1. SUSPICIOUS SPACES
AND LOOSE INTERPRETATIONS
I entered my sketchbook. In it, I sketched. What does 'sketching' mean?
Having bought a variety of hardnesses of lead I drew mostly people that
were around, walking by, smoking, fighting. In the margins I wrote, almost
pettily: 'He’s wearing old jogging pants and is fit and sinewy but
not wearing underwear. I can tell because as he jogs I can see his package
bouncing back and forth against the material, which has been thinned out
from overuse.'
Another way of using language loosely, ‘sketchily’ in visual
art: 'titles.' A former painting teacher of mine had an exhibition in
which one 'completely beige' (I said to him) painting was called something
like THE COLOUR OF OATMEAL AND HEROIN. In such a naming he introduced
‘real’ objects (oatmeal and heroin) onto the plane of the
abstract.
The space between an object and its title is too often thought of as
something superfluous, though in actuality it drastically alters the
viewer’s reading of a work.
In visual art, the names of all forms seem ‘loose’ (though
they do
correspond to a genealogy): 'sculpture', for example. A live performance
of electroacoustic music is legitimately called a 'sound sculpture'; 'kinetic'
sculpture can manifest itself as two bodies moving in a darkened room,
mimicking videotaped gestures projected on a screen behind them. 'Sculpture',
of course, is no longer the domain of apprentices sweating away on a piece
of marble while the master shouts orders about the placement of fig leaves.
In 'painting and drawing': the most recent and contemporary works of these
so-called two-dimensional (flat) mediums have included such sculptural
elements as draped and starched fabric, giant coils of rope, photographs
of mountain ranges.
And of course, text art: the forms in which text appears in our public
space (LED boards, billboards, grocery coupons and auto-repair flyers)
as well as the text itself (aphorisms, proclamations, coy and seductive
demands) are seen in any number of couplings with objects, or with installed
space itself. These works, while utilising text, may be enjoyed under
the rubric of painting, sculpture, installation, ceramics, or digital
media (sound and video).
In this world, all rigid (preconceived) forms are suspect, and any subversion
of form is fair game. All space is positive, and is worthy of being examined,
taken apart, reconstituted - even the spaces where we assume 'there is
nothing.' Some of these spaces: all whiteness in printed matter (margins,
paragraph breaks), the spaces between parked cars, the pause before dessert
when all plates are being cleared away by the hostess.
2. THE SHAPE (LENGTH, WIDTH, HEIGHT, WEIGHT...) OF TEXT
Being a visual-artist-who-works-with-text, the world of writing in itself
looks as if it were made of curiously integral, whole forms: the novel,
the poem (haiku, sonnet, etc.), the short story, the novella, the essay,
the article, the review. I haven’t yet encountered the (perhaps
exclusive) territory in which it is suggested to all present that a short
story is really a critique, which in turn may be a poem of sorts.
Being 'inside' a creative (narrative) piece of writing, for instance,
there are all sorts of issues to be considered: the narrator's point of
view, the quality of voices and dialogue, the 'action' and how it rises
and falls, characterisation. But from 'the outside', the forms of novel,
novella, and short story already having been forged, one has to ask whether
desires are being reconciled with prefabricated forms, i.e. 'is this idea
I have better as a short story or a novella, or a film script, or a collection
of
poems...'
In my ongoing confrontation with the world of ubiquitous and prefabricated
written forms, space (for these writers) , seems most visible from inside
the given form. That is to say, the question I’m most often faced
with first is 'What are you writing?', which only serves to demonstrate
the apparently paramount importance of ‘what is it?’ ‘What’
one is writing demands to be established before the other question of
importance: ‘what’s it about?’
From outside this world of enduringly popular, pervasive forms, however,
is the world in which all forms are being scrutinised; here, novels are
as much objects as paintings. All idealised forms (novels, paintings,
short stories, video, poems) have their own specific histories, hold unique
positions, and are not reducible. Each can be classified and described
by its own identifying characteristics. I can't think of any reason why
literary forms aren't objects - the only problem is that it may be more
difficult to see them.
I am interested in writing being as free in space as possible. This means
not acting within the constraints of literary form, nor reacting directly
against them. The idea that allows this opening: that the variety of possible
literary objects is infinite. Though these objects may exist unnamed,
standing outside all taxonomy, they are still possible. It's in this way
that I am able to use text at all, to write at all.
3. ACCIDENTS, PARTITIONS, JOKES
This text’s reason for being is not to delve into the reasons why,
historically, the respective realms of visual art and literature have
not achieved the same level of genre free-for-all, or even if this can
be said to be true; nor is it to frame self-reflexivity and transgression
in art as ends in themselves.
The object is to call attention to a potential poetics of space, which
appears to be less considered in ‘mainstream’ literature and
text in general, a poetics that is physically evident in the humour and
irony of a certain restaurant in Windsor, Ontario called CRABBY DICK’S
SEAFOOD’N’SPORTS SHACK, or in the loneliness of a message
written on a freight train, which you spy from the window of a bus headed
out of town: MIKE, I MISS YOU DUDE. The way that words/methods of public
dissemination are presented to us physically in public space 'prove' that
this public space is a poetic space, whether intended or not. The physical
spaces in/between which our daily lives unfold (streets, highways, homes,
alleys, malls, hospitals, strip clubs, airports) are pregnant with poetic
potential; but do our lives not also unfold in and between the editorial
of the morning paper and our most cherished novels? Just as we walk in
a certain direction (the street, leaving you no other choice, demands
it), we read between the lines.
Perhaps a more macabre example would be the foldout section of the tabloid
‘Québec Erotique’, which places graphic real-crime
descriptions (how many stitches a child rape victim needed, and where)
beside ads for a swinger’s party called ‘Jeudi soirs: Surprise
Gang-Bang’, and a sex shop’s weekly specials.
Accidents of meaning and irony-for-its-own-sake aside, a deliberate spatial
manipulation is also obvious in Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Micropolitics
and Segmentarity’ which functions as the philosophical work it is
meant to be, but on its own terms: sly jokes are inserted as chapter titles:
‘the Geology of Morals: Who does the Earth think it is?’ This
places the chapter title in a unique position to the text itself, similar
to the relationship between the phrase THE COLOUR OF OATMEAL AND HEROIN
and a certain ‘beige’ painting.
That the poetry between an object and the form that it calls itself--the
poetry between an object and its name--is not considered is a problem
for me, as is the fact that disparate objects are rarely seen under the
same book’s covers: children’s confessions of their sins,
right-wing propaganda pamphlets, movie reviews and Oprah transcripts,
short stories. The spaces between these speak of collective fears and
collective desires: even the supposedly benign space between a novel and
a poem.
|