Posted: July 27th, 2010 | Author: Blake | Filed under: Collected Thoughts | No Comments »
Universe of Remotes, Syria
Having spent $50 to replace a proprietary remote earlier this year, I was sympathetic to the Syrian solution.
Syrian Spice Stall
I listened to the excellent Planet Money podcast #148 today: When Cinnamon Moved Markets, in which the Planet Money team speaks to Tom Sandage, an Economist editor and author of An Edible History of Humanity. In the interview, Sandage details how ancient Arab traders justified exorbitant prices on spices using tall tales. The traders would describe how one could only find cinnamon in the nests of gargantuan, unbelievably violent birds. In order to retrieve the cinnamon, traders had to butcher a cow and leave it strewn across the beach. The birds would then carry the meat back to their nests which would topple due to the weight and the traders would scurry to retrieve the cinnamon before being eaten alive.
Sandage calls spices, “the internet of the ancient world”–a method of mapping out paths of cultural influence and trade, a network of taste, a flare of flavor, and now its historical aftertaste. It is well worth a listen.
Posted: July 9th, 2010 | Author: Blake | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Poetry | No Comments »
There is still some mystique of travel,
Some exquisite danger that requires affirmation
Of arrival. The thought of the plane
Twisting in the air like a fan;
The sharks circling the paralyzed boat
Anchored an impossible distance from the sun.
Even the monotony of the car crash,
Glass burning, bubbling in the wind:
The thought of the body eternally
Cut from its intended destination.
And so we go out into the world
And the old pray for us.
For a moment, we are pioneers again
Feeling the memory of the unknown,
The ghost of the undiscovered
Shivering each foot of the usual journey.
Posted: May 2nd, 2010 | Author: Blake | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: poem | No Comments »
Walking with two cups of French Roast
Across an uneven field,
Coffee dashing across my clothes,
Staining my palms and nails,
I think of Justice and her stillness—
How one step would upset the scales.
No hope of romping across Swiss alps,
Of holding fresh tea leaves,
Or taking a lover in Cleveland
(That blindfold bespeaking her wild side).
No, she must remain rooted in place—
A prison-bronze gilding her ungently,
Perspectives brought before her
which the stilled scales answer—
Scales held like her distant cousin
Atlas holds up the world. They dip,
Hold, judge, sway, pronounce guilty,
While, blindfolded, she guesses
Outcomes from the cries and whoops
Of the storytellers before her.
Posted: May 2nd, 2010 | Author: Blake | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
What caused Wordsworth to proclaim of the sonnets: “with this key / Shakespeare unlocked his heart” (Wordsworth, “Scorn Not the Sonnet”)? Or led Emerson to proclaim “Who ever read the volume of the Sonnets without finding that the poet had there revealed, under masks that are no masks to the intelligent, the lore of friendship and of love; the confusion of sentiments in the most susceptible, and, at the same time, the most intellectual of men?” (quoted in Schoenbaum, 314)? While scholars have frequently inveighed against this view, the identification of the speaker of the sonnets with Shakespeare himself recurs time and again—it rallies legions of South Hamptonians against Pembrokians and transforms the identities of “Mr. W.H.,” “the rival poet” and “dark lady” into the literary equivalent of King Tut’s tomb. And yet, as scholars frequently point out, we have no firm external evidence linking Shakespeare to the speaker—and the poems themselves appear consciously stripped of external markers. The identification arises then from something within the text itself—a set of persuasive “reality effects” that demand critical attention, whether built in by Shakespeare to create the illusion of a real speaker, the result of speaking from personal experience, or some mix of the two. In The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Helen Vendler argues, “No sufficient description exists in the critical literature of how Shakespeare makes his speaker “real” (18). I agree and hope to shed light on some of the ways in which the sonnets create a speaker who feels “real”.
Vendler surveys several of the sequence’s reality effects in a section worth repeating. She lists: Temporal (the formation of several “’panels’ of time” that imply the speaker’s continued existence and memory), Emotional (the use of “sharply conflicting moods with respect to the same topic” (19)), Semantic (the deft switching between “compartments of discourse” like economics, theology, and medicine (19)), Conceptual (the inclusion of “many incompatible models of existence… even within the same poem” (20)), Philosophical (in which the speaker rejects “received ideas” (20) and cultural norms), Perceptual (the consistent grounding of abstractions in real, perceptible things), and Dramatic (in which the speaker responds to an antagonist and states their position using indirect discourse (21)). Yet Vendler has left out a vital reality effect that has bewitched and bewildered readers: Aporia. Aporia, from the Greek “aporos” meaning “without passage,” is a constant presence in a text without a clean narrative trail. Yet the holes and irresolvable riddles of the sonnets, far from rendering the text alien or incomprehensible, create the sense of a speaker living outside of the text.
The text is riddled with Aporia—and they provoke a litany of questions. What are we to make of the ‘procreation sonnets’ and their sense of difference from the rest of the sequence? How do we account for the poetically-inferior, octosyllabic sonnet 145, or its apparent play on Anne Hathaway’s name in the last two lines? Or the inclusion of sonnet 146—the only sonnet unambiguously religious and lacking a love object? How to explain sonnets 153 and 154, which end the sequence with an elaboration on a six-line epigram by Marianus Scholasticus? At least sonnet 20, a site of endless contestation, has a sense of in-placeness—something of the glad fit of jigsaw piece—which these other sonnets lack. We will examine the problematic poems in greater detail and attempt to answer how they create the sense of a “real” speaker.
The ‘procreation’ or ‘marriage sonnets’, 1 through 17, form a unit that feels substantially different from the ensuing sequence. Their repetition of the argument for procreation, their reliance on rhetorical flourish, and their rebuttal by later sonnets offering art as an alternative avenue for immortality suggest that the poem are commissioned or extrinsically motivated in some way. The sense of an economic or social motive for the poems outside of the text creates the appearance that the speaker exists outside the text as well. He engages in an economic or social context outside and unmentioned by the poems that we must intuit, as we must intuit him. The compositional structure of the ‘procreation sonnets’ also suggests a real speaker. Vendler argues that the first sonnet serves as an index: “Such a wide sweep [of key words and themes in sonnet 1] leads me to think that the sonnet may have been deliberately composed late, as a “preface” to the others. The sonnet can be seen, in sum, as an index to the rest of the sonnets” (47). Even if we take only the first two lines: “From fairest creatures we desire increase, / That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,” we encounter intertwined themes of beauty and fairness, the speaker’s attachment to and privileging of beauty, and the axiomatic need for “increase”. We also encounter the image of the rose. The poem, then, appears to be written after the others and inserted to prepare us for what is next. If we accept Vendler’s argument, then the narrator is not tied within the sequence, as in Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, but above it. The sequence does not imply a speaker so much as it does a poet sensitive to its needs, fortifying it in some areas, rearranging in others.
Sonnet 145 is contentious. Critics have argued that Shakespeare did not write it, or that even if he did it does not belong in the sequence (Booth, 500-1). More recent criticism contends that it is an early work, suggested by its stylistic weakness and its play on Anne Hathaway’s name in the couplet: “I hate, from hate away she threw / And saved my life saying not you” (lines 13-14) (italics mine) (Gurr, 223). The poem is one of the few to tie the speaker to the real-world Shakespeare, complicating the concept of a completely independent speaker. The poem is also clearly novice work; for instance the final quatrain, the most consciously poetic:
I hate she altered with an end,
That followed it as gentle day
Doth follow night, who like a fiend
From heav’n to hell is flown away. (lines 9-12)
The night to day simile falls flat and mixing the metaphor with the “fiend” does not quicken the image. The poem’s threefold repetition of “I hate” also creates the sense that it won’t arrive. Where the speaker later packs three concepts of the human experience of time into three quatrains (see sonnet 60), this poem struggles to complete a sentence. As Gurr suggests, “It is an anemic poem” (222). Yet, remarkably, the inconsistent quality creates a more realistic speaker—one who has early poems—creating the sense of temporality and progress not only in the narrative of the sequence but in the development of the poet. We begin to see that “reality” arises when the distance between the speaker and the poems widens—as Seamus Heaney once wrote, there is “distance in his head” (Heaney, “St. Kevin and the Blackbird). A sequence gives the poet the rare ability to create an expectation, such as the regularity in quality, tone, form, and content in sonnets 18 to 125, and then disturb that expectation as the poet does again in sonnet 146.
Sonnet 146 strikes at a tangent. The poem lands on the discussion of love and earthly beauty firmly like a blow:
Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
. . . . . . . . these rebel pow’rs that thee array;
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? is this thy body’s end?
Then soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store:
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more.
So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men,
And death once dead, there’s no more dying then.
The poem jets out of orbit of the “sweet boy”, the “dark mistress”, beauty, and the rose, threatening to leave behind all those “hours of dross” for spiritual concerns. The poem demonstrates a flexibility and diversity of thought, similar to Vendler’s idea of the Conceptual effect. It also departs from the concerns of the sequence, unlike other model sequences. In Astrophil and Stella, Stella functions as the locus point of every poem—the title promises as much—and the sequence progresses through an orderly, if vague, narrative.[1] In contrast, 146 flares out from the sequence, leaving behind homes of all sorts: the body, the mansion, and the earth, while leveling them all through simile. Even while it rebukes the body, the poem still locates the speaker within it—this consciousness of the speaker’s life inside a body reinforces the sense of his corporeality and reality. The poem succeeds in granting the speaker a physical and spiritual depth—one that is arguably undermined in the final two sonnets.
Sonnets 153 and 154 create, perhaps, the most striking Aporia reality effect. They signal an abrupt shift in tone and register from the ringing condemnation of the ‘dark lady’ at the end of 152: “For I have sworn thee fair: more perjured eye, / To swear against the truth so foul a lie” (13-14). Sonnet 153 appears oblivious of the preceding poem and launches right into an extension of a Greek epigram: “Cupid laid by his brand, and fell asleep; / A maid of Dian’s this advantage found” (153.1-2). Critics have sought both to discredit the poem and remove it from the sequence (Booth, 533) and more recently to link the poem to the sequence and explain its presence. Booth elaborates the bawdy references and the suggestions of venereal disease (“a seething bath which yet men prove / Against strange maladies a sovereign cure” (153.7-8)), which figure earlier in the ‘dark lady’ sequence, for example the couplet of 141: “Only my plague thus far I count my gain, / That she that makes me sin, awards me pain” (13-14). The two poems certainly carry forward themes and concerns of the earlier poems and this seems enough to merit and describe their inclusion for Booth. Burrow attempts to explain the shift by comparing it to other sonnet sequences with similar moments: an Ode in Daniel’s Delia, an anacreontic ode in Barnfield’s Cynthia (1595), and the ‘Anacreontics’ in Spenser’s Amoretti (Burrow, 686). In the other sequences, the odes or anacreontics are labeled and set apart, much like a curtain during intermission, while in Shakespeare’s Sonnets there go undifferentiated. Similar shifts in contemporary sonnet sequences render the decision a little less perplexing intellectually, but it makes it no less jarring as a reader, nor does it detract from the Aporia effect. If anything, we imagine a speaker engaged with contemporary poetry, again existing outside the text. Vendler, in contrast, appears unfazed by the shift:
The very triviality and ancientness of these little myths… cool down the deep oaths of the rhetorically fevered lyric poems. The representative mythical I of 153 and 154 is far from the historical dramatis persona who could urge the young man to get a son, or could watch a woman playing the virginals. Comic distance is thereby gained on the realm of Eros and even on its enem, Diana. The poems de-Christianize the sequence. (649)
Vendler’s argument for the separate I of the final two poems is precise and correct. The poems do not sustain a consistent I—we are forced to imagine the speaker outside of the text as a poet and arranger detached from the “mythical I”. This notion is uncomfortable—we would rather not distinguish between Shakespeare and the poet implied by the text, yet to miss the distinction is mental sloth, wish fulfilment, or poor scholarship. As for Vendler’s explination of the final two poems as an attempt to “de-Christianize the sequence” (649), the wry tone undermines the Greek gods as much as it does the “deep oaths”—Cupid cannot stop “the ending doom” (55.12). The final two sonnets exist to display the poet’s range and end on a witty note. They might also signal the speaker’s independence and battle with venereal disease.
We are left with outlines. The text generates a figure outside of itself—the figure of an author: one who who can navigate and fill the sequence; who has developed as a poet over time; who lives in a body and frets for his soul; and who can create new speakers. It is no wonder then that countless critics have choosen to scribble the name Shakespeare between the outlines of that figure. Yet I believe a more conscientous path of criticism is available. Once we recognize how the sonnets create the figure of the author, we can begin to ask who that figure is free from the endless, distracting battles of Shakespearian biography. We can free the Sonnets from that burden. We can free ourselves from the constant, guilty practice of remaking Shakespeare in our own image.s
Works Cited
Gurr, Andrew. “Shakespeare’s First Poem: Sonnet 145.” Willyshakes.com. reprinted from Essays in Criticism, 21 (1971), 221-6. Web. 28 January 2010.
Heaney, Seamus. Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. Print.
Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Ed. Colin Burrow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print.
Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. London: Arden Shakespeare, 1997. Print.
Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Ed. Stephen Booth. New Haven, CT: Yale University Place, 1977. Print.
Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Print.
Wordsworth, William. “Scorn Not the Sonnet.” Wordsworth, William. 1888. Complete Poetical Works. Bartleby.com. n.d. Web. 30 January 2010.
Schoenbaum, S. Shakespeare’s Lives: New Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Print.
[1] The one interesting moment that I would term an
Aporia reality effect occurs in the eighth song in which the narrator switches from 3
rd to 1
st person. There is no easy explination, and thus, it feels human, the
I attracts greater depth.
Posted: April 4th, 2010 | Author: Blake | Filed under: Essay | Tags: Art, Broodthaers | 1 Comment »
Early in his poetic practice, Marcel Broodthaers altered and disrupted textual meaning, questioning our access to it and blurring the line between literal and visual—an obsession that would later characterize his work as an artist. The first hint of this practice occurred when Broodthaers inserted rectangles of monochrome paper over the poems in his book Pense-Bête, enough to scar the poem’s center without obliterating it entirely (Buchloh 79). Throughout his career Broodthaers would carry on blocking the reader or viewer’s access to resolute meaning and disturbing the balance between signifier and signified. What he said of his plaques could be extended to his entire practice: “They are intended to be read on a double level—each one involved in a negative attitude which seems to me specific to the stance of the artist: not to place the message completely on one side alone, neither image nor text. That is, the refusal to deliver a clear message…” (Broodthaers, 42). Broodthaers pits image and text against one another. His work often functions on several contradictory levels—apt for a man who loved to contradict himself. By examining the text and image in several works, the use of the “Fig,” and Broodthaers’s own writing about his work, we will attempt to find some stable ground amidst Broodthaers’s general dynamiting of meaning and trickiness.
Je Hais Le Mouvement...
After his initial experimentation with blocking access to his poems, Broodthaers’s continued to play with the books of his poetry as art objects. In 1964, he inserted the remaining volumes of his book Pense-Bête, still wrapped in their original paper, and a plastic ball into a base of plaster (Schwarz, 59). The work appears roughshod, an act of whim; the books begin tight and orderly and then droop by the end of the stack. By containing the books in a sculptural context, the viewer cannot access the text without destroying the sculpture. As Schwarz points out, the remaining object is not readymade since it is both serialized and constructed, nor is it surrealist “poetic object,” as the viewer cannot become a reader (Schwarz 60). It does not fit the given molds or mediums, refusing to submit itself or its hidden contents. Here the signifier, the book, triumphs wholeheartedly over the signified, the poems we cannot read. Broodthaers develops this theme of inaccessible meaning in his use of the Figs.
Pense Betes and Recto Reverso
The Figs. appear repeatedly, beginning in 1966 and continuing into Broodthaers’s final work. Media specificity is not a concern, as the Figs. appear in paintings, books, slide projections, films, and drawings—little goes unstamped, unplaqued, or unpainted with Fig. after 1966 (Cusse, 127). In the plaque Pipe et Formes Académiques, an early use of the figure, “Fig. 1” through “Fig. 6” mark geometric forms and a pipe resembling Magritte’s from The Treachery of Images. Broodthaers said that he was “haunted by a certain painting by Magritte, the one in which words figure” (Broodthaers, 39); he comes to terms with the Pipe only by appropriating it and labeling it within his own figurative system. This early work shows him experimenting, but not yet critiquing his own system. In Livre Tableau, Broodthaers expands on the earlier work by providing two frames—the first contains the same five geometric forms and the pipe, linearly numbered with Figs. 1-8. Yet in the second frame, the shapes are re-arranged and the Figs. are applied to them seemingly at random. For example, “Fig 2.” applied to a cube in the left frame, is now inscribed below a pyramid in the eighth position, while an identical pyramid in the second position is labeled “Fig. 8”. There is no logical explanation for the original system of Figs. and even less for the re-ordered system, instead it functions a critique of the attempt to freeze meaning in place, to place trust in a linguistic system that deconstructionism has debunked. The geometric symbols and Fig. inscriptions suggest an encyclopedia, a model in which the text reaches out to illustrations to define what it cannot, to extend beyond letters, text, and language. Snauwaert defines Broodthaers’ usage of figure as such: “it applies to the stage of observation when things are on the point of being named, when the object is about to be connected with a concept. Figure thus implies seeing, observing, but not yet explaining” (Snauwaert, 128). Snauwaert’s definition comes close, but the phrasing (“not yet explaining”) suggests that explanation is possible. Rather the absence of a referent text, the doubling of definitions, and the random, overlapping expansion of the figures preclude meaning. Rather than freezing the moment before meaning arrives, Broodthaers creates situations in which meaning is absent—a concept his Film Section puts additional pressure on.
Livre Tableau and Film Section
Film Stills
In the Film Section of his museum, Broodthaers tagged everything from clocks, pipes, and mirrors to the movie screen itself with “Fig. 0,” “Fig. 1,” “Fig. 2,” or “Fig. 12” (Krauss, 15). Slides and films also bore the distinctive Fig. image and classification. The resulting exhibit appeared scattershot with Figs., a de copia that threatens to overwhelm any attempt at meaning, yet the Figs. are not insincere. By bounding a visual space in a film and labeling it Fig. 1 or Fig. 2, the Figs. suggest that a word could exist for that [ ], a system of meaning could call on that moving image in order to define it. Here we brush up to Derrida’s idea of différance where unless we can distinguish something from something named we cannot name it. We have no ability to name the complex swirl of color in the given space, so Broodthaers makes us conscious of our linguistic and sensory constraints. When we consider the Figs. in the foreground of a slide, like those in Brüssel Teil, they perform a slightly different function. For example in the slide of a lamp-post where pieces of sky are defined as both “Fig. 1” and “Fig. 2.”; the Figs suggest a language that can differentiate between that which appears identical to us. The patches appear identical either because of our existing language programming (think of the many Eskimo words for snow) or from the insensitivity of our senses (the conceptual constraint of being human). It is no wonder that Broodthaers says he feels reassurance from the viewer “no longer feeling at ease” (Broodthaers, 43).
Broodthaers’s “Fig” practice developed until he settled on the variables 0, 1, 2, 12, 21, and the letters A and B (Snauwaert, 128). It is a systematized classification that at the same time resembles a non-system. Broodthaers only detailed explanation of the “Fig” is printed in the interview “Ten Thousand Francs Reward”:
You can see in the Mönchengladbach Museum, a cardboard box, a clock, a mirror, a pipe, also a mask and a smoke bomb, and one or two other objects I can’t recall at this point, accompanied by the expression Fig. 1 or Fig. 2 or Fig. 0 painted on the display surface beneath or to the side of each object. If we are to believe what the inscription says, then the object takes on an illustrative character referring to a kind of novel about society. These object, the mirror and the pipe, submitted to an identical numbering system (or the cardboard box or the clock or the chair) become interchangeable elements on the stage of a theater. Their destiny is ruined. Here I obtain the desired encounter between different functions. A double assignment and a readable texture—wood, glass, metal, fabric—articulate them morally and materially. I would never have obtained this kind of complexity with technological objects, whose singleness condemns the mind to monomania: minimal art, robot, computer.
The nos. 1, 2, 0 appear figurally. And the abbreviations Fig. poorly in their meaning (Broodthaers, 43)
Broodthaers’s “novel about society,” cannot be written, only understood obliquely, as one might understand an essay reading only the citations. Then any hope of meaning further dissolves when you factor in the repetition of Figs with the same classification number or letter. Yet even then Broodthaers insists upon the Figs. as differentiating his art practice from the computers and minimalists, which can only understand binaries. Instead we are left uncomfortable, following a system of classification that makes no real attempt at meaning. With a characteristic parting shot, Broodthaers scrambles his meaning further by calling the appearance of the numbers “figural” and using the abbreviation “Fig.” as the verb “to figure.” Thus, his signals, the numbers must be considered a part of the image even as it stands apart from it and the one concrete area, the “Fig.,” is invested with an uncomfortable degree of flexibility.
Broodthaers poetry, image, and figure converge in his book, Charles Baudelaire. Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes. The book begins with Baudelaire’s poem “la Beauté” with the line “Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes” (“I hate the movement which displaces the lines”) printed in red and “Fig. 1” written beneath the poem. The following pages feature eight regularly spaced Figs., defining the blank space (and displacing the lines), while at the bottom appears one of the words in the highlighted line. On the final page, “La beauté” is reprinted again with “les étoiles” printed in red, in place of “toutes les choses” in one of the lines. The modified poem is labeled “Fig. 2.” (Snauwert 132). In the book, Figs. function both as a means towards definition (as in the case of the two complete poems) and as something to be defined (as in the case of their placement on the blank space). In their second function they also consciously disturb the flow of meaning, suggesting their purpose of wrenching apart signifier and signified. The Figs. enact the dismantling of meaning and text promised by deconstruction.
The poem as image becomes even more explicit in Broodthaers’s re-imagining of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés in which he transforms the thirty-two pages of poetry into black, linear bands, again denying any access to the language but maintaining Mallarmé’s sense of space (Rorimer, 113)—in another of his great lines, Broodthaers wrote: “Space can lead only to paradise” (Broodthaers, 45). Mallarmé’s space had profound implications. Derrida begins Writing and Difference with a quotation from Mallarmé: “All without innovation except for a certain spacing-out of reading.” The critic Barbara Johnson comments that adding “space” to reading means two things for Mallarmé (and, I would argue, Broodthaers): “It means giving a signifying function to the materiality – the blanks, the typefaces, the placement on the page, the punctuation – of writing. And it also means tracking syntactic and semantic ambiguities in such a way as to generate multiple, often conflicting, meanings out of a single utterance.” (Johnson, 346). By maintaining the space, Broodthaers suggests poetry’s function as image and by crossing out the individual words, he suggests and even greater multiplicity of conceivable meanings. Un coup de dés collapses the boundary between image and text entirely by creating image out of text and an image that suggests text due to its context—medium specificity be damned.
In 1973-74, Broodthaers produced a two-sided piece named Untitled (recto/verso) with a 1 and a 0 cut out of cardboard, suggesting the binary. On the reverse side of the 0, Broodthaers wrote “Fig. 0,” “Fig. 1,” “Fig. 2,” and “Fig. A,” suggesting its universal significance, while on the front, he drew a smoking chimneystack in the 1. On the front of the 0 (traditionally the most significant of his figures), he wrote, “A theory of the figure would serve only to give an image of a theory. But the Fig. as a theory of the image?’ (Snauwert, 134). The Fig. opens up and disrupts language where theory is another step towards commoditization of art. We have a final sense of Broodthaers’s humor and irony when we realize he inscribed this on a commodity.
Works Cited
Buchloh, Benjamin, ed. Broodthaers: Writings, Interviews, Photographs. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 1988. Print.
Broodthaers, “Ten Thousand Francs Reward.” Buchloh 39-48. Print.
Buchloh, Benjamin “Open Letter, Industrial Poems.” Buchloh 67-100. Print.
Johnson, Barbara. “Writing” in Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 2004. Print.
Rorimer, Anne. “The Exhibition at the MTL Gallery in Brussels, March 13-April 10, 1970.” Buchloh 101-125. Print.
Schwarz, Dieter, “’Look! Books in plaster!’: On the First Phase of the Work of Marcel Broodthaers.” Buchloh 57-66. Print.
Snauwaert, Dirk “The Figures.” Translated by Kaatje Cusse. Buchloh 127-134. Print
Krauss, Rosalind. “’A Voyage on the North Sea’: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition.” New York, NY: Thames & Hudson. 1999. Print.
Posted: December 14th, 2009 | Author: Blake | Filed under: Collected Thoughts | Tags: Design, Facebook, Narrative, Twitter, Virtual Worlds | 5 Comments »
Renny Gleeson posted an interesting article in which he considers the metaphor of Facebook as a country. He dismisses it arguing that Facebook lacks a narrative or mythology to unite its users like a country unites its citizens. It is worth asking what a narrative looks like in a social network. Where do narratives grow online? What is preventing Facebook from creating that narrative?
First, what does a narrative look like in a social network? While they aren’t perfect, I believe virtual worlds have something of a narrative. How else can you explain a 11.5 million member subscriber base and the level of detail on wowwiki?
In World of Warcraft, there are multiple levels of narrative. There is the surface or game narrative crafted by Blizzard. It is full of conquering demons, racial alliances, seasonal festivals. Believe it or not, it has spawned books. Then there is the meta-narrative: forum debates about changes to the game, in game movies and music videos posted to YouTube and Machinima. Finally there are personal narratives: characters meeting in game and performing quests, friends forming guilds, characters growing in experience (and offline personal lives and health often falling apart).
I don’t have much experience with Second Life, but I imagine it is closer to a nation-building narrative, something of that settler on the digital planes mythos. There is the possibility to meet new people and build new things.
Facebook’s only narrative is meta-narrative with users discussing site redesigns and privacy policies, however, unlike a virtual world, there is no navigation of three-dimensional space, no risk or possibility of encounter. You are consigned to your social circle. You can learn more about a friend by reading their profile and looking at their pictures—but even this is Facebook Stalking and does not build a relationship like speaking to a person would.
In order to have a mythology or narrative, you require characters and conflict. Facebook presents a world with no conflict or challenges internal to itself. Its largest conflict is the challenge of establishing a functional social network—a meta-narrative available to a select few engineers, social media gurus, and facebook afficionados. It is a narrative written on Techcrunch. As for characters, Facebook presents no venue for naturally meeting others, which limits possibility, connection, and enjoyment.
Perhaps the most compelling social network narrative in recent memory is the story of Twitter. Its true naissance occurred this summer when asked by the Department of Defense to suspend network maintenance during the unrest in Iran, so that Iranian stories, 140 characters at a time, could flutter out. Conflict and real characters: Twitter had found its creation story.
Facebook must find its own story and in order to do so it must invite conflict. With its 350 million user-base, it can become the world’s open, social space.
Posted: October 20th, 2009 | Author: Blake | Filed under: Essay | Tags: Art, Line, Manzoni, Pollock | No Comments »
Jackson Pollock, "One", 1949
Piero Manzoni, "Line", 1959
A line. Simplistic and nude, the line bounds and sets loose, delimits and describes. It unites points of space into order, into oneness, allowing depth and physical transport into the canvas. With line, sun-flushed mountains crag up, bowls of fruit retain their freshness, reality is remade and reshaped. Yet what happens when the line makes no attempt at figuration—when it exists only for itself? Or when the artist stashes the line out of sight to be imagined and not seen? Pollock’s 1949 Number One and Manzoni’s Lines challenge the viewer to connect new meaning to line, to conceive of it in a rawer, elementary form
Pollock’s Number One [1949] is characteristic of his work during this period of magnificent productivity. It feels full, skyrocketed with energetic swoops, golden mustard splotches, and tangles of whiplashing white lines. The white lines are the most energetic, constantly swerving off course, asking questions, threatening to leap off in a fuse of white energy. Then there is a thumpy drizzle of grey and blue hints. If you examine the painting closely you are surprised by touches of maroon, fills of jellybean pink and chocolate. Color and line appear to merge. The eye leaps about the canvas seeking a point on which to rest but finds none. As Greenberg suggests, the piece has a definite “flatness”—the webs deny any ability to move in or through the canvas or inhabit its space. Then there is the scale of the piece: five feet three inches by eight feet six inches. The viewer must contend with it.
If Pollock’s work is, in a sense, closed off then Manzoni’s Lines exists in solitary confinement. In Lines, Manzoni painted a straight ink line, varying from less than a meter up to seven kilometers, down a roll of paper, then rolled the paper up and placed it within a cylindrical container, always cardboard with the exception of two in chromed metal, and the longest one in a cylinder made of lead (Foster et al., 414). On the exterior of the case, Manzoni wrote the length of the line, the composition date, and signed it. Yet while the title describes only the rolled up sheaf of paper bearing the line, the tube itself functions as an art object: the contrast between the tan paper and black container, the sharp handwriting, and the mystery of the unopened. That Manzoni altered the materials of the cylinder also suggests the importance of the container as well as the contained. The piece echoes Manzoni’s earlier Artist’s Shit, which plays with the same elements of enclosure, shock-value, and a critical appraisal of the power of the artist’s signature or “aura.” Reinforcing the conceit of Lines, Manzoni specified that the tubes were to be exhibited closed. To see the lines, they must be imagined.
Pollock’s lines never say too much. A journalist, William Wright, once asked Jackson Pollock, “Would it be true to say that the artist is painting from the unconscious, and the—canvas must act as the unconscious of the person who views it?” Pollock’s answer appears at a tangent: “Most of the paint I use is a liquid, flowing kind of paint. The brushes I use are used more as sticks rather than brushes—the brush doesn’t touch the surface of the canvas, it’s just above.” Pollock answers the question of intention, of how to read his work, with a description of process. In a way, he is describing what Kaprow describes in “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock”—the twin appreciation of the vital creation act and the work itself. In viewing the work there is an echo of Pollock’s primal creation act—the canvas on the floor, the mind and the stick hovering above it, Pollock utterly inside the work. How does this relate to Pollock’s lines? Pollock’s lines are not interested in explaining themselves, in speaking a figure, any more than Pollock himself. They suggest only themselves and their creation. As Pollock suggests, there is no ideal, artist-approved way of reading them.
I would contrast Pollock’s rather cagey quote with one from Piero Manzoni’s manifesto, where he proclaims, “… we search for the discovery of our first Images. Images, which are as absolute as possible, which cannot be valued for that which they record, explain and express, but only for that which they are to be” (Manzoni, 80). The essence of Manzoni’s art is the fundamental reduction of human mythology into an image. Lines attempts to approach the imagined space, the Platonic conception of the perfect line, by hiding it from vision, announcing it only on the surface of containers. It is curious to wonder whether Pollock or Manzoni’s lines are more “absolute”. Manzoni’s lines approach the absolute: they exist independently, they are total in themselves, but in the sense of absolute as having total power, I would incline towards Pollock.
Embedded within the two works is Greenberg’s influential essay on Modernist Painting, which declared that: “Because flatness was the only condition painting shared with no other art, Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else” (Greenberg, 87). Pollock’s work forms a foundation for Greenberg’s criticism. Out of it arises the Greenberg’s vocabulary of “color-space,” “allover” uniformity, and the “haptic” versus the “optic” (Foster et al, 439). Pollock’s lines in Number One adhere to the plane, denying figuration. According to Greenberg, Pollock’s lines are so flat that the canvas lacks an optical center or focal point, line functions then to create “a kind of luminous atmosphere, formerly the province of color” (Foster et al, 357). Pollock’s line thus transcend the typical restraints of reality and achieve abstraction—as Fried argues, Pollock’s line delimits “nothing—except, in a sense, eyesight” (Fried quoted in Foster et al., 357). Manzoni, on the other hand, plays with this conception of flatness by rolling the line up, breaking the flat plane. He attempts, tongue-in-cheek, to achieve transcendence of a different order by challenging the viewer to imagine the perfect line. Manzoni’s line is delimited only by our mind’s ability to spool it out.
Both works draw lines, demarcating themselves from the ordinary, the everyday. The lines do what Pollock said the best modern painters do, “They work from within” (Pollock, 22). In weighing the two works against each other, one must appreciate the jester in Manzoni’s work, but I believe it is the “absolute,” the “all-over” subsumption of the eye by Pollock’s visible line that carries us past the everyday.
Works Cited
Foster, Hal, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-alain Bois, and Benjamin h.d. Buchloh. Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004. Print.
Greenberg, Clement. The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969. Edited by John O’Brian. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Print.
Kaprow, Alan. The Legacy of Jackson Pollock (1958) in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Print.
Manzoni, Piero. For the Discovery of a Zone of Images (1957). Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. Edited by Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Print.
Pollock, Jackson. Interview with William Wright (1950). Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. Edited by Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Print.
Posted: October 6th, 2009 | Author: Blake | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: age, body, poem, power | No Comments »
Bricks of darkness clatter through the windows.
Virtual space yawns, collapses us back
into the body, into the pink cove
of the mouth, the arch of the synapse,
the dove of loneliness, the blackbird of company.
It is uncomfortable, so much of the self:
gums and guts sounding the body’s memory,
these stories recalling the taste of health.
Somewhere we hope hearts still beep
And the bombs lie asleep in their sheds.
We have learned the cost of silence is cheap.
It is time, it is time to go to bed.
Posted: August 28th, 2009 | Author: Blake | Filed under: Poetry | Tags: poem, window | No Comments »
Why this perpetual desire to be seeing into?
That a poem should be translucent
as the soul, the experience of experience,
written, perhaps, at a train station,
seated by a wide bay of windows—
while the baker and the lemon merchant talk below
(the poem should smell of bread and lemons).
Ultimately, we want windows, not words,
Or perhaps we want to be the poet,
not the reader of poems,
gazing again out of the window.
But for all this talk of windows, souls,
walls deserve their due: without them,
no privacy for the afternoon lovers,
draped in each other like wild silks;
no way to shut in the stove’s thick, shadowy light
and shut out the world’s bitter, toothy wild.
And for the poet, it is not
airiness and sweep and light,
but the earthen room, the wooden chair,
and the pen, cradled and spun like
the glassmith’s pipe.
Posted: August 20th, 2009 | Author: Blake | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
I know you have inherited
A great loss, like the peach pit
Left in your mother’s favorite purse.
At our wrong, over-easy words,
You turned your back.
Then a starling chirped, and launched itself
at the window.
The blow could not be confused
for the wind, and so we stood about the thing
and mourned in the little way required of us.
