TYLER COBURN: Some Monologues
Book Launch, Performance and Conversation
4 February 2026 Doors 6.30pm, performance begins at 7pm
Join us for the release of Some Monologues by Tyler Coburn, a publication that gathers fifteen years of the artist’s scripts (Wendy’s Subway, 2025). 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 Orit Gat.
Free, booking essential, to book please email [email protected]
Published December 2025 by Wendy's Subway
Document Series #13
Design by Bryce Wilner
Softcover, 336 pages, 9.25 x 6.625 inches
ISBN: 979-8-9909878-7-6
Edition of 1,000
Printed in Estonia
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 four books: I’m that angel (self-published, 2012), Robots Building Robots (CCA Glasgow, 2013), Richard Roe (Sternberg, 2019), and Solitary (Sternberg and Art Sonje Center, 2022). He has presented artwork at such venues as Centre Pompidou, Paris; Bergen Kunsthall; Hayward Gallery, London; Para Site, Hong Kong; and Kunstverein Munich. His Henry Moore Foundation Research Fellowship in 2017 focused on Garth Evans’ Artist Placement Group placement with British Steel Corporation 1969-71.
About the speaker
Orit Gat is a British writer and art critic living in London whose work on contemporary art, books, digital culture, and football has appeared in numerous magazines. She teaches in the writing programme at the Royal College of Art, where she is also the managing editor of the journal, draught. She is currently working on her first book, titled If Anything Happens, which looks at football (soccer) as a prism through which to explore questions about immigration, nationalism, race, gender, money, love, and the possibility of belonging.