Do you remember when you were seventeen and you thought about being young, and urban, and an artist? Maybe you imagined whitewashed loft spaces with a low-key reek of depravity and beautiful people with their improbable haircuts. And maybe there were poetry readings, and everything was a little bit of a performance, and everything was deeply, self-consciously cool.
Thursday night at the launch of GULCH: An Assemblage of Poetry and Prose, Torontoist found itself in the thick of something that looked an awful lot like this adolescent fantasy. Hatched by Steel Bananas, a collective dedicated to exploring critical theory in real-life art and culture, GULCH is themed around the idea of the rhizome. (For those Torontoist readers who have never suffered or savoured a romp through this field of critical theory, the rhizome is an image that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri borrow from biology to describe a way of thinking that values multiplicity, disjunction, and non-hierarchical development. Don’t be afraid to hit a little Wikipedia on this one.) And if you thought your second-year poststructuralist theory class would never take wing in the real world, GULCH aims to make you think again. Steel Bananas practises what amounts to a sort of guerrilla academia, mingling heady with hip.
Continue reading: This Shit is Steel Bananas on the main Torontoist site.
Congrats to Steel Bananas on the great launch!