated-, through a symptomatic, expansive, heterogeneous assembly practice. He has shown his work, individually and collectively, in contexts that include “First Thought Best” (Eremuak, Artium, Vitoria 2014), “Marginalia” (Arteleku, Donosti, 2013), Festival Pantalla Fantasma (Bilbao, 2013); L’Occasione (Bilbao, 2012), EspaiDos (Terrassa, 2010); and “Antes que todo” (CA2M, Mostoles, 2010). In 2012 he was the curatorial resident at the Fundacion Bilbaoarte, where he developed the sporadic exhibition cycle “Enter the Ghost, Exit the Ghost, Re-Enter the Ghost”. He took part in the Consonni’s HPC programming with “The Problem Lies in the Medium” and, also for Consonni, wrote and directed the play “Again, against”, premiered in BAD, Bilbao Festival of Contemporary Dance and Theatre (2013).
