Dena Beard
Dena Beard is the Executive Director of The Lab, a non-profit experimental art and performance space located in the Mission district in San Francisco. Her work at The Lab considers the exhibition and performance space as a site to investigate and dismantle systems of perception. Beard has organized exhibitions and projects with Dora García, Ellen Fullman, Fritzia Irízar, Jacqueline Gordon, Brontez Purnell, Constance Hockaday, Wadada Leo Smith, Lutz Bacher, Norma Jeane, Anna Halprin, Barry McGee, Silke Otto-Knapp, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, among others.
If you could recommend 3 books to anyone, what would they be?
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Finnegans Wake inspires what the artist Dora García calls “irreverent communities,” large swaths of people from every walk of life who are devoted to untangling the endless mysteries and interpretative possibilities of the confounding (and often hilarious) text.
I’m an insomniac, and I’ve kept a copy of Finnegans Wake on my nightstand for over decades — the strangeness of its words often helps dislodge me from the world of sense just enough to drift into unconsciousness.
Consent Not To Be A Single Being by Fred Moten
This is actually a trilogy of books that includes Black and Blur, Stolen Life, and The Universal Machine. The title is a quote from Édouard Glissant and is the essence of Moten’s practice. Duke University Press gives a small synopsis of that flow: “Althusser informs analyses of rappers Pras and Ol' Dirty Bastard; Shakespeare encounters Stokely Carmichael; thinkers like Kant, Adorno, and José Esteban Muñoz and artists and musicians including Thornton Dial and Cecil Taylor play off each other” and that’s just a small constellation within Moten’s solar system.
Here is a chorus of voices that are always and already thinking with and around and because of one another. And as with Joyce’s Wake, the books are best read with others rather than alone – they become alive in study, in laughter, in the shared knowledge gleaned between the lines. These aren’t just books; they are ways of being.
Ghosts by César Aira
A dear friend sent me Ghosts last December, at the height of the pandemic. It is a small book and I read it in a day. Then I started again. In all, I think I read it four times that month and I've been ravenously reading his many, many books ever since. Aira's sentences are like lightning, and they come one after the other in such rapid succession that at some point I find myself hovering over the page unsure of fact or fantasy. It's deeply physical and endlessly funny and still manages to use language alone to dismantle the architecture of a world built on oppression.
What are you reading now?
I'm currently in the middle of Anna Kavan's Ice with some detours to J.G. Ballard's Complete Short Stories. I'm also always reading and rereading books by The Lab's artists: Asher Hartman's Mad Clot on a Holy Bone, Brontez Purnell's 100 Boyfriends, and Tongo Eisen-Martin's Heaven is All Goodbye.
Whose reading list are you most curious about?
“Chus Martínez.”
— Dena Beard
