My unhealthy obsession with Belgian surrealism continues! In between hanging with my new daughter and writing an essay on the future of manifestos I've been translating the maxims of Louis Scutenaire (that's him in the foreground, with the poet Paul Colinet standing behind him). "Louis Who-tenaire?" you ask. Ah! Louis Scutenaire was an interesting guy. Lawyer turned surrealist, communist turned anarchist, friend of Magritte and namer of Magritte’s paintings, Scutenaire was active in the Belgian surrealist scene during its most vital years. His works include several volumes of “inscriptions,” or maxims, which give us a strong sense of his socially conscious but ever-skeptical ironist’s mind. Anyway, here are a few of my favorites:
It’s regrettable, for the education of the young, that memoirs of war are always written by people the war did not kill.
An angry cop: the usual, only more so.
Life will be good when work, for everyone, becomes a luxury.
To cry “Long live life!” is like shouting “Long live ice cream!” in a house that’s on fire. Shout all you want: you never know what may come of it.
I own up, absolutely, to the things that keep me a slave.
He who would enrage his neighbors charms their children.
Workers of the world: I have nothing to say to you.
There are a lot more. But they're like Valentine's Day chocolates: better when you don't wolf them all down at once.
Although I had a hand in putting together the list of readers for the just-completed Lake Forest Literary Festival, I had to be out of town for the events themselves, so I'm experiencing them vicariously, mostly in Josh Corey's blog (where they are reported in twoparts including video of Christian Bök performing), but also from this article by Lake Forest College's very own Kristin Kojarek (from Lake Forest's campus newspaper, The Stentor). Check it out:
Poets Pounce on the Annual LFC Literary Festival
By: Kristin Kojzarek
The poetry seemed to leap from its pages during Lake Forest College's fifth annual Literary Festival this week as authors used hypertext, computer programming, sound performance, and other collaborative experiments to demonstrate how poems can function in realms beyond print.
One of this year's visiting artists, best-selling Canadian poet Christian Bök, collaborated with a group of students to perform poetry through a spectrum of sounds in the Lily Reid Holt Memorial Chapel on Wednesday evening. "Writing is a skill just like any other skill," Bök said. "It's a type of technical engineering."
This year's artist-in-residence, winner of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer's Prize, Jessica Savitz, performed a reading from her latest book, Hunting is Painting, for the first time. Savitz is the first recipient of the Plonsker award and her book will be published by Lake Forest College Press/ & Now Books.
Showing off another route of creative writing, Chicago-based poetry group Gnoetry and computer artist and hypertext poet, Stephanie Strickland, used computer programming to demonstrate how poetry can be combined with technology to create a new type of art.
"This encourages readers to look at art in more than one way. Hypertext does things rather than says things," Strickland said. "Poetry does not necessarily need to be stacked up on a page," Bök claimed.
Strickland used a Flash player to demonstrate poetry synergized with digital images in the Meyer Auditorium on Tuesday afternoon. A large gathering of students and faculty remained transfixed on Strickland's poems as she moved the mouse across digital constellations and waves of sand where her printed words blended with the visuals. Some text was printed over backgrounds of different types of moving water where the words wavered and became obscured by the ocean waves. When the text became more clearly distinguishable it often faded again. "This brings the reader to the brink of deciphering words," Strickland said. "There is an inter-relationship between the objects and the words, which can also appear as 3-D objects."
Some of Strickland's poems did remain as static text onscreen with a white background or were juxtaposed by a simple design or a picture such as MTA transit card. Every so often, a digital leaf floated across the screen or a flock of butterflies flew down from an upper corner and circled the page. Strickland explained that using moving images with text requires the reader to use new approaches to reading and focusing on poetry. "It is using a new medium to create a new poetic experience. Reading images while watching text requires new reading skills," Strickland said.
When asked how she first became involved in electronic art Strickland said she always had an interest in literature and science. One day, she attended a seminar where she learned about hypertext from electronic fiction writers. "It was around 1994, when we were on the edge of the Internet and I was exposed to many new and exciting things," Strickland said. Realizing that forms of art besides fiction could be used with technology as well, Strickland began hunting for images to complement her poetry. "There is no end in this type of work, but there are multiple beginnings," she said.
The Literary Festival first evolved from a lecture series founded by Professors Davis Schneiderman and Robert Archambeau in 2004 called On the Run. "We named it On the Run because we had no money and did everything on a shoestring, so we were literally on the run," Schneiderman said. However, a year later when Schneiderman and Archambeau decided to try hosting an annual Literary Festival, people were supportive of the idea and helped fund the event.
"[The festival] is a really nice way for students to have an annual event where they can read the work of an author in one of their classes, then meet that author and have a wonderful experience," Schneiderman said.
Junior Ashlee Norton said, "I was really looking forward to meeting Christian Bök after learning about his book, Eunoia and I liked being introduced to Stephanie Strickland's new and innovative ideas."
Senior Leah Scull said, "I really liked Stephanie Strickland's presentation because I admired the way she was able to mesh technology with poetry inspired from nature and science. The way she used a magnet in sand as part of her piece "The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot" was beautiful and inspiring."
Concluding the festival, poets Brian Teare, Karen Leona Anderson, and Richard Greenfield, will read from their work in Meyer Auditorium tonight [2/12/09] from 7:00 p.m.-8:30 p.m.
So there I sat this afternoon in some coffee dive near the University of Pennsylvania, cooling my heels and thumbing around in my newly-purchased copy of The Deleuze Dictionary, when Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” came on the sound system. It’s not my favorite piece in the Iggy oeuvre, people, not by a good long howl. But it was a welcome relief after what I think must have been the world’s worst acid jazz album. Anyway, the conjunction of music and theory was instructive, if by instructive we mean “it sent me running around the joint begging for a pen so I could make some notes on my damp and crumpled napkin.” Now, hours later, I’m back in my hotel and deciphering the feverish cuneiform napkin notations of the caffeinated Archambeau. The main point (underlined not once but thrice in green felt marker bleeding into fuzziness at the edges) is this: “IGGY = MINOR LIT/DELEUZE & GUA… [illegible].” (Poor Felix Guattari, even here finding himself smooshed into the margins by his illustrious co-author). And I think, post-caffination, I can still stand by the point: Iggy Pop’s song “Lust for Life” performs some of the most important functions of what Deleuze and Guattari call “minor literature” (which, as we should all recall from Miss Starchington’s homeroom lecture on postmodern French critical theory, is a tremendously important form of literature — don’t let the name fool you!).
Are you in a hurry? No, me neither. I mean, there’s no Tivo in this hotel, and I can’t bear to watch commercials any more, so let’s take the scenic route to the main point, starting with some of the lyrics to the song. Here are the first and second verses, along with the chorus, of "Lust for Life":
Here comes Johnny Yen again With the liquor and drugs And the flesh machine He's gonna do another striptease Hey man where'd you get That lotion? I been hurting Since I bought the gimmick About something called love Yeah something called love That's like hypnotizing chickens
Well I am just a modern guy Of course I've had it in the ear before 'Cause of a lust for life 'Cause of a lust for life
I'm worth a million in prizes With my torture film Drive a G.T.O. Wear a uniform All on a government loan I'm worth a million in prizes Yeah I'm through with sleeping on the Sidewalk - no more beating my brains With the liquor and drugs With the liquor and drugs
Well I am just a modern guy Of course I've had it in the ear before 'Cause of a lust for life 'Cause of a lust for life
So how does this connect up with Deleuze and Guattari's idea of minor literature? Ah, well, it's simple. It's all in the — what? What's that you say? Yes, you, there, in the back, with the degenerates and ne'er-do-wells. What? You say you weren't paying attention in Mrs. Starchwell's class, and you need a refresher on the concept. You embarrass me, sir. I mean, I'm in Philadelphia, and without my copy of Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. I'll have to make do with the internet, and The Deleuze Dictionary (no, there's no Guatarri Guidebook — ol' Felix gets screwed again!). But okay, here's the deal. For all of you back-row reprobates.
It goes like this: minor literature, for Deleuze and his sidekick Guattari, doesn't necessarily consist of — what? Another interruption? What is it this time? Oh. Yeah. Well, sure. The song is music, not literature. So I guess you're right. Except I'm only going to discuss the lyrics, so it's sort of like teaching the text of Macbeth in a literature class, rather than studying a production of the play in a theater class. Okay? Okay. All right, then. And I see that spitball, Davis. I'm keeping my eye on all of you. So no funny business. Right, then.
So. It goes like this: minor literature, for Deleuze and his sidekick Guattari, doesn't necessarily consist of the literature written by ethnic, sexual, or any other kind of minorities. As Ronald Bogue puts it in (ahem) The Deleuze Dictionary,
What constitutes minorities is not their statistical number [sic], which may in actual fact be greater than that of the majority, but their position within asymmetrical power relationships that are reinforced by and implemented through linguistic codes and binary oppositions. Western white male adult humans may be outnumbered worldwide, but they remain the majority through their position of privilege, and that privilege informs the linguistic oppositions that define, situate, and help control non-western and non-white populations, women, children, and non-human life-forms. Minorities merely reinforce dominant power relations when they accept the categories that define them. Only by undoing such oppositions as western/non-western, white/non-white, male/female, adult/child. or human/animal can minorities change power relations. Only by ... blurring categories can new possibilities for social interaction be created.
Yeah, I know, I know. That "only by blurring categories" is a bit much. Bogue, at least here, seems to be kind of a "heroic theory" guy. But let's let it slide. Anyway, don't blame me for it, Davis. I can see you getting ready to fire off that spitball. The point is this: minor lit takes the terms used in the normative language of those in power and short circuits them, making them untenable in their old form (if not for everyone, then at least for the people to whom the piece of minor lit speaks most effectively and immediately).
Verena Conley, also writing in that most venerable of texts, The Deleuze Dictionary, puts it slightly differently. Speaking of D and G's use of the term "minor," she states: "The term is often developed in connection with language and the 'order-word,' that is, a pass-word that both compels obedience and opens up passages. In this sense Deleuze argues that language ... is fundamentally political." So: language, in this view, doesn't just describe. When used by the empowered majority (which, again, could consist of a numerical minority — Deleuze and Guattari define "majority" as a power-status, not a numbers-status), it is normative. It orders us to act in certain ways. This can be tremendously enabling, but it also forecloses on certain possibilities. Take the word "man." If you're a young guy, and you're told to "be a man," there's a command there to be, say, strong and brave and stoic and all that macho hoohah. And you experience the command all the time, not just when the coach is yelling "be a man, goddam it, Archambeau, you big girl's blouse! Man up and take the hit! If you're going to be a lineman you're going to have to take the goddam hit, already!" (uh, sorry — flashback time). And you experience the injunction to be those things the word "man" implies in its dominant usage all the time. But along with all the enabling stuff (you do learn to take the hit, to push the car out of the snowbank, and all that jive), other things are disabled. You know, like emotional expressiveness. Or whatever.
Now, what do you want to know about next? The way minor writing works, or the secret catch to the whole majority thing? The secret catch? Okay. You got it. The secret catch to the whole majority thing is this: there is no majority status. Or, rather, majority status exists, but only as an abstraction or an ideal. Nobody actually corresponds to that ideal entirely. Here, again, is Verena Conley on the issue: "Majority is an abstract standard that can be said to include no one and speak in the name of nobody." So: nobody actually embodies the ideal of "man" in its majority-usage as an order-word. Or, to move away from the language of "ideal" with all its Platonic weight and toward the terminology Deleuze and Guattari use, no one actually has a subjectivity that corresponds exactly with the territory demarcated by the word "man", without deficiency in some area or excess in some other. (And this goes for all order-words). So: major literature, and majority language in general, gives us terms that embody imperatives of how we're (insert scare quotes here) supposed to be. And minor literature works to fuzzy up those terms and all they stand for. Verena Conley's prose gets a bit godawfully algebraic when she deals with this, but she does know what she's talking about. Minority language "is characterized by the presence of connections," she says, "that is, by the additive conjunction 'and' and the mathematical sign '+': a minoritarian language is 'x + y and b + traits a + a and...'" Alrighty. Deep breath. What she means is this: minority writing takes a term like "man" and refuses to accept it on the terms of the empowered majority group. Instead, minority writing adds significances to the term. The term now isn't reducible to the set of meanings it once had. It now takes us outside of the territory once covered by the term. In one of Deleuze and Guattari's favorite terms, it becomes "a line of flight" out of that territory.
So, then. Iggy Pop.
"Lust for Life" works as minor literature in the way it reworks the meaning of what it means to be "just a modern guy." It's worth lingering a bit over what the phrase "just a modern guy" means in the song. I think the "just" (as in "only" or "merely") is important, because it really does make "modern" seem less like it means "up to date" or "of our time" and more like it means "ordinary" or "regular" or "not unusual." I mean, it's a matter of nuance. But "I'm just a modern guy" here does seem less like it means "I'm a guy who is neither affiliated with the past nor the future" than it means "I'm not unusual: I conform to the standards of our time and place." There's a kind of "you and I share a common subjectivity, that related to our time" vibe to it, and a lot of the vibe comes from the "just." So there's a kind of normality implied here, and Iggy tells us he accepts and embodies that normality. "Modern guy," then, is a kind of order-word, and Iggy seems to be following along. Being a modern guy. Just that. Nothing fancy. Nothing abnormal. Nothing out of the norm.
Nothing, that is, until the next phrase, the qualifier of the normative "just a modern guy": "of course I've had it in the ear before." As an article in Slate put it, it's a surprising lyric to find in a song once used to promote cheap Caribbean cruises: "I don't know what, exactly, Iggy means when he says that he's 'done it in the ear before,'" says the Slate write, "but I'm sure Royal Caribbean won't allow it on their cruise ships." Did you notice the slip-up there? The Slate guy says he doesn't know what Iggy means by having "done it in the ear," but the original lyric is about having "had it in the ear." So I think the slip-up actually indicates that the Slate guy has a pretty good idea what Iggy means: that he's (figuratively) had sex using the least likely of orifices, and that (implicitly) he's done things sexually that the ordinary, average guy, the guy who is "just a modern guy" hasn't done, and by which such a guy would claim to be appalled. There's lots of corroborating evidence for this theory in the song (the "flesh machine," and Johnny Yen's promised striptease, for example). And there's plenty of corroborating evidence from Iggy Pop's life to indicate that he knows whereof he speaks, here. His own adventurous, polymorphous bisexuality is the stuff of legend (Seriously! Have you seen Velvet Goldmine?). So: Iggy gives us what seems to be a kind of normative order-word (his particular usage of "just a modern guy") and then immediately blurs things. I mean, he doesn't say "I would be just a modern guy, except for the fact that I've had it in the ear before." That would be accepting the meaning of the normative term, and saying he doesn't fit into it. Instead, he says he is just a modern guy. But there's a kind of escape from what that term means in majority discourse. That idea of a uniform-wearing, government-loan having, gory movie watching regular guy? Iggy's not excluded from it. But he's also not contained by the boundaries of what it means to be that guy. His subjectivity covers all that territory, but exceeds it, too, in certain sexual areas. Or, to put it in slightly gaudier terms redolent of Deleuze's terminology, Iggy (or, rather, his autobiographical character "Johnny Yen") isn’t entirely contained in the territory designated as normative — he flies out of it, bursting its boundaries on the wings of his splendidly freakish libido. (Forgive me. “Lines of flight” and “deterritorialization” are my favorite Deleuzian terms, and I really want use them to invoke an Iggy-Johnny figure as a kind of winged Icarus. Maybe I do deserve the spitball for that. Fire away, Davis).
Although it seems like it was about a million years ago, it turns out it was only last November that an essay of mine on poetry and politics came out in Poetry magazine. A few echoes still seem to be reverberating. Michael Greenspan, for example, has a letter in the February issue of Poetry in which he wonders if I'm familiar with the ideas of Michael Golblatt and Robert Nozick about the grumbling disposition of wordsmiths. I think I did read the Nozick piece, but had never read Goldblatt.
Greenspan's letter is interesting for many reasons, but to me the chief one is this: he finds my ideas similar to those of Nozick, a libertarian free-market guru, whereas the last guy to write in to Poetry about the essay more-or-less accused me of being a communist. The accusation of communism made me feel like I'd stepped into the wrong decade, and was dodging the House Un-American Activities Committee, smoking Pall Malls, and driving around in a Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz with tail fins the size of Gidget's surfboard. Which, come to think of it, doesn't sound all that bad, provided the Caddy keeps me one step ahead of Joe McCarthy's boys. The Nozick thing makes me feel like I should be shredding my files and hoping Obama doesn't send the federales after me for my part in the destruction of the American economy. Although, given the way things seem to be done in this country lately, if those federales do catch me they'll probably just park a wheelbarrow full of cash in my Wall Street office suite, explain that it's my part of the bailout, salute, and be on their way.
Am I grumbling? Well, I do I aspire to wordsmithery. Ask Nozick and Goldblatt about the connection.
So there's this thing going down on Facebook where people ask their friends to post 25 random things about themselves. When I saw this, I thought it was exactly the sort of thing I wouldn't want to take part in. I mean, for a guy who talks too much, writes a lot of essays and a not-discreditable amount of poetry, and blogs, I think I actually don't put much about myself out there (except in the company of my friends, where my favorite topic is my evolving relationship to my own narcissism). Maybe this is laughably wrong, but I think of myself as having pretty firm boundaries about my private experience, even if I ham it up in front of people all the time. Anyway, I took the plunge and found it weirdly satisfying. Here 'tis:
25 Things
1. I grew up in western Canada, but spent part of each year in the Midwestern U.S., and part on the American east coast, too.
2. I remember my dad telling me to look at how the shaft of sunlight coming through a drop of water caught in a spider web was making a tiny, tight, perfect little star of light dance on his notepad. Just as I saw this, the drop dropped.
3. I also remember my dad sketching me (he’s an artist). I was in the second grade and wouldn’t shut up while he tried to concentrate. I think the moving face-muscles were a problem. He said “If you can’t stop talking, I’ll have to draw you with your mouth open.” It’s a cool portrait, though. And it sort of catches my then-incipient blowhardish word-love.
4. If everybody tells me it’s wrong, a big part of me always figures it must be at least half-right.
5. When I was in junior high, my degenerate friends wanted me to join the percussion section with them, but I decided to play flute so I could meet girls. The guys were kind enough not to mock my failure.
6. I had to move to Sweden to learn how to listen to funk.
7. I am terrible at recognizing faces. More than once this has embarrassed me. Like the time when I was in college and I’d met this girl and her friend in the student union bar. The girl seemed kind of shy; her friend was more outgoing. Anyway, later that night I was studying at a big empty table in the library and she came up and sat across from me, folding her hands on the table and smiling. I glanced up from my book (Paradise Lost, I think) and, not recognizing her, gave her a quick blank stare before looking back down. She ran away, and I later saw her with her friend. She turned her head; her friend shot me a dirty look.
8. I swear to whatever gods there may or may not be, meeting Valerie saved my soul.
9. Coffee, always. Always. I love the fresh-ground good stuff, but if there’s nothing else I’ll drink it day old, stone cold, and looking like it’d grow mold.
10. Countries I’ve been to: the U.S., Canada, Mexico (to the north, and the Yucatan, which seemed like a whole other country), Italy, France, Belgium (everyone should go to Belgium), Germany, Denmark, Sweden, England, Ireland, Iceland. I think that’s it. Oh, wait: the Netherlands.
11. I love blogging because I love to write but I hate waiting for whatever I wrote to get published. But when people ask me to write something for a book or journal I almost always say yes.
12. I’m pretty solid in the kitchen. When in doubt, braise that mother.
13. I can’t remember all of the different houses, apartments, guest-houses-for-visiting-academics, etc. I’ve lived in. But it was easier to move when I was in my twenties and could fit all my gear into a borrowed pickup. I think I’m staying put for a while.
14. One Christmas, a couple of years before I’d clutched my first ergonomic wooden toy in the hippyish preschool my parents sent me to, I remember opening a present very carefully. Inside was a cardboard box. I didn’t know there was a gift in the box. I thought my parents had given me a box. It seemed like a lame gift, but I didn’t want to make them feel bad, so I started talking about what a great box it was. When I was thirty and visiting my parents I heard my dad tell my mom how much he liked that moment, and how he found my unmitigated pleasure in receiving a box beautifully innocent. I never told him I was faking it. I have no memory of what the actual present was.
15. I think I’m mostly getting better at stuff.
16. Remember that water drop I was talking about in #2? I wrote a poem about it for a creative writing class I took in college. “What does the drop stand for?” asked a fellow student. “Life,” said my professor. He sounded confident.
17. If you’re over 60 years old, I’ll instinctively treat you with respect.
18. If you’re a student and you cry in my office, I’ll have no idea where to look.
19. My mom makes the best apple pie. Seriously. Try it, and you’ll think your mom’s apple pie is a cruel joke.
20. Once I saw lightning hit the ground about a foot outside my bedroom window. But that scared me less than the bird that flew down my bedroom chimney later that night. It was a hell of a storm.
21. I think I would have died one night in a Canadian winter when the lads and I decided we were too messed up to drive, and should walk home instead. We were in a part of town we never went to, far from our neighborhood. There was a blizzard, a real, Canadian one, and we were walking down an utterly abandoned stretch of highway. We probably had ten miles to go and weren’t quite sure where we were. We heard the tiny buzzing of a car engine in the distance. It seemed to take forever to arrive, and when it did, it was a car driven by a Vietnamese immigrant kid from high school. We didn’t know him very well. Anyway, he pulled up, opened the passenger door, and drove us home. He hardly said a word.
22. When I moved to the U.S. for grad school, I was surprised at how cheap the cheapest beer was. Until I drank the stuff. Bilge water. The guy I shared a house with and I would drink one can of it each per chess game, and play chess all through the night. Man, that stuff sucked.
23. Once when I was a kid I lay on the ground and stared into a perfectly empty, perfectly blue sky until I wasn’t there any more, or there wasn’t any I left to be anywhere. I wasn’t asleep or anything. It was weird. Then my mom called me and I was back.
24. I’m always making up these weird-ass songs and singing them around the house. The latest is called “Monkey Privateer.” I bet when my daughter is old enough she’ll make fun of me for this. We’ll see. She’ll be born next week.
25. Remember that professor I wrote about in #16? I’m starting to think he was right.
Come one, come all! (Except maybe you, Ben). Click for a larger view of the festival poster showing dates and times for our small army of fab poets:Christian Bök, Stephanie Strickland, Jessica Savitz, Eric Elshtain and the Gnoetry group, and many more! Yeah. We're getting good at this.
We're 30 miles north of Chicago near the lake shore. You want travel directions? Got ya covered.
Just introduced the new writer in residence here at Lake Forest to the swanky suite of rooms in which she'll be writing and residing. It looks like the sort of place where you're likely to encounter Mr. Rochester on his way to meet the crazy wife he keeps locked in the attic. Or maybe Mr. Darcy as he furrows his brow at the perplexing Miss Bennet who danced such a charming quadrille.
And just who will be writing and residing in such surrounds, you ask? Jessica Savitz. She'll be buffing up the manuscript of Hunting is Painiting, and Lake Forest College Press/&NOW Books will publish it later this year. Here's the press release:
Jessica Savitz Named Plonsker Emerging Writer in Residence
Lake Forest College is pleased to recognize Jessica Savitz as the inaugural winner of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency, given to an author under forty years old with no major book publication. Savitz, who lives in Chicago, is currently working on a manuscript of poetry titled Hunting is Painting, and she will begin her residency in early February.
“It is a surreal and magical gift to be awarded this prize,” says Savitz, who has received several other honors for her work and has spent time as a creative-writing teacher. “The prize has been so validating; it has changed the way I approach my creative work.”
She earned an M.F.A. in poetry writing from the University of Iowa and a B.A. in English from Kenyon College. Following her studies, she worked at three Montessori schools, including a year as the co-directress of the Deerfield Montessori Children’s House and a year as a creative-expression teacher at Riverwoods Montessori School. She has been a Maytag Poetry Fellow and Teaching-Writing Fellow at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and she was a finalist for the Fence Modern Poets Series and the Beatrice Hawley Award.
“I hope that I will become better at making art on a daily basis [during the residency],” Savitz adds, “that it will be a natural part of my life-rhythm, and that I will be more and more connected to inner-peace and to the beautiful imagery surrounding us every day.”
Each spring, in conjunction with the &NOW Festival, residents will spend two months on the College’s campus completing a manuscript, participating in the annual Lake Forest Literary Festival, offering a series of public presentations, and they receive a $10,000 stipend. Their completed manuscript will be published (upon approval) by &NOW Books imprint, with distribution by Northwestern University Press.
The residency is made possible by a donation from a local philanthropist who was impressed by the College’s recently established publishing enterprise, Lake Forest College Press.
“This is the continuation of great things for Lake Forest's creative writing program, and we are thrilled about the possibilities presented by the Plonsker Residency,” Associate Professor of English Davis Schneiderman said.
Emerging prose writers under forty years old, with no major book publication, interested in applying for the 2010 residency should send: Curriculum vita; no more than 30 pages of manuscript in progress; and a one-page statement of plans for completion to: Plonsker Residency, Department of English, Lake Forest College, Box A16, 555 N. Sheridan Road, Lake Forest, IL 60045. Submissions must be postmarked by April 1, 2009 for consideration by judges Robert Archambeau, Davis Schneiderman, and Joshua Corey. Direct inquiries to andnow@lakeforest.edu with the subject line: Plonsker Prize.
In 2005, the British artist Banksy — then on the verge of becoming probably the world’s most famous street artist — walked into the Museum of Modern Art and three other New York museums done up in a beige raincoat and fake beard, looking more like a subway flasher than a “quality vandal,” as he called himself. Once inside he furtively mounted his own work among the masterpieces, relying on speed and two-sided tape rather than curatorial consent as his way into the collections, at least until guards noticed. “These galleries are just trophy cabinets for a handful of millionaires,” he wrote later in an e-mail message to a reporter, explaining his dim view of museums and his desire to see his work inside one purely to poke fun at the whole idea. “The public never has any real say in what art they see.”
This is great stuff! For one thing, it offers a fantastic example of an actual avant-garde action, something much rarer than you'd think, given how often the term 'avant-garde' gets thrown around. Often, it seems to be some sort of synonym for formal oddness, but in its more restricted sense the term refers to art that takes the institutions of art (museums, galleries, art history, the high-gloss prestige factory that goes by the name "the art world," etc.) as its medium, and takes a critical stance toward the norms of those institutions. As Jochen Schulte-Sasse put it, "the historical avant-garde of the twenties was the first movement in art history that turned against the institution 'art,'" and in 2005 Banksy was clearly working in this mode. I mean, his real medium wasn't the visual art he was posting on the wall — it was the act of posting something in that particular space. Compare Banksy to someone like, say, Damien Hirst, and you can really sense the difference: Hirst is sometimes called avant-garde, but he's entirely a creature of the "art world," making stuff that is discussed and sold in terms dictated by that world — but the Bansky of 2005 was standing outside that scene, and meddling with it.
I've met plenty of people (they shall remain namless) who like the kind of thing Bansky did in '05 so much that they've talked of it in heroic terms, as if taking, say, art history as one's medium made one's work superior to work in other media like, say, paint or clay or stone. I've always thought there was an irony to this: the guys I'm thinking of are way too postmodern to dream of forming a hierarchy of art based on genre (you know: tragedy is better than comedy, or classical music is better than rock music, or whatever). But they seemed to set up an even more restrictive hierarchy by claiming that the medium of an artwork made it inferior or superior to other works. In a way, their position is just a twist on Kant's idea of barbaric taste in which a work is valued not for its form, but for the kind of stuff it's made of. If you call a piece of jewelry beautful because it is made of diamonds and platinum, or you admire a car interior because it is done up in leather, you're engaging in the kind of taste Kant called barbaric. I don't see how this is much different if the medium in question is conceptual. But I digress: Banksy's artwork (or art action) is good stuff, I think, regardless of the medium.
Anyway. Randy Kennedy's article got me thinking about two historical developments pertaining to the avant-garde, the first of which I suppose is an irony, and the second of which is best described as an incipient historical tipping point.
Here's the irony: while the avant-garde set out to attack the institutions of art, it has in large measure been absorbed by those institutions. Although Banksy has been pretty successful at keeping his work from being turned into museum and gallery fodder, such has not been the case for many avant-garde types. I don't think I've got much more to say about this than what I said in an article in Action Yes last year:
It is certainly true that institutions such as museums, galleries, literary anthologies, academic departments of art and literature, and the like are still with us, having withstood the assaults of the avant-garde. And it is equally true that these institutions have absorbed the very avant-gardes that challenged them, to the point where Peter Bürger can complain that “the demand that art be reintegrated in the praxis of life within the existing society can no longer be seriously made” (35).
There is a great irony in reading a statement like this, from the National Gallery of Art’s archive commemorating their 2006 Dada exhibition: "448 works in a wide range of media, including collages, assemblages, photographs, prints, drawings, paintings, posters, films, and audio recordings were presented in this multimedia installation that traced the history of the Dada movement.... Audio recordings of sound poems by Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, and Raoul Hausmann were played in listening chambers, and selected short Dadaist films were shown in a continuous loop in a special viewing area within the installation. An audio tour was narrated by National Gallery of Art director Earl A. Powell III and others." The idea of a special viewing area is anathema to the movement that despised the institutional separation of art from the bustle of life, and unless Earl A. Powell III was present during his narration, and visitors were equipped with wet sponges to hurl at him, the spirit of the movement that invited viewers to take axes to artworks was deeply violated. Even such resolutely anti-institutional neo-avant-garde practices as Allan Kaprow’s Happenings (and his later Activities) have fallen prey to the institutions of art they were designed to challenge and circumvent. These participatory and deliberately spontaneous and ephemeral entities have been filmed, documented, and embalmed by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, whose Kaprow exhibit is called (apparently without irony) “Art as Life.”
I'm actually ambivalent about this institutionalizing of the anti-institutional. In a way, it's a neutering of the work. But it's also how I find out about it. I suppose it's like pinning a butterfly to a mounting-board and putting it under glass: you kill the thing in order to show it to people. (I'm not totally against this: I've got a bad-ass Malaysian Cicada mounted in a frame on the mantlepiece, and love looking at the thing. It must weigh a half pound).
So much for the irony, and my, or our, complicity in it all. What about the thing I'm somewhat clumsily calling an 'incipient historical tipping point'? Let me back into the point I want to make by taking a look at Bansky's comment about galleries. “These galleries are just trophy cabinets for a handful of millionaires,” said Bansky, “the public never has any real say in what art they see.” I want to say he's right in that first bit, in that galleries and museums are trophy cases for millionaires. Trust me on this: I'm an art-school brat, and I've been around this stuff long enough to know that the kind of cultural-capital accumulation games, the exclusions and class-establishing ploys Pierre Bourdieu described in Distinction are very real. But I've got a couple of reservations that keep me from flat-out endorsing Banksy's statement. Firstly, while galleries and museums are trophy cases for millionaires, they aren't only that. They have a host of functions: like libraries, they sometimes serve as impromptu daytime homeless shelters; they also serve as safe upper-middle-class date venues; they also provide what they claim to provide — access to many wonderful works of art that can mean a lot to a viewer. These aren't mutually exclusive functions.
As for the second bit of what Banksy says, I actually disagree: the public has a great deal of choice about what it sees. In fact, it usually chooses not to see what's in a museum. Many people rightly catch on to the millionaire trophy case function of galleries, and feel unwelcome there. So they choose not to go. Bourdieu has some good stuff about this in Distinction, in the sections on the "entitlement effect." But I'm already digressing and meandering, so I'll leave off with it and not quote Bourdieu right now. Anyway, the popular rejection of galleries connects up to a statement by another artist discussed in Kennedy's article, Shepard Fairey, and this brings me at last to the idea of an incipient historical tipping point for the avant-garde.
But the Shepard Fairey moment [the installation of his portrait of Obama in the National Portrait Gallery] may be less significant for what it says about how museums view street artists than for how those artists have come to view museums — how for many younger artists, street and otherwise, museum enshrinement no longer represents the kind of end zone it did for many who came before, even those like Keith Haring who began with street art and deep misgivings about the establishment. In interviews, Mr. Fairey, 38, has stressed how honored he is to be in the National Portrait Gallery, part of the Smithsonian Institution and about as American as a museum can be. He has also stressed that he doesn’t see it as a place in a hierarchy but instead on a kind of continuum, right alongside the work he creates with the police on his trail or album covers for bands or work commissioned by huge companies like Dewar’s or Saks Fifth Avenue...
What's interesting about this passage is the way it shows us that the de-hierarchizing tendencies of our time are really starting to amount to something. I mean, it has always been the case that the official art-world was only one of many fields for aesthetic activity. But the art-world hasn't always seen itself that way, and it has often been able to project the illusion that it was the scene that mattered. But centralization and hierarchization continue to wane (probably for technological and socio-economic reasons too big for us to fully grasp, let alone change, even if we wanted to, which I don't). And this has implications for the avant-garde. I mean, as late as 2005 Banksy could still talk about galleries and museums as if they were the dominant force that we needed to rebel against, and he could work against them using the fine old tactics of the avant-garde. But (to lapse into unforgivable academese) avant-gardism of this kind is intended as the negation of a dominant set of institutions. And we're reaching a point where this kind of action makes less sense than it once did. What do you do when those institutions have been swamped amid all the other venues for aesthetic production and display? Attacking a giant Godzilla is one thing, but what to do when the miraculous shrink-ray of postmodernity reduces that Godzilla to just one more regulation-sized iguana among many others? You've got to change your game. The way Shepard Fairey has done.
All of this resonates with a conversation I had with my colleague Dave Park the other day. He'd stopped by to pick me up on the way to a brunch party and we sat around getting tanked up on coffee and talking Foucault and Bourdieu (Dave's a social scientist, and knows his way around this stuff by different paths than I do). We got on to the notion of utopias and their negation in anti-utopias, and Dave proposed the idea of heterotopia: that is, of the rejection of the notion of an ideal-world, and of the negation of that ideal-world by its critics (who hold up implicit or explicit counter-utopias). The true happy state is a plural one, a heterotopia of many possibilities. The best case for art now seems to be heterotopic, rather than the false utopia of the official art world, or the negation of that utopia by the old-school avant-garde.
Alrighty then. So I've got about a half-dozen writing committments simmering in the critical kitchen, and several bits of administative trivia waiting to be swept under the rug. And a guest-room only half converted into a nursery. So the only rational thing to do is to continue writing about Belgian surrealism, even though I've wrapped up my official commitment in that area and sent the little essay off to the editors of the relevant journal. Anyway, it's all I've thought about this morning, as I cleaned up my notes and files from the writing of the essay.
So here's what I'm thinking: Belgian surrealism was the real deal, and those Belgians who stayed at home in Belgium were in a crucial sense better positioned to carry out one of the central projects of the avant-garde than were their Parisian and New York-based colleagues. That is: their eccentricity vis-a-vis the centers of artistic and literary reputation-making actually helped them to develop a critical attitude toward the institutions of culture. And wasn't the development of such an attitude one of the main goals of the avant-garde from Dada on?
Just about anything one reads about the Belgian surrealist scene (which started up in the 20s and continued to thrive well into the 60s) mentions the unpretentiousness and affability of it all. In contradistinction to the status-monkeys vying for Breton's blessing in Paris, or trying to pick up some of Dali's commercial luster in New York, we always hear of a Belgian scene dominated by people who actually liked one another, and pursued their work as a form of pleasure and intellectual engagement free from reputation-grubbing and political maneuvering. An example ready to hand from my files is Klaus Herding's 1982 review of a Magritte exhibition that placed M.'s work in the context of the Belgian scene from which the famous artist emerged. "Belgian surrealism," writes Herding, has up to now
...been overshadowed by the French artistic canon, yet here it reveals itself as highly distinctive and at the same time more firmly rooted in the native soil than its Parisian counterpart. In the André Breton circle, for example, there was a clash between exclusivity (for which a conventional term was le château) and a revolutionary demand for validity for all (the expression for this was l'océan)... the Belgian branch purported to be more 'reasonable,' jollier and more relaxed: good food and drink rather than male sado-masochistic fantasies were the rule when its practitioners met, and from 1949 until 1951 Magritte, Mariën, Louis Scutenaire, Paul Nougé, Paul Colinet and Robert Willems contributed as cartoonists to the weekly magazine Vendredi.
It sounds like a good-natured, congenial scene, which didn't take itself too seriously (a particular crime for surrealists, I should think). Of course there's a price one pays for shunning ambition (I mean ambition in the very bourgoise sense of material self-advancement, and the artsy variant where we simply substitute a lust for personal fame and the piling up of cultural capital around one's name for the regulation bourgeois' accumulation of economic capital), and Michel Delville, the guy who hipped me to Belgian surrealism in Liège a decade ago, understands this well. Here's a bit from his essay "The Secret History of Belgian Surrealism," which we ran in Samizdat back in 2001:
Correspondance, the first Belgian Surrealist magazine, was founded by Paul Nougé, Camille Goemans and Marcel Lecomte in 1924, the same year as Breton’s First Surrealist Manifesto. Since that time, Belgian poetry has remained one the European avant-garde’s best-kept secrets. The names of Nougé, Chavée and Dumont are conspicuously absent from most anthologies and literary histories, and Belgian surrealism is generally considered as a non-literary phenomenon and almost systematically confined to the paintings of René Magritte and Paul Delvaux. Unlike many other Belgian writers who moved to Paris to make a career (the examples of Georges Simenon, Henri Michaux, Pierre Alechinsky and many others come to mind) most Belgian surrealists published their work in their home country, and this may explain their lack of recognition outside a small circle of connoisseurs and specialists. Perhaps it is the sense of being relegated to the margins of francophone culture that accounts, at least in part, for the radical, convulsive spirit that runs through the history of the Belgian counterculture, from proto-Dada poet Clément Pansaers to Noël Godin, the now world-famous entarteur who recently hit Bill Gates with a cream pie...
The interesting bit here, for me, is the way the deliberate self-marginalization of the group actually allows them to develop a special perspective, a more subversive "radical, convulsive spirit" than is found elsewhere in surrealism. One way to think about this special perspecitve is with the concept of "minor literature" articulated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. For them, minor literature is not (or not necessarily) a literature written by an ethnic or cultural minority — though it can happen that way, and may even help. I mean, Kafka — whose relationship to language and ethnicity was all kinds of crazy — offers Deleuze and Guattari their test case for minor literature in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. But it's important to note that D. and G. aren't talking about a literature written, identity-politics style, to represent a particular identity group and its interests (though they weren't against that sort of thing). A minor literature represents, rather, something more like a deep, even intuitive, critical attitude toward the dominant ways of representing the world. Both the values of the dominant culture and the language expressing those values (that is, the dominant culture's major literature) are held up to question by the writer of a minor literature, who therefore becomes “a sort of stranger within his own language.”
Reidar Due, in his book Deleuze, gets the gist of this down rather economically, saying: “To be a classical writer one has to have access to a central viewpoint from which to represent the moral, cultural, and political structure of a society. Minor literature, by contrast, views society from an oblique, marginal angle.” He then goes on to contrast Goethe, as a classic or major author, with Joseph Conrad, whom Due sees as a writer of minor literature in the Deleuzian sense:
With his drama Faust Goethe created a representation of middle-class values and dilemmas (morality and sex, thought and action) in which subsequent generations of middle-class citizens could recognize themselves. That made Goethe a classical author. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, by contrast, depicts English colonialism as a hell of barbarism and cruelty — and he can do so [sic] because he produces specific intensive states within the English language, liberating it from its conventional rhetorical virtues of wit, elegance, and satire.
Minority, then, is stylistic and moral dissent, and it's important too: as Deleuze and Guattari oxymoronically put it, “there is nothing that is major or revolutionary except the minor.”
I think the deliberately self-marginalizing Belgian surrealists, off doing their own thing in the provinces, are well positioned to take an eccentric and critical stance toward the institutions of the dominant literature and culture in Paris. I suppose Breton and co. could be said to represent a minor-lit stance toward the big culture of, say, La Nouvelle Revue Française, but the Belgians hold minor status even with relation to the Paris-New York avant-garde scene. Their refusal to beat feet over to the city of lights to make it on the scene there is already a kind of statement to this effect.
Anyway. The Belgians' position outside the main institutions of Francophone culture (even avant-garde Francophone culture) is, ironically, a great strength for them in pursuing one of the main projects of the avant-garde: the undermining of cultural institutions. My great touchstone for the hows and whys of the avant-garde questioning of the institutions of art is Jochen Schulte-Sasse's introduction to Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, where he tells us about how the avant-garde evolved out of a sense of the limits of late-nineteenth-century aestheticism (you know: Oscar Wilde and company). It's probably not necessary to quote from it here, but in the great scheme of things this whole post is unnecessary, so in the spirit of general egregiousness I'll quote my favorite chunk of Schulte-Sasse's intro to Bürger:
Aestheticism’s intensification of artistic autonomy and its effect on the foundation of a special realm of aesthetic experience permitted the avant-garde to clearly recognize the social inconsequentiality of autonomous art and, as the logical consequence of this recognition, to attempt to lead art back into social praxis....the turning point from Aestheticism to the avant-garde is determined by the extent to which art comprehended the mode in which it functioned in bourgeois society, its comprehension of its own social status. The historical avant-garde of the twenties was the first movement in art history that turned against the institution “art” and the mode in which autonomy functions.
So that's a general avant-garde project — and I think we can see how in a sense it's also a particular kind of minor literature project: in questioning the institution of art it also questions the forms and values of classical art. But the Belgian surrealist move — coming from a group on the fringes of the avant-garde, which is to say from the fringes of the fringe — involves questioning both the classic literature and the central core of the avant-garde itself.
The work of Marcel Broodthaers offers a good case in point (but he's just one among many — he comes to mind largely, I think, because there was an exhibit of his down at the Arts Club in Chicago last time I had lunch there with my appropriately avant colleague Davis Schneiderman). Some of Broodthaers' thumbings-of-the-nose at the institutions of art were done with a light touch. I particularly like how he simply declared the existence of the "Musée d'Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles" one day. It was located in his apartment (and, later, became a kind of umbrella organization, or faux-organization, for many of his activities, and for the writings and performances of his friends. Eventually he expanded it to include a "Section Littéraire" and a "Section Cinéma." It was a great way of poking fun at the pretentions of Official Culture.
Official culture, though, is a pretty easy target. Broodthaers went further, often questioning or undermining the conventions of the avant-garde itself. I keep coming back in my thinking to his "Pense-Bête," a piece where he took some of the unsold copies of a book of poems he wrote and clumsily cast them (along with a child's ball) into a hunk of plaster. It's important to the piece that the books sit loosely in the plaster, and could be pulled loose and read. Think about it: when the only people likely to view the piece (afficionados of the avant-garde) come to see it, they are faced with the contradictions of the avant-garde art lover. On the one hand, they're all committed to the idea that art isn't sacred and shouldn't be cut off from us by any sacred aura. On the other hand, to actually pick up one of the books and read it would be to violate the decorum of the gallery: they'd be damaging an exhibit. Of course they shouldn't be bothered about damaging an exhibit: hadn't the great Dada heroes placed small axes next to their work, along with invitations for spectators to destroy anything they disliked (hence ceasing to be mere spectators)? But the contradiction of being avant-garde and being an art-lover was too much. As Broodthaers observed in "Ten Thousand Francs Reward," no one actually ever violated the sacred aura of the exhibit to read a book: they all looked at them politely, like the most bourgeois of exhibition-consumers:
Here you cannot read the book without destroying its sculptural aspect. It is a concrete gesture that passes the prohibition on to the viewer — at least that's what I thought would happen. But I was surprised to find out that viewers reacted quite differently from what I had imagined. Everyone so far, no matter who, has perceived the object as an artistic expression or a curiosity. "Look! Books in plaster!" No one had any curiosity about the text; nobody had any idea whether this was the final burial of prose or poetry, of sadness or pleasure"
I'm not sure whether he showed them, or they showed him, but I am sure about what's on display: the contradictions of avant-garde art itself.
Another way Broodthaers' "Pense-Bête" challenges the norms of the avant-garde is by causing us to question the nature of one of the major avant-garde forms: the readymade. Dieter Schwarz (to whose thinking I'm indebted in everything I say about Broodthaers) has a lot to say about this in an old issue of October. "In contradistinction to the readymade, which is selected by its 'author, being thereby instated as an aesthetic object'" says Schwarz, "the poems of Pense-Bête [the book, not the sculpture of the same name] remain part of a literary discourse, for the author's statement is obviously .... inscribed within a cultural tradition." That is: the readymade is usually a testament to the aesthetic gaze and aesthetic intention of the artist: he sees something and, by selecting it, declares that it has aesthetic value. Here, though, the found object has already been designated as an aesthetic object (in a literary sense, not a sculptural one), and has been so designated by the same guy who is now presenting it as a found object. And can an object really be called a readymade when it is the artist in question who actually made the object (albiet for a different purpose)? If the readymade asks "what makes art art?", then "Pense-Bête" asks "what makes a readymade a readymade?" So the avant-garde questioner of art finds himself interrogated. The minor avant-garde takes a good, hard, critical look at the classic avant-garde. And does it while having a good time, too.
Michel Delville got it right, I think, when he said (in "A Secret History of Belgian Surrealism") that many works of Belgian surrealism were enabled by the distance from the fame-hunting, revolution-dreaming world of Parisian surrealism. The Belgians, says Delville, "were inspired by the chink of beer bottles, the smell of fried sausages and the sight of people pissing in the streets on their way back from the local café. As Louis Scutenaire once put it, in Belgium 'on boit de la bière et on mange de la viande / Et tout le monde est une bande d’abrutis' ('we drink beer and we eat meat / And we’re all just a bunch of morons')." Now that's what I call a liberating vision of art!
The latest Cultural Society is up online, thanks to the efforts of the indefatigable Zach Barocas, who deserves some kind of medal for getting his editing done while relocating from Minneapolis to New York. Marring the very fine list of contributions is my own effort, "Nawlins Dreamsong Late ’08." The poem makes a big deal about insisting it is based on real events, and it is based on real events. But I can do nothing without a text, and the poem is also based on John Berryman's "Dream Song 15," which sprang into my mind while the events recounted in the poem were going on. I'm not entirely sure why, though I suppose it had to do with the sudden manifestation of the weirdness of the bits of speech encountered in each poem.
Anyway, in recognition of the debt to Berryman and his persona-driven dream-theater, here's his poem, which is truly fabulous, if pretty dark. The Chicago woman's words — "kiss my ass, that's what you are" — are the kind of poetry of everyday life that doesn't get preserved often enough:
Let us suppose, valleys & such ago, one pal unwinding from his labours in one bar of Chicago and this did actually happen. This was so. And many graces are slipped, & many a sin even that laid man low
but this will be remembered & told over, that she was heard at last, haughtful & greasy, to brawl in that low bar: 'You can biff me, you can bang me, get it you'll never. I may be only a Polack broad but I don't lay easy. Kiss my ass, that's what you are.'
Women is better, braver. In a foehn of loss entire, which too they hotter understand, having had it, we struggle. Some hang heavy on the sauce, some invest in the past, one hides in the land. Henry was not his favourite.
That sense of a lost innocence in the third stanza is as strong here as it is anywhere in The Dreamsongs. And this poem's got the added emotional oomph of that sad, scrappy underdog thing. I like to think the whack-job language in my poem is some kind of cousin to what Berryman had going on, but my "Nawlins Dreamsong" has none of the emotional depth on display in Berryman's poem. Maybe I make up for some of the lost ground with a few allusions, but this is clearly Berryman's game being played here, not mine. I just wanted to pay my hommage.
I've been tapping out a short essay about Belgian Surrealist poetry of the mid-twentieth century today (what, like you did something more important?), and this got me thinking about the whole Surrealist scene in Belgium from the 40s through the 60s. One of my favorite guys from the scene was Marcel Broodthaers, and his sensibility really takes you to the kind of half-wry, half-punk ethos they had going back then. Broodthaers started out as a poet. When (oh great inevitability) copies of his book Pense-Bête didn't sell, he cast a bunch of them in plaster and declared himself a visual artist. It worked out. So, you know, there's hope.
