Objects that Matter: Olson, Bergvall, and the Poetics of Articulation Nathan Brown On October 29, 2005, I spent the afternoon at the “Noulipo” Conference at the RedCat theater in Los Angeles. The conference was devoted to the pertinence of the French avant-garde movement OuLiPo to recent American poetry grounded in constraint-based writing and procedural methods of composition. On a panel titled “The Politics of Constraint,” Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young delivered what has since become a notorious performance of their “Foulipo” manifeso—short for Feminist OuLiPo. Isn’t it curious, Spahr and Young asked, that the homosocially male and mathematically inclined coterie of the OuLiPo were holding their meetings at exactly the same time that feminist body art by women like Carolee Schneeman, Shigeko Kubota, Marina Abramovic, and Eleanor Antin asserted the irrevocable impact of the sexual revolution upon the international art scene? What could have been, Spahr and Young wanted to know, if the practitioners of OuLiPo and of feminist body art had more openly thought through the consequences of each practice for the other, back in the 1960s and ’70s? And what might yet emerge if we thought through, and practiced, those consequences today? But it was the way that Spahr and Young posed these relatively straightforward questions that has continued to elicit controversy and in some cases belittling dismissals—most recently on Ron Silliman’s influential blog.1 On stage at the RedCat, Spahr and Young read a text from which they had deleted all instances of the letter “r”—a procedure referred to as “slenderizing” in the OuLiPo Compendium.2 The first sentence of their text thus reads “One day we wee talking about wok fom the 70’s, all that body pefomance wok that suddenly began to happen, all at once.”3 And as they read from their slenderized text, Spahr and Young proceeded to strip naked—and to redress, as it were—three times over the course of their performance. Their strategy was thus to splice the two signature gestures of the movements under investigation: getting naked in public (in the case of feminist body art), and the subjection of a text to a uniformly applied, pre-determined operation (in the case of the OuLiPo). “Take off your clothes and say procedure,” reads the epigraph to their text from Yesterday’s News, by Bay Area poet Taylor Brady. In a critical response to this performance, Kenneth Goldsmith has characterized Spahr and Young’s manifesto as “awash in nostalgia”—nostalgia for a bygone era of spontaneous happenings in which the body was at once a paradise regained and a battleground to be fought for.4 But to my mind VOL. 3 NO. 3.