Wednesday, May 16, 2007
On a Treated Victorian Novel
There's a recurring narrative if you choose to accept it as such. "Toge," something that functions as an actor in several of the pieces, provides a bit of continuity. It is impossible to deny that further continuity comes from the fact that the individual poems are all torn from the same novel. Other than that, I feel that the work is extremely scattered, and while the aleatoric nature of the book leads to meaning-slippage and cerebral high jinks, it's not for me the pinnacle of artistic enterprise.
To me, it feels as if the piece was a great idea that had to be gotten done before someone else took it. It's interesting to this end that the webpage offers newer renditions of the poems. In one way this is progressive. It provides a space for poetry that is dynamic, susceptible to change. On the other it may suggest that Phillips could have held off on publishing the work until he was completely satisfied with it.
It's rather pretentious, in my mind, that Phillips constructs phrases throughout the piece such as "now the arts connect" and "here is art" (7,8), when the mixing of visual and verbal has been prevalent since the dawn of advertising and freeform typefaces. I think A Humument is a little gimmicky for such grandiose suggestions.
My gripes aside, the piece does end up humorous at turns. These moments are for me the highest points of its success. Here, parody works and draws attention to the distinctions between the page and the reader, reevaluating inside and outside and the sacredness of the text. It seems necessary that the thing be taken lightly like that, because all told it's not that much more extraordinary than refrigerator poetry on top of blackened margins.
The Sienese Shredder
One of the most striking series of works in this anthology was the collage postcards by John Ashbery. I am not too familiar with Ashbery’s work, so I cannot speculate on the author’s intended meaning. However, the postcards do function in a particular way for me.
One of the things I noticed immediately upon looking at these postcards was the bizarre juxtapositions of incompatible objects—a free-floating heading pasted on top of a cactus, a cat head on top of a fountain, a cartoon dog next to the statue of liberty, and so forth. Many of the postcards also have anachronistic elements. For example, the last collage of the series is of a Victorian looking arm holding a wine glass pasted over an image of a rural town. This piece also draws my attention to the contrast between the civilized and uncivilized. The hand delicately grips the glass in an almost aristocratic manner, while the rural background suggests rustic naivety and simplemindedness.
Another striking piece is the one on page 139. The tension depicted in this piece is between chaos and control. An ecstatic-looking man occupies the center of piece. His expression is almost manic. His mouth is gaped, he has no shoes on and it is obvious that he is in a jumping position. He appears to be in the middle of an unfettered act of defiance. This is also supported by the fact that he is wearing a suit and is obviously engaging in deviant behavior. Beneath him are waves crashing against rocks. In the background of the top left corner of the postcard is an image of religious stained-glass windows. The religious elements suggest control, austerity, and prudishness. Conversely, the man and waves suggest chaos, disorder, and deviance.The Humument
I read the Humument cover-to-cover a while ago, but I don’t remember too many details about the content.
However, I feel that the concept of the book itself can be related to post-structuralist ideas of authorial control as well as Lacanian linguistic concepts. The post-structuralists assert that the author does not have control over the meaning of a text once it is produced. Texts function as a sort of autonomous object that can produce infinite meanings. Tom Phillips seems to be toying with this idea by taking a text and deliberately alternating in a way that produces a different meaning. By doing this he is de-centering and destabilizing meaning itself. Tom also denies the author total control of a text by using the novel to create a new text.
Similarly, Lacan thought that there was no continuity between the signifier and signified. There is always a failure of signs to achieve their proper meaning because there is no direct or innate relationship between the signifier and signifier. By altering a Victorian novel, the Humument draws our attention to the inability for the original ‘sign’ (A Human Document) to achieve its ‘proper’ meaning (the original plot of the text). The ambiguity of the Humument is also a reflection of the disconnection between signifier and signified.
A Treated Victorian Novel
The most intriguing aspect of this collection, for me, was the concept of its physical/textual transformation from nineteenth-century novel, into a modern exploration of visual poetry - primarily through means of one artist recycling another's work. In using W. H. Mallock's "A Human Document" as his base, Tom Phillips' reworking of the text is reminiscent of the inherently circular nature of creativity. And what does Phillips' reworking of the original text imply? How does it contribute to the meaning and themes of the original text? Also, the book's focus on the visual quality of each page/poem, and the way each poem conveys a different and spontaneous subject, distracts from the quality and meaning of the actual poetry. The poems are often disjointed and unclear, lacking many of the qualities prized in "good" poetry. In the abscence of impressive poetry, the detailed and vibrant images of the collection are emphasized. The images seem to be seperate from the poetry itself, lending no further imagery or illustration to the poem it encloses. Overall, I found this ambitious collection to be an interesting and visually stimulating read, but lacking in an overarching, coherent theme.
This post is actually by Rebecca Weaver....
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
A Humament.
I finally figured out how to post.
This is exciting.
I guess I should talk about Humament, which is probably the most amazing thing I've flipped through in a long while. This book helped me understand the real meaning behind visual poetry. To be honest, before reading this book, I had a hard time deciphering between "good" and "not so good" visual poetry, which is necessary to know before attempting to WRITE visual poetry. Humament defines visual poetry for me in two ways:
first, the form itself is a critique of the "word on the page," taking the most loaded and self-aware genre of writing, victorian prose, and simplifying it to "the best words in their best order," a poem. Using the empty space left after editing the text, visual art, in this case paintings, fuse the gaps between the words. Visual poetry, then, is not poetry with words, it is the written word combined with visuals as one complete art form.
Secondly, what makes Humament so integral in my understanding of visual poetry is the fact that if needed, these poems could stand alone without the visuals. I understand visual poetry as poetry ENHANCED by visuals, and hopefully not the other way around. What I have categorized as "bad" or less well crafted visual poetry seems to consist of kitchy objects simply decorated with words.
I guess to summarize, the difference between good and not so well crafted vis. poetry lies in the difference between creative and cleaver art. Humament is of course, the former.
=)
SaM.
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Humument: I have already posted this, but just in case you haven't seen
I found the artwork fitting in some cases and empty in others, but I think it was the variation of style that caught me. The artwork either echoed the themes of the poetry on the page or stood silent to let the words speak for themselves. Pleasing to the eye, but rarely as stimulating as some of the poetry.
Overall, when I first laid my hands on the book I was excited. It had the guise of the masterpiece I had been waiting for all my life because it is tediously creative and beautiful. But with a second and third glance through it’s glossy pages, I began to understand it more for its purpose which I believe (sorta) to be, rewriting history in a politically, socially, climactic time as the 1970s. Stenciling over the Victorian age itself with a breathe of ingenuity and fantastic art in most of it’s pages.
Sienese Shedder: Hammond
Thursday, April 26, 2007
This book was indeed a sort of cut-and-paste accumulation of art, prose and poetry. Some pieces, like the Osap's Fables, seem at first glance to be completely nonsensical, while others seem to follow thought patterns. The shorter prose paragraphs often fell lyrically upon the ear enough for me to consider them poetry, and in fact often seemed to debate this fact within themselves. I actually found that my favorite piece wasn't one of the cut-up bits that give the Shredder it's unique internal look, but was actually one of the first pieces that falls into the 'prose' category. Gerard de Nerval's Chantilly is an expression of a place, a snapshot almost. The author gives to us his reminiscence about a place he obviously loves, from visual impressions to the memories they inspire, the character of which infinitely colors the impression of the place. Much like Chantilly lace he lays out the places and customs as you might excpect, and then he drops in the harshness of reality, deaths and sorrow that bring the rosy quality of the memories to a much deeper and more soulful hue. This piece is an exceptional example of what I feel gives way to the always present question, what is poetry?
Monday, April 16, 2007
Ghost Dad was an exceptional movie.
I also liked Edwin Denby's poem about the "no-nonsense escalator." See, I'm scared of escalator's because my Grandma was a scary person that told me really nonsensical things about ordinary everyday objects that transformed them, in my mind, into monstrosities. The escalator was one of them. And I am sure plenty of other kids can admit to being horrified by the story about the boy whose foot got stuck in the escalator. I mean, it's a traumatizing thing when you're seven years old. So I think the poem really hit a reminiscent spot for me which helped me to identify with it and ultimately cherish it.
Actually, I really liked all of The Sienese Shredder. Even the boring parts were more exciting than reading the usual monotony that people read in things like Time magazine everyday. And there was just something about the journal, beyond the entries, just a general feel about it I guess you could say, that really seemed to resonate with me. I felt like it's a journal that represents a new chapter in the life of art, a chapter that I get to be experiencing first hand, and as cheesy as that may sound, I'm not going to lie; I'm excited.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Chocolate bar between two slices of bread--
words know how to find their own way
and, left to themselves, decide where to land." -- Marie Chaix
The Sienese Shredder collectively reflect Chaix's principle. She illustrates by narration alone the flexibility of language as universal enough to transcend convention, while John Ashbery and Jane Hammond manipulate images and scarce text in order to conceptually test the limits of this flexibility.
While most of the book's entries challenge my rejection of language as mere iconology, poets Jane Hammond, Ron Padgett and Chris Edgar reinforce it. I inherently classify poetry, however narrowly, as an art most heavily dependent on its language -- the way they're arranged on the page or stressed vocally. I suppose more innovative means of presenting a poetic idea or story allow for a wider range of interpretations (and isn't personalized catharsis art's goal?)... but visual poetry like Ashbery's and Hammond's, when presented alongside more conventional free verse poems, seem to contain messages too far removed from the artist's original emotional intent.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Strange, Strange Sienese Shredder
My favorite piece (besides, of course, our dear Carbo’s :P), is Ron Padgett’s “The Absolutely Huge and Incredible Injustice in the World,” a nouveau work humorously outlining the irony of the unjust and inescapable disposition of mankind. He juxtaposes genuine inquiries and proclamations of human nature, such as “What makes us so mean?,” “It is hard not to be appalled by existence,” and “Life is so awful!” with amusing images of gorillas, hippos, and other oddities, overly dramatic ejaculations, and arbitrary tangents. In doing so, Padgett quite effectively lends a sense of outlandish humor to what could have been a drearily serious work.
Another choice example is, in my opinion, Harry Mathews’s “Romantic Poem,” which, barring the title, would not leave any notion of romantics. I enjoy how the title adds a new dimension to the poem and forces the reader to search for hidden meanings between lines.
All that said, I totally want to kidnap the puppy pictured on the postcard on page 144. How cute can you get? :)
I have a face that stays mostly on the front of my head
The New Crustacean
A warning is offered right at the offset that concrete subjects will be problematic throughout the text. The narrator states that he (“a father, a brother, a lover, a friend”) cannot tell about himself because “you’d only be further from the truth.” He sets up the technique that will dominate the rest of the text by stating that he is “determined entirely by context.” The reader learns that he has a family, a past, and at the end he hitches a ride toward an indeterminate future, but the details are not offered. In one instance, no circumstances are disclosed of an event which overtakes the narrator with nausea and pain. All that exists are the peripheries and consequences, and the reader is left to imagine endless possibilities that could assume the event.
The most striking example of this occurs when the narrator prepares himself to return to the site of a family camping trip. The site is not described, but simply by its being an attraction because of its lake, vivid images which must differ from reader to reader cascade through its absence. The same is true of whatever objects a clerk at the “large store” advises the narrator to bring along. He sheepishly purchases four of something we can almost picture clearly: fishing lures, boots, ponchos, meals-ready-to-eat, rifles, snake bite kits, compasses, styrofoam floaties, etc.
The commentary on how stories can exist with such absences suggests that ingrained in readers are types of narrative frameworks which stand nearly by themselves. In reflecting on “The New Crustacean,” it is hard not to think of Saussure and the structures of difference which make language possible. Per the theory of his successors, these structures stand as well without centers. By constructing walls such as the one where Hasegawa’s narrator purchases the unnamed supplies, the author creates empty spaces for images, the specificity of which are unimportant.