Book Launch, Performance, and Conversation: Some Monologues by Tyler Coburn
Tyler Coburn, Some Monologues, 2025. Photo: Justin Lubliner
Location
Midtown Manhattan
Address provided upon RSVP.
About the event
Doors: 7:45pm
Event: 8–10pm
Free, RSVP required.
Join us for the New York release of Some Monologues by Tyler Coburn. On this occasion, Coburn presents a new monologue entitled People that draws influence from A Personal History of American Theatre (1980), a one-person performance by the American actor and writer Spalding Gray (1941–2004). Moving through a set of index cards bearing the names of plays he acted in, Gray told stories related to those productions, dwelling on events unfolding behind the scenes. As the order of the index cards was random, no two performances were ever the same. In Coburn’s version, each of his cards indicates the name of a person who has a role in the book: an academic he interviewed for a project, an amorous attendee to one of his monologues, his collaborator Susan Bennett (the original voice actress of Siri), a data center employee who insulted him, and more. People brings focus to Coburn's many collaborators and the monologues they helped create.
After performing People, Coburn is joined in conversation by writer and art critic Nicole Kaack.
About the book
Working at the nexus of performance, art writing, and fiction, Tyler Coburn creates monologues that explore how the “I” is marked in speech. His myriad topics—alternate history, legal personhood, digital labor, and resonant frequency, to name a few—defy straightforward modes of presentation, often insisting on site-specificity and social intimacy at the expense of conventional documentation.
Some Monologues collects, for the first time, the scripts of Coburn’s work from the past fifteen years, many of which have not previously been published. Accompanying them are texts by eleven artists, writers, curators, and scholars who experienced these performances firsthand, collaborated in their making, conversed with the artist about them, or share an interest in the subjects they engage. Written in theoretical, poetic, and autobiographical registers, these contributions offer new perspectives on the monologue as an expansive and relational form.
About the author
Tyler Coburn is an artist, writer, and professor based in New York. He received a 2024 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and his writing has appeared in ArtReview, BOMB, C Magazine, Dis, e-flux journal, frieze, LEAP, Metropolis M, Mousse, and Rhizome. Coburn is the author of five books: I’m that angel (self-published, 2012), Robots Building Robots (CCA Glasgow, 2013), Richard Roe (Sternberg, 2019), Solitary (Sternberg and Art Sonje Center, 2022), and Some Monologues (Wendy's Subway, 2025). He has presented artwork at such venues as Centre Pompidou, Paris; Bergen Kunsthall; Hayward Gallery, London; Para Site, Hong Kong; and Kunstverein Munich.
About the speaker
Nicole Kaack is an independent writer, editor, and curator whose research interests include language, memory, and performance. Kaack's writing has been published by Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, ARTnews, Artforum, ArtReview, BOMB, Cleveland Review of Books, and Sound American. She has organized exhibitions and programs at the Kitchen, Hunter College, A.I.R. Gallery, NARS, Miriam Gallery, HESSE FLATOW, and Small Editions. Previous roles include editorial program manager at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), associate director at A.I.R. Gallery, curatorial fellow at the Kitchen, and archival fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. With Mira Dayal, Kaack runs the collaborative artists' book project prompt:.