d.a.levy's "destructive writing" and the Instant of Communication, Ingrid Swanberg

When the element of destruction is no longer externally established in the theme (when poetry is not simply resonant movement, if the verbal play alone operates upon it a suppression of objects as such), it is no longer a crushing fatality but a deliberate exuberance, a rapid flood tide bearing limits away. It is not the overwhelming sky (annihilating mankind), but, on the contrary, the infinite transparency of the sky. The invoked God is in fact nothing but man himself, and the absurd confusion of stars with the limited quadrangle of a field makes man divine through a suppression of his limits only if man himself, almost at the boundaries of his fields, becomes what he calls a god. And I cannot doubt that this surge of poetry `bestows sight' in the depths of the sky of what I am (my presence at the edge of the abyss, which a cry reveals in the instant). Bataille (AM 151)

. . . (I'm an atheist who believes in god,
I have to, i am god writes all my
poems). . . d.a.levy ("Cleveland Undercovers", ZC 88)

In The Inhuman, Lyotard, in his articulation of the aesthetics of the sublime and its relationship to the avant- garde, describes "the irreversible deviation in the destination of art, a deviation affecting all the valencies of the artistic condition" (TI 101) as primarily a deviation taking its impetus from the Ereignis, the occurrence, the event--or, put negatively, in Burke's sense, from a spiritual terror of privation of the happening: ". . .the sublime is kindled by the threat of nothing further happening" (99). Other features of the sublime, the disarming of thought through an agitation of indeterminacy with regard to "what is", the shift in the position of the artist as sender to artist as involuntary addressee and the consequent supplanting of didactic forms (poetics and rhetoric) by aesthetics (99), the importance of the marvelous, monstrous, formless, imperfect, shocking as vectors of intense aesthetic feeling--all contribute to the "Is it happening?" of the sublime. The Kantian notion of negative presentation stands apart, for Lyotard, in that he sees the "Is it happening?" as fundamentally a question of time, which is not an explicit part of Kant's problematic (99). Lyotard believes that the here and now of Newman's sense of the sublime marks the question holding the contradictory feelings of anxiety and joy in suspension, awaiting the possibility of nothing happening (92). Moreover, this here and now announces "the displacement in which consists the whole of the difference between romanticism and the `modern' avant-garde" (93). This is a displacement of the fundamental task of romanticism, of "bearing pictorial or otherwise expressive witness to the inexpressible" (93). The difference lies in that what is inexpressible is not some other thing, being, time or place rendered through the work, but what happens, the event of the work itself is the inexpressible:

Here and now there is this painting, rather than nothing, and that's what is sublime. Letting go of all grasping intelligence and of its power, disarming it, recognizing that this occurrence of painting was not necessary and is scarcely foreseeable, a privation in the face of Is it happening? guarding the occurrence before being on one's guard, before `looking' [regarder] under the aegis of now, this is the rigour of the avant-garde. (93)

In some ways the problematics of the visual arts lend themselves very readily to Lyotard's explication of the sublime. The essays in The Inhuman furnish numerous examples. "The paint, the picture as occurrence or event, is not expressible, and it is to this that it has to witness" (93), etc. This paper will take up the poetry of d.a.levy, an American avant-garde poet who came into prominence in the 1960s, and will look particularly at his Concrete poems, which he gave the appellation, "destructive writing." levy's destructive writing falls into an indeterminate region between the visual and the written. I'll try to address the following questions: Is the here and now of the Is it happening? a sufficiently rigorous approach to the saying of the poem? If, as Bataille says, poetry is directed toward the same aim as sacrifice, seeking "as far as possible to render palpable, and as intensely as possible, the content of the present moment" (AM 149), may such a moment be aligned along the axis of the sublime with the here and now, which Lyotard indicates is a departure from Surrealism? To what extent does the poem communicate, in the sense Lyotard presents us with in regard to technology, that ". . .what is called communication is always, in every case, that nothing happens, that we are not destined" (TI 114)? What is the relation of this "nothing happens" to the event of the poem? In so doing I'll be guided by Lyotard's sense of the Ereignis of the (sublime) work of art and by Bataille's articulation of "the plenitude of the instant" which belongs to the poetic ordeal of sacrifice.

In August 1968 (year of violent appropriations), three months before his suicide, d.a.levy, in response to a request for a "poem about East Cleveland," wrote "Suburban Monastery Death Poem," a 28-page apostrophe to the city that explodes with ferocious despair and dark laughter.

"east cleveland has more history than cleveland"
she sed as if to pump that additional piece
of information into my de-generating energy
centers like a gas station attendant
i couldnt get it across to anyone
how tired i was
just writing poems for tomorrow
or writing poems for myself
a form of suicide

The poem's theme is of the appropriation and marginalization of the poetic under the technological epoch, what levy called "the nothingness of being a poet in America." In fact, the request for a poem about East Cleveland was an invitation to self-parody, touching, as it did on the notoriety levy experienced as the result of obscenity charges brought against him by the city, a pretext for silencing him because of his outspoken criticism of the establishment (he had also been arrested for jaywalking), on his overall refusal to be silenced, on his recent move to East Cleveland, and on his well- known poem "Cleveland Undercovers," published three years earlier, a poem in which he "writes" the city in a wild, exuberant and rhythmic prosopopoeia.

I won't take up levy's biography beyond these few details, which are intended to offer a setting for the mood of the Concrete poems and the question of communication/non-communication. If we take the `nothing happens,' the "loss of all destiny," with Lyotard, as "the essential feature of our problematic" (TI 114), then, as Heidegger puts it (writing of Hölderlin), there is "no moment in which to make a contrived myth of the figure of the poet" (PLT 95). "Suburban Monastery Death Poem" opens with a prelude ("PART ZERO--Celebration With Rada Drums") in which levy writes of the riots occurring in the Hough (a black ghetto):

only ten blocks away
buildings burned--perhaps burning now
the august night broken by sniper fire
police men bleeding in the streets
a sniper surrenders (perhaps out of ammunition)
Gun Jammed?
someone sed he was framed in a doorway
like a picture--his hands in the air
when they shot him--
only ten blocks away
from my quiet apartment
with its green ceramic buddhas
& science fiction books
unread skin magazines to be cut up
for collages

only ten blocks away
from my total helplessness
from my boredom enforced by the state
they are looting stores
trying to get televisions
so they can watch the riots
on the 11pm news

the national guard jeeps patrol
the streets again
the army-green trucks with the
giant white star on the side
moving in the summer lightning. . .

In speaking of Rimbaud's "silent contestation", his complete, unambiguous and unreserved sacrifice in the abandonment of poetry (a sacrifice through which he extended its "possible"), Bataille, in Inner Experience, describes the revolt of the poet at ". . .the idea of `using' poetic genius. And when this revolt is felt, everything becomes dark--one must vomit the wrongdoing, one must `expiate' it" (149). Bataille refers here to a usage, an exploitation of the poetic gift specifically relating to personal ambition, "glory," yet by extenuation this applies as well to the usage of poetry in the interests of project, which Bataille designates to the realm of morality. The darkening, or profanation, of poetry calls for sacrifice, which for Bataille, signifies the release of things from their servility, their use-value: "Like our ancestors, we must take objects away from productive activity to the interest of the instant itself." (IE 148). This is important in relation to the aesthetics of the sublime in at least three respects: 1) Because of the indeterminacy of its origin, the poetic gift comes, under the sublime, to be recognized only by its effects on the addressee (both the public and the artist). The avant-garde artist thus risks subservience to what Lyotard terms "the shock-effect", which opens the possibility of capture within various projects and programs (Dadaism is a good example) where the result is all that counts. 2) A progressive Christian-capitalist society demands that art be a finished product to be stored in its museum-silos or sold in its markets. As Lyotard notes in describing the seductive power of the art-market over artists, there is a "confusion between innovation and the Ereignis, a confusion maintained by the temporality specific to contemporary capitalism" (TI 106), a confusion which ultimately, by allowing innovation to "work," eclipses the question-mark of the Is it happening? (107). 3) Our technological epoch imposes an order which blinds us to all other orders, privileging identity and information above communication in such a way that avant-garde projects are subsumed as concepts within a technological economy we are unable to objectify, just as in the poem, "they are looting stores / trying to get televisions / so they can watch the riots / on the 11 pm news." Lyotard, in articulating the Kantian aesthetic of the sublime, links the incommunicability of the sublime to the Heideggerian retreat of Being. "For Heidegger, the welcome accorded something sensory, in other words some meaning embodied in the here-and-now before any concept, no longer has place and moment. This retreat signifies our current fate" (TI 113). The destitution of the present time belongs to the ontological limit of the completion of metaphysics, "the extreme oblivion of Being" (PLT 95), which leads philosophy to "misuse" poetry as a source for enriching itself. One must meet the poem half-way "thinking our way soberly into what [the] poetry says, to come to learn what is unspoken" (PLT 96). For Heidegger, the manifestness of the destiny of Being is intended for the poet because the poet says without representing. Bataille describes such poetic saying as ". . .the cry of what, within us, cannot be reduced; what within us, is stronger than us" (AM 138), powerful emotion instantaneously singing out the actuality of what is. The instant is communication. It is in this sense that he speaks of will: "This moment of the plenitude of the instant, in which the other is no longer `other than me', in which I am no longer 'other than him', is the ordeal of sacrifice, when it can, if poetry attains it, be willed" (AM 151). Thus poetry is destruction, intimation of ruin (IE 149). What is destroyed is removed from the profane world of utility and in the brevity of the instant is restored, through its absence, to sensibility. Poetry and sacrifice have the same aim: ". . .to render palpable and as intensely as possible, the content of the present moment" (AM 149). This is a deceptively simple thought. Bearing in mind Heidegger's sense of the poet's saying of the unspoken, the aletheia structure of the destituteness of the destitution of the present time (PLT 95), and the notion of poiesis as a bringing forth into presence or a letting come into presence through ecstasis, in which the poet is a "limit where the poiein itself is given to itself" (qtd. in Saíz, 2), we may ask, what, in the plenitude and brevity of the instant of poetic destruction, is brought into presence? This is also to ask after the possibility of a linkage between a poetic will to sacrifice and the "task of art. . . of the immanent sublime" Lyotard defines in terms of an "undoing the presumption of the mind with respect to time" and of "alluding to an unpresentable" (TI 107, 128). For Bataille, the cry of poetry and sacrifice "bestows sight" (AM 147, 149), sight which is of the senses as opposed to knowledge which is of reason (AM 137). Bataille believes that poetry differs from sacrifice in that in poetry words, which we use for instrumental acts of reason, are what is sacrificed, that is, removed from servility, in the poem. "We would in no way have anything of the human about us if language had to be entirely servile within us." (IE 135). This is essentially to attend, with Heidegger, to the demand that we enter into the speaking of language, not our own:

Only in that way do we arrive at the region within which it may happen--or also fail to happen--that language will call to us from there and grant us its nature. We leave the speaking to language. We do not wish to ground language in something else that is not language itself, nor do we wish to explain other things by means of language. (PLT 190-191)

For Bataille what is revealed in the sacred instant of communication is the victim's absence. The instant, always already fleeting, holds open to sensibility an absence which both obscures and reveals. Yet the stress here is upon the instant of change rather than the suppressed object. "The ritual has the right of fixing `sensitive concern' at the burning instant of transition: where what exists already ceased to exist, or what no longer exists is, for sensibility, no more than it was." (AM 149) The poem, for Bataille, is not exempt from appropriations falling in general under the sway of the technological. This takes place on two accounts: Firstly, it arises out of the nature of language itself--turning again to Heidegger: "In what is spoken, speaking gathers the ways in which it persists as well as that which persists by it--its persistence, its presencing" (PLT 194). Secondly, the desire for permanence and security tends towards a stifling of the poem's emotive actuality in deference to the uses of culture:

What once bestowed sight is exactly what later prevents it. . . Between the man (who cries) and actuality (which is), language whose generality and immaterial character slips smoothly into security, immutability and the Academy, habitually intervenes. Poetry, proclaiming the suspended instant, by the fact that the affecting order of words will survive it, tends to express only a durable meaning. In fact, such is the poverty of poetry that in using words to express what happens it tends to stifle the cry of actual emotion under the disguise of a museum face. . . .And in consecrating [words] to the elevated condition to stir emotion, it slowly uses the emotive value and, without fail, withdraws a power it wanted to be as great as possible. (AM 147)

Bataille also remarks here, on the same principle, the way in which poetry separates noble and sacred words from the ordinary and common, demonstrating how the "unpoetic" poetry of Jacques Prévert, through a process of arbitrary association, overturns this stifling order. "It is poetry because, in itself, it harshly effects the ruin of poetry." (AM 152) This was precisely the aim of the Concrete avant-garde, with its violent "concretions." The "Para-Concrete Manifesto," developed by levy, D.R. Wagner and Kent Taylor, proclaims (following Artaud),

. . .Our concrete poems are Shit/ each poem a tiny spat of diarrrrhea
growing into infinite globules of cement excrement/ our concrete poems
are beyond concrete poems/ Where DaDaism failed, preaching Anti-Art
but creating art & the NaDaists failed by creating an art of nothing-
ness when they proclaimed NOTHING - the cleveland cement fuckers will
succeed in giving the Public SHIT. . .
each poem - a new death of WORDS AS ART. . . (ZC 129)

For levy, as for Bataille, the poetic is in essence: change, disruption, destruction, ruin.

I'd like to turn now to levy's destructive writing poems. The "experiments in destructive writing" of the Zen Concrete and The Tibetan Stroboscope sequences are Concrete poem-collages largely composed of heavily ink-saturated fields of "text", in which words are darkened and blurred beyond legibility. Words and lines slip, cloud, grow, bend, change, appear, disappear and decompose on the page. Fragments of Buddhist scripture, photo images from contemporary "skin magazines," images from sacred (erotic) Tibetan and Indian art, and ironic typewritten captions are sometimes embedded into the syntax formed by the saturated fields of darkened text. These embedded images seem to gain the character of the obliterated typography, and to sink into its obscurity. There is a mood of annihilation; a subtle reference to censorship. The overwhelming effect is a sense of great immediacy, direct transmission, a ground zero impact. A frequent response to these poems (when a response is not refused out of hand--this itself, of course, being a response) is laughter.

For the purposes of this paper I'll take up one of the poems in which no images appear, titled simply "SELECTED WRITINGS" and inscribed with levy's poetic signature and the year, "1967." Below these appears an eclipsed text in a shape recognizable as a poem, in which the words and lines bleed and fur with a superabundance of black mimeo ink ringed by a faint aura of oil. What is the saying of this poem? What is its event? More to the point, is the question of the Is it happening? sufficient to the poem? Lyotard's description of this question is as follows:

The event happens as a question mark `before' happening as a question. . . .The possibility of nothing happening is often associated with a feeling of anxiety, a term with strong connotations in modern philosophies of existence and of the unconscious. It gives to waiting, if we really mean waiting, a predominantly negative value. But suspense can also be accompanied by pleasure, for instance pleasure in welcoming the unknown, and even by joy, to speak like Baruch Spinoza, the joy obtained by the intensification of being that the event brings with it. This is probably a contradictory feeling. It is at the very least a sign, the question-mark itself, the way in which it happens is withheld and announced: Is it happening? The question can be modulated in any tone. But the mark of the question is `now', now, like the feeling that nothing might happen: the nothingness now. (TI 90, 92)

I think the levy poem exceeds the scope of this question. In this poem the "mark of the question" becomes simply a mark. The copula of the here and now is severed in the instant of the poem's concretion. "SELECTED WRITINGS" is writing as writing. What occurs does not occur in the work; the Ereignis of the poem is not situated in the realm of a witness of pigments as in the event of the painting (TI 93), nor in the "field where certain researches [recherches] into language have free rein" (100), but in the instant of the "death of WORDS AS ART" (ZC 129). (To regard the poem as a "research" would be to reinscribe it in the destitution of the technological order and to insure that "nothing happens, that we are not destined" [TI 114]). The poem's destructive writing is a putting to death of words. Its realm is without mastery, without time. It is the instant of a complete spending, in which words are sacrificed and the poem is. As Bataille writes,

". . . poetry. . .is the sacrifice in which words are victims" (IE 135). If there is an absolute of the poem, it is its silent contestation of the `nothing happens' in the instant in which its absence is revealed. Thus as in Bataille's paradox, it is in the sacrificial instant of communication, the fleeting moment of change, that the poem lives.

The awakening of the sensibility, the passage from the sphere of intelligible (and usable) objects to excessive intensity, is the destruction of the objects as such. In the world of the instant nothing is dead, absolutely nothing, even if the infinite pressure of death alone has the power to burst in with a single leap. (AM 150)

In its destructive play, the levy poem brings a (literal) thickening of language into a typography of ruin that forecloses upon the possibility of appropriation through the poem's meaning, its fictioning, its said. Only as it is taken out of any productive activity does the poem communicate. levy is aware of the danger, in sacrificing "meaning" of creating a fiction of meaninglessness readily lending itself to modalities of use-value: innovation, taste--the demands of culture and the market place (which in turn follow the demands of technology)--"the eclecticism of consumption"-- Lyotard associates with postmodernism (TI 127). But even Lyotard's sense of "the task of art" which would serve "the honour of painting," etc., is open to appropriation on the part of intellectuals and philosophers moving into the "position of an unknown avant-garde" (128). Such is Bataille's intuition in connecting morality and project. Yet in "SELECTED WRITINGS" not only the sense of words but words themselves are given up in an extension of the poem into the neutrality of pure writing, a risking in language unto death (of words). This risking which admits of no second order for the saying of the poem and in which the poet alone is the limit is the rigor of the avant-garde.

Poetic genius is not verbal talent (verbal talent is necessary since it is a question of words, but it often leads one astray): it is the divining of ruins secretly expected, in order that so many immutable things become undone, lose themselves, communicate. Nothing is rarer. (IE 149)

Or said another way, with regard to time:

When poetry, to which nothing is connected in advance, can destroy without respite, it always makes use of unforeseen means. (AM 152 emphasis mine)

The poem's death is a `nothing happens' which exceeds everything. Death in the poem doesn't appear; it happens; it is the event. The Ereignis of this poem is always already withdrawn into the indeterminate "time" of the residue: the materiality, "concreteness" and silence of the destructive writing. Sublime depth of abyss. The poem remains in absence under the singularity of the signature and date. Its "time" of possibility is of the future anterior, not in Lyotard's sense of "guarding the occurrence before `looking' [regarder] under the aegis of now . . .[which]. . .is the rigour of the avant-garde" (TI 93) (it is not about guarding or regarding), but in the sense of an absolute expenditure that opens up a space for communication. Through a total annihilation of the poem's said, we are brought into rapport with its saying, its cry of silence, its removal into writings, its absence confronting us with an unimaginable depth, "the infinite transparency of the sky." Such rapport is not a fictioning but an actualizing. The poem's deathly silence of writing is beyond appropriation into project, beyond recuperation into aesthetics, "researches." It has no "museum face." What appears on the page, the "selected writings," the "remains" are not the poem--for to say this would be "to retain with one hand what the other gives" (IE 148).

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND THE WORKS CITED
AM: Bataille, Georges. The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism. trans. Michael Richardson. London: Verso, 1994.
IE: ---, Inner Experience. trans. Leslie Ann Boldt. Albany: State U of New York P, 1988.
PLT: Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
ZC: levy,d.a. Zen Concrete & Etc. Madison: Ghost Pony P, 1991.
TI: Lyotard, Jean François. The Inhuman. trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1991.
Saíz, Próspero. "Bataille and Vallejo: The Cry of the Lyric and the Poetics of Sacrifice." presented at the MMLA Convention, Nov. 1995, St. Louis.

This paper was originally presented at the annual M/MLA convention, Chicago, 1997.

Above copied from: http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/dalevy/daesa-is.htm

Self-Referentiality and Mass-Production in the Work of Allan McCollum, 1969 - 1989, ANNE RORIMER

reprinted from ALLAN McCOLLUM, STEDELIJK VAN ABBEMUSEUM
Eindhoven, Holland; 1989

SINCE 1977, when he shifted the focus of his earlier production, Allan McCollum has been involved in an investigation of the work of art with regard to its function within the social system. "If one wants to understand art," McCollum has stated, "it seems to me, one should begin with the terms of the situation in which one actually encounters it."1 To this end, the artist has developed a diverse series of works that reflect upon the status of art in contemporary culture. Although their paricular means and emphasis necessarily vary, the Surrogates, Perpetual Photos, Perfect Vehicles, and Individual Works, created by McCollum during the last twelve years, call attention to the place of art as an economic and psychological, not merely physical, presence within society.

A small, square work, Untitled, 1977, measuring 21 x 21 cm and made of wood covered with an off-white acrylic, marks McCollum's departure from his previous approach to painting and his achievement of a new level of thematic interest. This transitional piece is to be distinguished from prior works by the artist because of the simple presentation of its own painted surface as a primary and singular fact. Notably moreover, the frame of the work exists as an extension of its painted surface since a groove of about a centimeter in depth creates a narrow indentation close to and parallel with its edge. As in the ensuing Surrogate Paintings in wood — first conceived in 1978 as individually colored monochromes and in 1979 as images of black-centered, matted, and framed objects — and the cast Plaster Surrogates, 1982, the surrounding picture frame and its enclosed 'image'are combined on one and the same pictorial field.

Although no two pieces are ever identical, each Surrogate presents the same, self-reflexive image of a typical painting and thus provides what McCollum has aimed at from the inception of this series: 'a universal sign-for-a-painting.'2 Since their literal content is their own depiction, the Surrogates declare themselves to be paintings in a generalized state. As such they may be looked at in relation to how a painting is treated — as opposed to what it might portray — within the current cultural context.

The Surrogates may be hung singly or together in small or large groups depending on the given situation, which is dictated in every case by the conventions of installation in the home, museum, or one-person exhibition. No single work in this series is identical with another in size or color or possible combinations thereof. Never large in scale and posessing a slightly rough surface, they maintain a reference to painterliness and the handmade along with their mechanically produced appearance. At the same time as they all are virtually alike, they satisfy in ironic manner the demand for uniqueness traditionally associated with works of art. In this way, the Surrogates, as their title suggests, are able to play the part of painting. Denuded of abstract or figurative referential content and ostensibly blank, they bring the many uses of art in society to the fore, whether as a decorative element, item of exchange, symbol of prestige, or possession of personal worth, suggesting the scope of its possible functions.

The Perpetual Photos, 1982-present, exhibited for the first time in 1984, reinforce the significance of the Surrogates. Rather than directly creating a painted image that is about being a painting as in the case of the Surrogates, in these works, McCollum produces photographs by enlarging the diminutive and illegible images of paintings that may be found in the backgrounds of television performances. The resulting images deny access to any knowledge of the original; instead they exist in their own right as blurred abstractions derived from the media where paintings have been clearly subordinated to the larger scenario. As the artist has explained, 'When I enlarge these little meaningless smudges up to lifesize — the size of a picture we might hang in our own home — there's nothing there, just the ghost of an artwork, the ghost of content'3. These ghostlike images serve to haunt the spectator insofar as they 'mimic one's search for meaning in an artwork.'4 The absence of specific content which is, in itself, their content) turns the viewer's attention toward a consideration of the meaning of content in general and its constant regeneration.

Like the Surrogates and Perpetual Photos, the Perfect Vehicles, 1985 (large-scale version, 1988), have been divested of particularized content in order to present themselves as objects belonging to the category of art. The Vehicles, differing one from another in color only, are cast in solid plaster. Modeled by McCollum after the most typical antique Chinese ginger jar, which has been extensively reproduced and copied for centuries, they represent a generalized abstraction of a vase form, although they lack its characteristic hollowness.5 Formally suggesting both the male and the female6 and also alluding simultaneously to both womb and tomb, they cut across the stylistic boundaries of past and present objects of design. They embody multiple associations ranging from ancient vessels such as burial urns to contemporary household decanters that figure prominently in modern home decor. Arrayed in grouped isolation on pedestals or dominating an exhibition space like over-lifesized statuary, the Vehicles are emblematic of their own uselessness as vases made into art. In a tongue-in-cheek text pertaining to these works, the artist wishfully affirms and rhetorically queries: 'In extinguishing absolutely the possibility of any recourse to utility, I mean to accelerate the symbolic potential of the Vehicles toward total meaning, total value. I aim to fashion the most perfect art object possible....Is it not my role as an artist to reproduce and repeat at will — that psychic effervescence — associated with the unrepeatable and perfectly unique timeless moment in which the rest of the world simply fades away?7

The Vehicles address the notion of the transcendent, timeless work of art. In parallel manner with the Surrogates and Photos, they stand as neutral signs that colorfully, sleekly, and wittily point to their own emptiness as vases. Paradoxically, their emptiness as vases imbues them with a weighty import as functionless objects that nonetheless function to carry signification. In short, they refer to themselves as symbolic objects that, specially allocated and classified within the social order as art, automatically signal the expectation of content and engender the desire for response.


Through their reference to the small scale, symbolic collectible or bibelot, McCollum's most recent series, the Individual Works, extend his aesthetic inquiry further. A continuing piece, open to future realizations, it exists to date in two parts, one of which is a turquoise blue and the other a salmon pink. These room-sized displays are each comprised of over 10,000 small, similarly-scaled, graspable objects. In recent exhibitions the Individual Works have been placed contiguously on a single pedestal table measuring approximately 50 square meters. Each separate object represents a different combination of top and bottom halves of shapes cast from about 150 different household items or their parts. No two objects are alike, although their sheer multiplicity and seeming similarity gives an overall effect of mass-produced identity. In this way, these works incisively cut through the established divisions between high and low art, or art and non-art forms of production. As McCollum has pointed out with respect to the Individual Works project: "... it addresses what is lost in the opposition of art production and industrial production, the cultural trope of the Unique versus the Expendable, the Irreplaceable versus the Common: the psychological underpinnings of the Class system as mediated through our making of things. This work is about an unnecessary and arbitrarily configured dichotomy we all seem to need to believe in..."8

BY BRINGING THE MAKING OF art into the immediate sphere of industrial mass-production, the work seeks to overcome the restrictive barriers that tend to cordon art off from greater accessibility. Unlike other works dealing with relationships between art and industrially-made, non-art or commercial objects of everyday use, McCollum's piece deals with basic assumptions regarding uniqueness as a built-in requirement for art, be the work a urinal by Marcel Duchamp or a replicated Campbell soup can by Andy Warhol. In the process of allying the unique and precious object with the ubiquitous and ordinary one, he foregrounds the unspoken capacity of art to act as an object of desire, historically placed in the hands of a few.

All of the works in each of the four series by McCollum examine their own role within the broader social framework as objects whose economic and psychological value in the culture usually is concealed or, at least, not overtly stated. In seeking to devise forms for allowing the work of art to comment upon itself, McCollum has drawn upon, as well as made reference to, the significant aesthetic concerns of a number of his immediate predecessors and, in the process, redefined their aims. Paintings exhibited prior to 1975 when he was living in Los Angeles anticipate McCollum's future work in as much as they suggest the nature of his artistic enterprise at the outset of his career in the late 1960's.

During the period from 1968-1977, McCollum developed increasingly systematic and mechanical sets of procedures for the production of 'self-referential'art works. Unstretched, stained paintings of 1969 — done on a small scale using handkerchiefs and in a large format using canvas — ironically referred to Color Field painting, extensively exhibited in America at this time.9 Evenly-spaced, horizontal, white stripes on a grey field contained within an encompassing border characterize these early paintings. For their realization, McCollum first tinted their fabric with household dye and, having then applied strips of masking tape to protect areas of the dyed surface, he subsequently removed periodic sections of the grey coloring by lightly spraying the surface of the material with laundry bleach. The artist describes these works as 'formalist-paintings-as-Fluxus-objects,' stating that it was his intention in these years "to produce a kind of contemporary painting in a mechanical manner using only materials that could be found in the supermarket."10 As in the case of artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, or Jules Olitski — who are known for staining their canvases with paint — he followed a procedure of soaking the weave of the canvas with liquid grey so that the painted image and its supporting material surface would integrally blend together. However, having also withdrawn the imbued grey colour from areas not covered by the bands of tape, McCollum effectively reversed the conventional figure/ground dichotomy through the allusion to photographic forms of mechanical reproduction by way of presenting the work in the negative as areas of light and dark. Paintings brought into being by the inseparable combination of the contradictory processes of dyeing and bleaching thereby succeeded in parodying their own, quite literally, self-absorbed nature while they also made reference to the repetitive methods of factory production.

From the late 1960's to the mid-1970's McCollum developed another series of paintings, visually resembling brickwork, whose content revealed the work's form to be the product of its method of formation. For these series, he constructed each work according to regularized procedures of glueing together strips or squares of canvas — all cut to the same size and color — stained in advance — in rows according to various predetermined systems for their linear placement. Industrial caulking secured the individual strips or squares of canvas — which had no pre-existing backing — to each other and became a visible element of the painting. Therefore, as the artist has expressed it, "there was no way to distinguish the work's composition from the features of its fabrication."

These early paintings by McCollum, divulging the very substance and process of their own making within their thematic parameters, are indebted to the innovations brought about in sculpture in the second half of the 1960's. "The elimination of pictorialism and metaphor in favor of the literalism of making" by artists like Eva Hesse or Richard Serra directly influenced McCollum at the time. Serra's Casting, 1969, for example, which laid bare the activity of handling material while expressing its true physicality, specifically impressed him. For the realization of Casting, Serra threw molten lead into the angle created by the intersection of wall and floor of the gallery space. Once the metal had hardened he pulled it away from its position at the base of the wall and, having repeated this action about a dozen times, placed each molded strip of lead in parallel succession on the floor of the exhibition area. A work such as this, with its sequential manipulation of a raw, industrial, non-art material, offers a clear reference point for McCollum's decision to expose the caulking that both held his paintings together and participated in their pictorial configuration.

Pencil, ink, watercolor, and acrylic works begun by McCollum in 1974, labeled Untitled Paper Constructions, further succeeded through processes of mechanization in reducing painting to the terms of its own formal construction. Thus, they overtly challenged the convention of self-referentiality for its own sake by demonstrating that self-referentiality could, in fact, be mass-produced. In a wry response to the dogma of the time, which focused on relationships between a painting's internal image and its edge, McCollum discovered the means to correlate image and edge so that they might be totally interdependent rather than mutually exclusive. These works likewise defined their own rectilinearity instead of being circumscribed a priori within a delineated boundary. Utilizing certain existing and basic geometric shapes — obtained when one grid of squares is rotated 22% degrees and superimposed on itself — to form a succession of rectangles, he composed a system for generating a series of handmade works whose criss-cross patterns varied in size and color. The shapes themselves were commercially printed in quantity on drawing paper. McCollum then painted them himself, tore them out along their lines, and glued them together in a puzzle-like fashion. In this way, the shapes could be constantly re-used to systematically and mechanically engender ongoing permutations of form. Paintings thus arrived at through the sequential repetition of rectangular units consisting of interlocking shapes, were, in a sense, 'patterned' after themselves in a potentially indefinite manner. By offering a diversity of essentially equivalent patterns, they demonstrated their fundamental similarity in the face of multiplicity and commented critically on the idea of singularity for its own sake.

McCollum's systematic approach to these works may be seen in the light of the influential methods of Sol LeWitt while his reduction of their formal elements to predetermined, standardized components bear witness to his high regard for the work of Daniel Buren. The use of repetitive arithmetic or mechanical systems — freeing LeWitt and Buren, respectively, from dependence on arbitrary compositional arrangements and expressive signs of making endows each of their works with their individuality in conjunction with determining aspects of their support. Having extended the interpretation of the work's support to encompass the walls of the existing exhibition space, LeWitt introduced the idea of producing 'a total drawing environment' by 'treating the whole room as a complete entity — as one idea.'11 By employing a predetermined system of lines, such as the basic series All Combinations of Arcs from Corners and Sides; Straight Lines, Not Straight Lines, and Broken Lines, evolved in 1973 and used for many different installations, he has been able to effect the complete interpenetration of linear elements with any given surface. Buren, for his part, has expanded the definition of a work's support to account for all of the factors — both physical and social — of its institutional framework. As early as 1965 he arrived at the decision to reduce the pictorial element of his work to the repetition of alternating white and colored vertical bands 8.7 cm in width. This unvarying striped pattern, which may be printed on any material and adhered to any surface, functions as a neutral sign for painting and, as such, constantly has served to integrate the content of each of Buren's works with the specific context in which it is presented. Highly receptive to the procedures introduced by these artists in the latter part of the 1960's, McCollum has directed their influence toward other purposes. Whereas both LeWitt and Buren address the given surroundings of the work in the endeavor to reassess the traditional confines of the delimited, material object, McCollum has chosen instead to attend to the object of art as a consolidated, physically detached entity. McCollum's early paintings, exhibiting the same self-reflective inclinations as his later production, serve as a link between his work of the 1980's and the major issues in painting set forth at the end of the 1950's and beginning of the 1960's by artists such as Robert Ryman, Frank Stella, and Roy Lichtenstein. The work of these three artists, to cite several influential figures, is regarded by McCollum as crucial to his thinking. With the intent of emptying the canvas of previous types of subject matter whether of figurative images, abstract compositional arrangements, interior states of being, or references to the author's intervening 'hand'— each of these artists, like others of their generation in the United States and in Europe, has replenished painting with quintessential, non-illusionistic forms of self-referential content. Ryman expressly defined the nature of such innovations when he wrote:

"We have been trained to see painting as 'pictures,' with storytelling connotations, abstract or literal, in a space usually limited and enclosed by a frame which isolates the image. It has been shown that there are possibilities other than this manner of 'seeing' painting."12

Ten years before he had characterized his own practice with the statement that 'there is never a question of what to paint, but only how to paint. The how of painting has always been the image, the end product.13 For Ryman, whose paintings suggest the unlimited possibilities for the application of paint, painting is an ongoing reflection on painting. In his work, the means of painting that serve to articulate a surface are also the end of painting, that is, they are the thematic material.

STELLA AND LICHTENSTEIN have likewise defined painting as an independent reality. Stella's Black Paintings of 1958-60, for example, with their imagery that is limited to concentric bands, deny precedence to any one compositional element and do not distinguish between the foreground and background of the pictorial image. Rather, they point to the factual aspect of the otherwise fictional picture plane and to its capacity of being an object in its own right.

Lichtenstein, by other means, has similarly identified the picture plane as a reality unto itself. In lieu of giving evidence of his personal touch, he has wanted his "painting to look as if it had been programmed."14 The series of Stretcher Frames with Cross Bars, 1968, exemplifies how Lichtenstein's already flat imagery acts to comment on its own equivalent status with the given, two-dimensional, pictorial surface. Presented within an overall field of dots denoting the process of mechanical reproduction, the images of canvas backs refer not only to the underpinnings of their structural support seen from behind, but simultaneously display the inescapable actuality of their frontality as paintings. In their supreme and humorous self-referentiality, these canvases are depicted as if they were photographic reproductions and thus are images about the fact of being images.

The paintings of Ryman, Stella, and Lichtenstein prefigure the work of McCollum in their extreme and ultimate self-referentiality. However, by pursuing the implications fostered by these works to their logical conclusion, McCollum has succeeded in turning their inwardly directed message outward. Through his recognition of the fact that their paintings expressly pointed to themselves, he came to the realization that they therefore could be interpreted as signs for painting. Taking his cue from this understanding, McCollum has created works that are to be seen explicitly as signs and to be read from within the broader cultural discourse as well as within the discourse of art per se. In his words, it had seemed that 'Every conceivable description of a painting that one might offer to define its "essence" or its "terms" could always be found to also define some other, similar object which was not a painting — except for one: a painting always has the identity of a painting; a painting is what it is because it is a convention. It exists precisely because the culture makes a place for it. As a definition, of course, this is a lot like saying, "a painting is something often found over a couch," and yet it was exactly this sort of common-sense definition which I felt was missing in all that other formalist debate. The 'terms' of painting are the terms of the world-at-large! An artwork is related to every other object and event in the cultural system, and the meaning of the artwork resides in the role the artwork plays in the culture, before anything else."15

WHILE SHARING SELF-REFERENTIALITY, taken another step farther, in common with Ryman, Stella, and Lichtenstein, McCollum's recent work parallels the thinking and practice of artists like Buren, and also like Michael Asher, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, or Lawrence Weiner, on account of its contextually and socially orientated thematic content. Just as these artists have, since the late 1960's, been involved with redefining the traditional forms of painting and sculpture in relation to the economic and social systems of support that provide them with their 'backing,'McCollum as well seeks to affix his work within the encompassing social environment. By serving as self-referential signs, his objects are able to speak of the belief systems bestowed on them by the culture in which they take part.

The oeuvre of McCollum, in large degree, finds its methodological roots in the radical developments in painting and sculpture ascribed to the decade of the 1960's. At the same time, its philosophical roots are primarily to be found in the cross-disciplinary areas of theatre and performance. Events and actions, initially produced under the influential aegis of John Cage and labeled as Happenings or grouped under the heading of Fluxus, flourished world-wide during the 1960's and 1970's. Often motivated by the desire for social change, these works aimed at restructuring ingrained concepts of art by challenging the preconceived methods for and categories of its realization. If Cage, by the 1950's was seeking to dissolve the distinctions between the sounds of art and life in his music, a succeeding generation of artists in many instances attempted to break down the divisions between art and politics by using the work of art as a tool. The activities of the Provo group in Amsterdam16 in the mid-1960's, as a telling example, were known at the time for their socially equitable schemes, specifically in the realm of public transport. A project entitled White Bicycles was a proposal for the distribution of some 20,000 free, public bicycles and illustrates one attempted amelioration of the social system through artistic intervention.

The words of George Maciunas, founder of Fluxus, would seem to anticipate the underlying spirit at the basis of McCollum's work in its equalitarian aspect. 'The value of art-amusement,' Maciunas maintained in 1965, 'must be lowered by making it unlimited, massproduced. obtainable by all and eventually produced by all.17 Also utopian in its motivation, the work of McCollum aspires toward an elimination of the historically and culturally imposed requisites for uniqueness, which artificially furnish the art object with its worth. If McCollum's paintings of the previous decade represent the search for methods of serialization through reflection upon their own making, his work of the recent decade manifests the ways in which mass-production and aesthetic production can merge in a work of art without lowering its inherent value. Serving as both art and sign-for-art, works by McCollum fore ground their own nature as objects of pure desire without definitive referential limits.

I would like to thank Sally Ruth Rau for her editorial assistance.

Notes
1. Allan McCollum, quoted in Gray Watson, "Allan McCollum, interviewed by Gray Watson," Artscribe, December/January 1985/86, p. 67.
2. McCollum, quoted in D. A. Robbins, "An Interview with Allan McCollum," Arts Magazine October 1985, p .40.
3. Ibid., p. 44.
4. Ibid.
5. The idea of basing the Vehicles on the ginger jar form evolved from a sequence of studies of vase shapes begun by McCollum in 1980.
6. See John Miller, "What You Don't See is What You Get: Allan McCollum's Surrogates, Perpetual Photos and Perfect Vehicles," Artscribe, January/February, 1987, pp. 32-36.
7. McCollum, "Perfect Vehicles,"in DAMAGED GOODS: Desire and the Economy of the Art Object", New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986, p. 11.
8. McCollum, quoted in Ulrich Wilmes, "Works 1978-1988," Allan McCollum, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, 1988/89, p. 57. Catalog of an exhibition held at Portikus Frankfurt am Main and De Appel, Amsterdam.
9. The Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles, which handled McCollum's work in the early 1970's, held many exhibitions of Color Field painting during these years.
10. This and subsequent quotes by McCollum are from conversations with the artist, summer 1989.
11. Sol LeWitt, quoted in Bernice Rose, "Sol LeWitt and Drawing," in Sol LeWitt, New York: The Museum of Modern Art,1978, p. 32.
12. Robert Ryman, quoted in Wall Painting, Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1979, p. 16.
13. Ryman, quoted in Art in Process IV, New York: Finch College Museum of Art/Contemporary Wing, 1969-70, unpag.
14. Roy Lichtenstein, quoted in John Coplans, Roy Lichtenstein, Pasadena: Pasadena Art Museum,1967, p. 12.
15. McCollum, quoted in Robbins note 2, p .41.
16. The existence of this group was brought to my attention by McCollum. See Adrian Henri, Total Art: Environments, Happenings, and Performance, New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974, pp. 180-181.
17. George Maciunas, quoted in Clive Phillpot, "Fluxus: Magazines, Manifestos, Multum in Parvo," in Clive Phillpot and Jon Hendricks, Fluxus: Selections from the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1988, p. 13.

above copied from: http://home.att.net/~allanmcnyc/Anne_Rorimer.html

Chance and Art

From the earliest days of algorithmic art, the probabilistic approach to art generation has been very popular. Its modus operandi can be summarized as follows: (1) a space of possibilities is defined in explicit, mathematical terms; (2) a probability distribution is defined over this space; (3) an algorithm is executed which draws random samples from the space, in accordance with the probability distribution.

The idea of chance-based art was first broached in the early twentieth century by Lewis Carroll, Marcel Duchamp, and Tristan Tzara. Its consistent application was pioneered in the 1950's by Ellsworth Kelly, François Morellet and John Cage; it was continued by a large number of artists which includes Mark Boyle, Karl-Otto Götz, Jackson Mac Low, Kenneth Martin, Manfred Mohr, Frieder Nake, Georg Nees, A. Michael Noll, Peter Struycken, Zdenek Sykora, Herman de Vries, and Ryszard Winiarski

Different approaches to probabilistic art

Random Sampling

The computer may be used to make abstract art at a new level of abstraction. One may implement formal definitions of visual styles, and then use chance operations to sample pieces within that style. This was done, for instance, by Martin, Mohr, Nake, Nees and Sykora; Noll's Mondriaan simulation is another obvious instance. The best representative of this approach is perhaps Harold Cohen's program-sequence AARON, which was developed somewhat later and is significantly more complex.

Programs of this sort are sometimes viewed as models of a human artist. Because it is the role of the random sampling operation to create a certain amount of unpredictability within the program's style, this operation may then be viewed as the locus of "creativity" (Nees, 1969) or the placeholder for "intuition" (Nake, 1974). This is misleading; real variety and unpredictability depend on the complexity of the program's style.

Celebrating Chance

Several artists made work which does not merely employ random sampling operations, but uses chance in a more prominent role: to avoid choice and to symbolize arbitrariness. Work of this sort is created by drawing random samples from very elementary spaces (all possible grids, all possible dot configurations, all possible line configurations), or from spaces which themselves were chosen at random. Examples are Duchamp's Erratum Musical, Morellet, Cage and De Vries. Technically, such work is "algorithmic art". Content-wise, it is close to the traditions of the readymade and the monochrome. All of the artists just mentioned also made non-probabilistic work which shows this: Duchamp invented the readymade, and emphasized how the choice of his readymades was "based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste ... in fact a complete anesthesia" (Duchamp, 1961). One of Morellet's favorite themes is the empty grid. Cage wrote silent pieces (4'33", 0'00"), and lectured on "Nothing". De Vries painted white monochromes and published an empty book.

The intrinsic connection between chance art and the monochrome is well-known from Information Theory textbooks: for human perception, strictly uniform patterns and strictly random patterns provide similarly boring, almost indistinguishable experiences; total order and total disorder are equivalent. For instance: randomly colored grids are perceptually indistinguishable from each other. If the cells of a random black-and-white grid are sufficiently small, it looks uniformly colored: grey.

Many chance-artists made very similar-looking pieces. The content of such pieces may nonetheless be radically different: Kelly's work is about perception; Morellet is ironically philosophical ("esprit"); Cage and De Vries used chance in an almost figurative way, evoking nature; Struijcken is concerned with objectivity (being right).

Art after the End of Art

To be aware of art history as a meaningless process of stylistic innovation, and yet to be part of that tradition, implies the desire to make a qualitatively different step: to not just add a few more styles, but to transcend the whole process. (Constructive postmodernism.) An unusually explicit articulation of this an ambition is the idea of the "arbitrary artwork" – the piece which is sampled at random from the space of all possible artworks, without any subjective aesthetic decisions.

Hard-core chance art as pioneered by Morellet and De Vries (random grids etc.) does not carry out this idea, but it symbolizes it. That was a necessary first step. To actually produce random artworks requires a long-term scientific research project: to develop an explicit analytical description of the space of all possible artworks, not in terms of pixel grids, but in terms of Gestalt structures as perceived by human observers. The IAAA project Artificial is a modest attempt in this direction. [Cf. Scha (1988), Harry (1992), Van Weelden (1994), Scha (1998), Scha (2001).]

copied from: http://radicalart.info/AlgorithmicArt/chance/index.html

Chance (What is it? Does it exist? Can we fake it?)

Is it possible to design conceptually definite processes with unpredictable outcomes? Can indeterminacy be implemented without invoking "nature", and without shifting artistic decisions to curators, performing artists, or the public itself? The obvious answer to this challenge is the use of chance procedures – a method that may be summarized as follows: (1) define a space of possibilities in explicit, mathematical terms; (2) define a probability distribution over this space; (3) draw random samples from the space, in accordance with the probability distribution.

This probabilistic art generation strategy highlights one artistic problem with relentless clarity: How to define the space of possible outcomes (and the concomitant probability distribution)? This problem is discussed in our page on chance art. The strategy also raises some slightly esoteric philosophical/physical questions: What is chance, and does it exist? For the practice of chance art, the answers to these questions are largely immaterial, but for an appreciation of its conceptual dimensions, they are indispensible.

What is chance?

The common-sense notion of chance refers to real-life unpredictability. (William Wollaston, 1722: "Chance seems to be only a term, by which we express our ignorance of the cause of any thing.") For predictions about an ongoing sequence of events that must be based on observations of an initial segment, a mathematical correlary of unpredictability can be developed: unpredictablity = the absence of regularity = the impossibility of a gambling strategy. This analysis was first proposed by Richard von Mises in 1919. It was perfected by Abraham Wald (1936/1937) and Alonzo Church (1940), criticized by Ville (1939), and saved by Per Martin-Löf (1966).

A different perspective on this matter, based on Shannon's information theory, is due to Andrey Kolmogorov, who focussed directly on the absence of regularities in initial segments of a random sequence. Since any regularity in a sequence allows it to be encoded in a more efficient way, randomness may be equated with incompressibility. This idea was further developed by Gregory Chaitin. (Cf. Li & Vitanyi, 1993; Calude, 1994; Chaitin, 2001.)

Randomness implies various kinds of statistical uniformity – and for many practical purposes, that is all one needs from a "random" sequence. Effective criteria for statistical uniformity were first proposed by Kermack & McKendrick (1936/1937) and Kendall & Babington Smith (1938). See Meyer (1956) for a bibliography of early work in this area. The current state of the art is the Diehard test-suite (cf. Marsaglia & Tsang, 2002).

Does it exist?

Unpredictability is often operationalized through uncontrolled physical processes, such as casting dice, tossing coins, and spinning the roulette wheel. For practical purposes, this works fine. We know, however, that events of this sort can in principle be predicted, by measuring initial conditions and applying the laws of classical mechanics. For roulette wheels this is even practically feasible (Bass, 1985). But prediction becomes increasingly difficult if we look at modern devices for random number generation, which generate fast bit streams from small-scale physical phenomena such as thermal noise (electric potential fluctuations in conducting materials) or atmospheric radio noise (cf. random.org).

Physical measurements at the quantum level are not predicted by any known theory; they are thus "random" in an unusually strong sense of that word. It is sometimes asserted that they are absolutely random, i.e., that we know that no conceivable deterministic theory could predict their outcomes. Von Neumann (1932) presented a formal proof to this effect, which was, however, based on an incorrect assumption (cf. Hermann, 1935; Bell, 1966). In the meantime, there is experimental evidence about the reality of quantum-entanglement, which implies that quantum-measurements cannot be accounted for by local hidden variables. HotBits is an online source of random numbers which uses quantum effects: radioactive decay.

Can we fake it?

An old challenge in computer science: can a deterministic computer be programmed to yield number sequences which are "random" in the mathematical sense of that word? In the strict sense demanded by Von Mises and Kolmogorov, this is obviously out of the question: the generating algorithm defines both a perfect gambling strategy and an extremely efficient compressed code. (John von Neumann, 1951: "Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.") Mere statistical uniformity, on the other hand, is a difficult but not impossible challenge. Divisions between large incommensurable numbers often yield sequences with reasonable statistical properties (Knuth, 1969). Several other methods have been developed over the years; see Coddington (1996) for an overview. The current state of the art is the "Mersenne Twister" (Matsumoto & Nishimura, 1998).

copied from: http://radicalart.info/AlgorithmicArt/chance/chance.html

for more information see:

http://sigchi.org/chi97/proceedings/short-talk/ak.htm

http://www.lcdf.org/indeterminacy/

http://www.art-newzealand.com/Issues21to30/chance.htm

MANIFESTO IN A CLEAR LANGUAGE, Antonin Artaud

manifesto in a clear language
by antonin artaud
december 1925


If I believe neither in Evil nor in Good, if I feel such a strong inclination to destroy, if there is nothing in the order of principles to which I can reasonably accede, the underlying reason is in my flesh.

I destroy because for me everything that proceeds from reason is untrustworthy.I believe only in the evidence of what stirs my marrow, not in the evidence of what addresses itself to my reason. I have found levels in the realm of the nerve.

I now feel capable of evaluating the evidence. There is for me an evidence in the realm of pure flesh which has nothing to do with the evidence of reason. The eternal conflict between reason and the heart is decided in my very flesh, but in my flesh irrigated by nerves. In the realm of the affective imponderable, the image provided by my nerves takes the form of the highest intellectuality, which I refuse to strip of its quality of intellectuality. And so it is that I watch the formation of a concept which carries within it the actual fulguration of things, a concept which arrives upon me with a sound of creation. No image satisfies me unless it is at the same time Knowledge, unless it carries with it its substance as well as its lucidity. My mind, exausted by discursive reason, wants to be caught up in the wheels of a new, an absolute gravitation. For me it is like a supreme reorganization in which only the laws of illogic participate, and in which there triumphs the discovery of a new Meaning. This Meaning which has been lost in the disorder of drugs and which presents the appearance of a profound intelligence to the contradictory phantasms of the sleep. This Meaning is a victory of the mind over itself, and although it is irreducible by reason, it exists, but only inside the mind. It is order, it is intelligence, it is the signification of chaos. But it does not accept this chaos as such, it interprets it, and because it interprets it, it loses it. It is the logic of illogic. And this is all one can say. My lucid unreason is not afraid of chaos.

I renounce nothing of that which is the Mind. I want only to transport my mind elsewhere with its laws and organs. I do not surrender myself to the sexual mechanism of the mind, but on the contrary within this mechanism I seek to isolate those discoveries which lucid reason does not provide. I surrender to the fever of dreams, but only in order to derive from them new laws. I seek multiplication, subtlety, the intellectual eye in delirium, not rash vaticination. There is a knife which I do not forget.

But it is a knife which is halfway into dreams, which I keep inside myself, which I do not allow to come to the frontier of the lucid senses.

That which belongs to the realm of the image is irreducible by reason and must remain within the image or be annihilated.

Nevertheless, there is a reason in images, there are images which are clearer in the world of image-filled vitality.

There is in the immediate teeming of the mind a multiform and dazzling insinuation of animals. This insensible and thinking dust is organized according to laws which it derives from within itself, outside the domain of clear reason or of thwarted consciousness or reason.

In the exalted realm of images, illusion properly speaking, or material error, does not exist, much less the illusion of knowledge: but this is all the more reason why the meaning of a new knowledge can and must descend into the reality of life.

The truth of life lies in the impulsiveness of matter. The mind of man has been poisoned by concepts. Do not ask him to be content, ask him only to be calm, to believe that he has found his place. But only the madman is really calm.

above copied from: http://www.391.org/index2.htm

Art After Philosophy (1969), Joseph Kosuth

The fact that it has recently become fashionable for physicists themselves to be sympathetic toward religion . . . marks the physicists’ own lack of confidence in the validity of their hypotheses, which is a reaction on their part from the antireligious dogmatism of nineteenth-century scientists, and a natural outcome of the crisis through which physics has just passed. –A. J. Ayer.

. . . once one has understood the Tractatus there will be no temptation to concern oneself anymore with philosophy, which is neither empirical like science nor tautological like mathematics; one will, like Wittgenstein in 1918, abandon philosophy, which, as traditionally understood, is rooted in confusion. –J. O. Urmson.
Traditional philosophy, almost by definition, has concerned itself with the unsaid. The nearly exclusive focus on the said by twentieth-century analytical linguistic philosophers is the shared contention that the unsaid is unsaid because it is unsayable. Hegelian philosophy made sense in the nineteenth century and must have been soothing to a century that was barely getting over Hume, the Enlightenment, and Kant.1 Hegel’s philosophy was also capable of giving cover for a defense of religious beliefs, supplying an alternative to Newtonian mechanics, and fitting in with the growth of history as a discipline, as well as accepting Darwinian biology.2 He appeared to give an acceptable resolution to the conflict between theology and science, as well.

The result of Hegel’s influence has been that a great majority of contemporary philosophers are really little more than historians of philosophy, Librarians of the Truth, so to speak. One begins to get the impression that there “is nothing more to be said.” And certainly if one realizes the implications of Wittgenstein’s thinking, and the thinking influenced by him and after him, “Continental” philosophy need not seriously be considered here.3

Is there a reason for the “unreality” of philosophy in our time? Perhaps this can be answered by looking into the difference between our time and the centuries preceding us. In the past man’s conclusions about the world were based on the information he had about it – if not specifically like the empiricists, then generally like the rationalists. Often in fact, the closeness between science and philosophy was so great that scientists and philosophers were one and the same person. In fact, from the times of Thales, Epicurus, Heraclitus, and Aristotle to Descartes and Leibnitz, “the great names in philosophy were often great names in science as well.”4

That the world as perceived by twentieth-century science is a vastly different one than the one of its preceding century, need not be proved here. Is it possible, then, that in effect man has learned so much, and his “intelligence” is such, that he cannot believe the reasoning of traditional philosophy? That perhaps he knows too much about the world to make those kinds of conclusions? As Sir James Jeans has stated:

. . . When philosophy has availed itself of the results of science, it has not been by borrowing the abstract mathematical description of the pattern of events, but by borrowing the then current pictorial description of this pattern; thus it has not appropriated certain knowledge but conjectures. These conjectures were often good enough for the man-sized world, but not, as we now know, for those ultimate processes of nature which control the happenings of the man-sized world, and bring us nearest to the true nature of reality.5
He continues:

One consequence of this is that the standard philosophical discussions of many problems, such as those of causality and free will orof materialism or mentalism, are based on an interpretation of the pattern of events which is no longer tenable. The scientific basis of these older discussions has been washed away, and with their disappearance have gone all the arguments . . .6
The twentieth century brought in a time that could be called “the end of philosophy and the beginning of art.” I do not mean that, of course, strictly speaking, but rather as the “tendency” of the situation. Certainly linguistic philosophy can be considered the heir to empiricism, but it’s a philosophy in one gear.7 And there is certainly an “art condition” to art preceding Duchamp, but its other functions or reasons-to-be are so pronounced that its ability to function clearly as art limits its art condition so drastically that it’s only minimally art.8 In no mechanistic sense is there a connection between philosophy’s “ending” and art’s “beginning,” but I don’t find this occurrence entirely coincidental. Though the same reasons may be responsible for both occurrences, the connection is made by me. I bring this all up to analyze art’s function and subsequently its viability. And I do so to enable others to understand the reasoning of my – and, by extension, other artists’ – art, as well to provide a clearer understanding of the term “Conceptual art.”9

THE FUNCTION OF ART

The main qualifications to the lesser position of painting is that advances in art are certainly not always formal ones. –Donald Judd (1963).

Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture. –Donald Judd (1965).

Everything sculpture has, my work doesn’t. –Donald Judd (1967).

The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. –Sol LeWitt (1965)

The one thing to say about art is that it is one thing. Art is art-as-art and everything else is everything else. Art as art is nothing but art. Art is not what is not art. –Ad Reinhardt (1963).

The meaning is the use. –Wittgenstein.

A more functional approach to the study of concepts has tended to replace the method of introspection. Instead of attempting to grasp or describe concepts bare, so to speak, the psychologist investigates the way in which they function as ingredients in beliefs and in judgments. –Irving M. Copi.

Meaning is always a presupposition of function. –T. Segerstedt.

. . . the subject matter of conceptual investigations is the meaning of certain words and expressions – and not the things and states of affairs themselves about which we talk, when using those words and expressions. –G. H. Von Wright.

Thinking is radically metaphoric. Linkage by analogy is its constituent law or principle, its causal nexus, since meaning only arises through the causal contexts by which a sign stands for (takes the place of) an instance of a sort. To think of anything is to take it as of a sort (as a such and such) and that “as” brings in (openly or in disguise) the analogy, the parallel, the metaphoric grapple or ground or grasp or draw by which alone the mind takes hold. It takes no hold if there is nothing for it to haul from, for its thinking is the haul, the attraction of likes –I. A. Richards.

In this section I will discuss the separation between aesthetics and art; consider briefly formalist art (because it is a leading proponent of the idea of aesthetics as art), and assert that art is analogous to an analytic proposition, and that it is art’s existence as a tautology that enables art to remain “aloof” from philosophical presumptions.

It is necessary to separate aesthetics from art because aesthetics deals with opinions on perception of the world in general. In the past one of the two prongs of art’s function was its value as decoration. So any branch of philosophy that dealt with “beauty” and thus, taste, was inevitably duty bound to discuss art as well. Out of this “habit” grew the notion that there was a conceptual connection between art and aesthetics, which is not true. This idea never drastically conflicted with artistic considerations before recent times, not only because the morphological characteristics of art perpetuated the continuity of this error, but as well, because the apparent other “functions” of art (depiction of religious themes, portraiture of aristocrats, detailing of architecture, etc.) used art to cover up art.

When objects are presented within the context of art (and until recently objects always have been used) they are as eligible for aesthetic consideration as are any objects in the world, and an aesthetic consideration of an object existing in the realm of art means that the object’s existence or functioning in an art context is irrelevant to the aesthetic judgment.

The relation of aesthetics to art is not unlike that of aesthetics to architecture, in that architecture has a very specific function and how “good” its design is is primarily related to how well it performs its function. Thus, judgments on what it looks like correspond to taste, and we can see that throughout history different examples of architecture are praised at different times depending on the aesthetics of particular epochs. Aesthetic thinking has even gone so far as to make examples of architecture not related to “art” at all, works of art in themselves (e.g., the pyramids of Egypt).

Aesthetic considerations are indeed always extraneous to an object’s function or “reason-to-be.” Unless of course, that object’s reason-to-be is strictly aesthetic. An example of a purely aesthetic object is a decorative object, for decoration’s primary function is “to add something to, so as to make more attractive; adorn; ornament,”10 and this relates directly to taste. And this leads us directly to “formalist” art and criticism.11 Formalist art (painting and sculpture) is the vanguard of decoration, and, strictly speaking, one could reasonably assert that its art condition is so minimal that for all functional purposes it is not art at all, but pure exercises in aesthetics. Above all things Clement Greenberg is the critic of taste. Behind every one of his decisions is an aesthetic judgment, with those judgments reflecting his taste.

And what does his taste reflect? The period he grew up in as a critic, the period “real” for him: the fifties.12

How else can one account for, given his theories – if they have any logic to them at all – his disinterest in Frank Stella, Ad Reinhardt, and others applicable to his historical scheme? Is it because he is “. . . basically unsympathetic on personally experiential grounds”?13 Or, in other words, “their work doesn’t suit his taste?”

But in the philosophic tabula rasa of art, “if someone calls it art,” as Don Judd has said, “it’s art.” Given this, formalist painting and sculpture can be granted an “art condition,” but only by virtue of their presentation in terms of their art idea (e.g., a rectangular-shaped canvas stretched over wooden supports and stained with such and such colors, using such and such forms, giving such and such a visual experience, etc.). If one looks at contemporary art in this light one realizes the minimal creative effort taken on the part of formalist artists specifically, and all painters and sculptors (working as such today) generally.

This brings us to the realization that formalist art and criticism accepts as a definition of art one that exists solely on morphological grounds. While a vast quantity of similar looking objects or images (or visually related objects or images) may seem to be related (or connected) because of a similarity of visual/experiential “readings,” one cannot claim from this an artistic or conceptual relationship.

It is obvious then that formalist criticism’s reliance on morphology leads necessarily with a bias toward the morphology of traditional art. And in this sense their criticism is not related to a “scientific method” or any sort of empiricism (as Michael Fried, with his detailed descriptions of paintings and other “scholarly” paraphernalia would want us to believe). Formalist criticism is no more than an analysis of the physical attributes of particular objects that happen to exist in a morphological context. But this doesn’t add any knowledge (or facts) to our understanding of the nature or function of art. And neither does it comment on whether or not the objects analyzed are even works of art, in that formalist critics always bypass the conceptual element in works of art. Exactly why they don’t comment on the conceptual element in works of art is precisely because formalist art is only art by virtue of its resemblance to earlier works of art. It’s a mindless art. Or, as Lucy Lippard so succinctly described Jules Olitski’s paintings: “they’re visual Muzak.”14

Formalist critics and artists alike do not question the nature of art, but as I have said elsewhere:

Being an artist now means to question the nature of art. If one is questioning the nature of painting, one cannot be questioning the nature of art. If an artist accepts painting (or sculpture) he is accepting the tradition that goes with it. That’s because the word art is general and the word painting is specific. Painting is a kind of art. If you make paintings you are already accepting (not questioning) the nature of art. One is then accepting the nature of art to be the European tradition of a painting-sculpture dichotomy.15
The strongest objection one can raise against a morphological justification for traditional art is that morphological notions of art embody an implied a priori concept of art’s possibilities. And such an a priori concept of the nature of art (as separate from analytically framed art propositions or “work,” which I will discuss later) makes it, indeed, a priori: impossible to question the nature of art. And this questioning of the nature of art is a very important concept in understanding the function of art.

The function of art, as a question, was first raised by Marcel Duchamp. In fact it is Marcel Duchamp whom we can credit with giving art its own identity. (One can certainly see a tendency toward this self-identification of art beginning with Manet and Cézanne through to Cubism,16 but their works are timid and ambiguous by comparison with Duchamp’s.)

“Modern” art and the work before seemed connected by virtue of their morphology. Another way of putting it would be that art’s “language” remained the same, but it was saying new things. The event that made conceivable the realization that it was possible to “speak another language” and still make sense in art was Marcel Duchamp’s first unassisted Ready-made. With the unassisted Ready-made, art changed its focus from the form of the language to what was being said. Which means that it changed the nature of art from a question of morphology to a question of function. This change – one from “appearance” to “conception” – was the beginning of “modern” art and the beginning of conceptual art. All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually.

The “value” of particular artists after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art; which is another way of saying “what they added to the conception of art” or what wasn’t there before they started. Artists question the nature of art by presenting new propositions as to art’s nature. And to do this one cannot concern oneself with the handed-down “language” of traditional art, as this activity is based on the assumption that there is only one way of framing art propositions. But the very stuff of art is indeed greatly related to “creating” new propositions.

The case is often made – particularly in reference to Duchamp – that objects of art (such as the Ready-mades, of course, but all art is implied in this) are judged as objets d’art in later years and the artists’ intentions become irrelevant. Such an argument is the case of a preconceived notion ordering together not necessarily related facts. The point is this: aesthetics, as we have pointed out, are conceptually irrelevant to art. Thus, any physical thing can become objet d’art, that is to say, can be considered tasteful, aesthetically pleasing, etc. But this has no bearing on the object’s application to an art context; that is, its functioning in an art context. (E.g., if a collector takes a painting, attaches legs, and uses it as a dining table it’s an act unrelated to art or the artist because, as art, that wasn’t the artist’s intention.)

And what holds true for Duchamp’s work applies as well to most of the art after him. In other words, the value of Cubism – for instance – is its idea in the realm of art, not the physical or visual qualities seen in a specific painting, or the particularization of certain colors or shapes. For these colors and shapes are the art’s “language,” not its meaning conceptually as art. To look upon a Cubist “masterwork” now as art is nonsensical, conceptually speaking, as far as art is concerned. (That visual information that was unique in Cubism’s language has now been generally absorbed and has a lot to do with the way in which one deals with painting “linguistically.” [E.g., what a Cubist painting meant experimentally and conceptually to, say, Gertrude Stein, is beyond our speculation because the same painting then “meant” something different than it does now.]) The “value” now of an original Cubist painting is not unlike, in most respects, an original manuscript by Lord Byron, or The Spirit of St. Louis as it is seen in the Smithsonian Institution. (Indeed, museums fill the very same function as the Smithsonian Institution – why else would the Jeu de Paume wing of the Louvre exhibit Cézanne’s and Van Gogh’s palettes as proudly as they do their paintings?) Actual works of art are little more than historical curiosities. As far as art is concerned Van Gogh’s paintings aren’t worth any more than his palette is. They are both “collector's items.”17

Art “lives” through influencing other art, not by existing as the physical residue of an artist’s ideas. The reason that different artists from the past are “brought alive” again is because some aspect of their work becomes “usable” by living artists. That there is no “truth” as to what art is seems quite unrealized.

What is the function of art, or the nature of art? If we continue our analogy of the forms art takes as being art’s language one can realize then that a work of art is a kind of proposition presented within the context of art as a comment on art. We can then go further and analyze the types of “propositions.”

A. J. Ayer’s evaluation of Kant’s distinction between analytic and synthetic is useful to us here: “A proposition is analytic when its validity depends solely on the definitions of the symbols it contains, and synthetic when its validity is determined by the facts of experience.”18 The analogy I will attempt to make is one between the art condition and the condition of the analytic proposition. In that they don’t appear to be believable as anything else, or be about anything (other than art) the forms of art most clearly finally referable only to art have been forms closest to analytical propositions.

Works of art are analytic propositions. That is, if viewed within their context – as art – they provide no information whatsoever about any matter of fact. A work of art is a tautology in that it is a presentation of the artist’s intention, that is, he is saying that that particular work of art is art, which means, is a definition of art. Thus, that it is art is true a priori (which is what Judd means when he states that “if someone calls it art, it’s art”).

Indeed, it is nearly impossible to discuss art in general terms without talking in tautologies – for to attempt to “grasp” art by any other “handle” is merely to focus on another aspect or quality of the proposition, which is usually irrelevant to the artwork’s “art condition.” One begins to realize that art’s “art condition” is a conceptual state. That the language forms that the artist frames his propositions in are often “private” codes or languages is an inevitable outcome of art’s freedom from morphological constrictions; and it follows from this that one has to be familiar with contemporary art to appreciate it and understand it. Likewise one understands why the “man in the street” is intolerant to artistic art and always demands art in a traditional “language.” (And one understands why formalist art sells “like hot cakes.”) Only in painting and sculpture did the artists all speak the same language. What is called “Novelty Art” by the formalists is often the attempt to find new languages, although a new language doesn’t necessarily mean the framing of new propositions: e.g., most kinetic and electronic art.

Another way of stating, in relation to art, what Ayer asserted about the analytic method in the context of language would be the following: The validity of artistic propositions is not dependent on any empirical, much less any aesthetic, presupposition about the nature of things. For the artist, as an analyst, is not directly concerned with the physical properties of things. He is concerned only with the way (1) in which art is capable of conceptual growth and (2) how his propositions are capable of logically following that growth.19 In other words, the propositions of art are not factual, but linguistic in character – that is, they do not describe the behavior of physical, or even mental objects; they express definitions of art, or the formal consequences of definitions of art. Accordingly, we can say that art operates on a logic. For we shall see that the characteristic mark of a purely logical inquiry is that it is concerned with the formal consequences of our definitions (of art) and not with questions of empirical fact.20

To repeat, what art has in common with logic and mathematics is that it is a tautology; i.e., the “art idea” (or “work”) and art are the same and can be appreciated as art without going outside the context of art for verification.

On the other hand, let us consider why art cannot be (or has difficulty when it attempts to be) a synthetic proposition. Or, that is to say, when the truth or falsity of its assertion is verifiable on empirical grounds. Ayer states:

. . . The criterion by which we determine the validity of an a priori or analytical proposition is not sufficient to determine the validity of an empirical or synthetic proposition. For it is characteristic of empirical propositions that their validity is not purely formal. To say that a geometrical proposition, or a system of geometrical propositions, is false, is to say that it is self-contradictory. But an empirical proposition, or a system of empirical propositions, may be free from contradiction and still be false. It is said to be false, not because it is formally defective, but because it fails to satisfy some material criterion.21
The unreality of “realistic” art is due to its framing as an art proposition in synthetic terms: one is always tempted to “verify” the proposition empirically. Realism’s synthetic state does not bring one to a circular swing back into a dialogue with the larger framework of questions about the nature of art (as does the work of Malevich, Mondrian, Pollock, Reinhardt, early Rauschenberg, Johns, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Andre, Judd, Flavin, LeWitt, Morris, and others), but rather, one is flung out of art’s “orbit” into the “infinite space” of the human condition.

Pure Expressionism, continuing with Ayer’s terms, could be considered as such: “A sentence which consisted of demonstrative symbols would not express a genuine proposition. It would be a mere ejaculation, in no way characterizing that to which it was supposed to refer.” Expressionist works are usually such “ejaculations” presented in the morphological language of traditional art. If Pollock is important it is because he painted on loose canvas horizontally to the floor. What isn’t important is that he later put those drippings over stretchers and hung them parallel to the wall. (In other words what is important in art is what one brings to it, not one’s adoption of what was previously existing.) What is even less important to art is Pollock’s notions of “self-expression” because those kinds of subjective meanings are useless to anyone other than those involved with him personally. And their “specific” quality puts them outside of art’s context.

“I do not make art,” Richard Serra says, “I am engaged in an activity; if someone wants to call it art, that’s his business, but it’s not up to me to decide that. That’s all figured out later.” Serra, then, is very much aware of the implications of his work. If Serra is indeed just “figuring out what lead does” (gravitationally, molecularly, etc.), why should anyone think of it as art? If he doesn’t take the responsibility of it being art, who can, or should? His work certainly appears to be empirically verifiable: lead can do, and be used for, many physical activities. In itself this does anything but lead us into a dialogue about the nature of art. In a sense then he is a primitive. He has no idea about art. How is it then that we know about “his activity”? Because he has told us it is art by his actions after “his activity” has taken place. That is, by the fact that he is with several galleries, puts the physical residue of his activity in museums (and sells them to art collectors – but as we have pointed out, collectors are irrelevant to the “condition of art” of a work). That he denies his work is art but plays the artist is more than just a paradox. Serra secretly feels that “arthood” is arrived at empirically. Thus, as Ayer has stated:

There are no absolutely certain empirical propositions. It is only tautologies that are certain. Empirical questions are one and all hypotheses, which may be confirmed or discredited in actual sense experience. And the propositions in which we record the observations that verify these hypotheses are themselves hypotheses which are subject to the test of further sense experience. Thus there is no final proposition.22
What one finds all throughout the writings of Ad Reinhardt is this very similar thesis of “art-as-art,” and that “art is always dead, and a ‘living’ art is a deception.”23 Reinhardt had a very clear idea about the nature of art, and his importance is far from recognized.

Because forms of art that can be considered synthetic propositions are verifiable by the world, that is to say, to understand these propositions one must leave the tautological-like framework of art and consider “outside” information. But to consider it as art it is necessary to ignore this same outside information, because outside information (experiential qualities, to note) has its own intrinsic worth. And to comprehend this worth one does not need a state of “art condition.”

From this it is easy to realize that art’s viability is not connected to the presentation of visual (or other) kinds of experience. That that may have been one of art’s extraneous functions in the preceding centuries is not unlikely. After all, man in even the nineteenth century lived in a fairly standardized visual environment. That is, it was ordinarily predictable as to what he would be coming into contact with day after day. His visual environment in the part of the world in which he lived was fairly consistent. In our time we have an experientially drastically richer environment. One can fly all over the earth in a matter of hours and days, not months. We have the cinema, and color television, as well as the man-made spectacle of the lights of Las Vegas or the skyscrapers of New York City. The whole world is there to be seen, and the whole world can watch man walk on the moon from their living rooms. Certainly art or objects of painting and sculpture cannot be expected to compete experientially with this?

The notion of “use” is relevant to art and its “language.” Recently the box or cube form has been used a great deal within the context of art. (Take for instance its use by Judd, Morris, LeWitt, Bladen, Smith, Bell, and McCracken – not even mentioning the quantity of boxes and cubes that came after.) The difference between all the various uses of the box or cube form is directly related to the differences in the intentions of the artists. Further, as is particularly seen in Judd’s work, the use of the box or cube form illustrates very well our earlier claim that an object is only art when placed in the context of art.

A few examples will point this out. One could say that if one of Judd’s box forms was seen filled with debris, seen placed in an industrial setting, or even merely seen sitting on a street corner, it would not be identified with art. It follows then that understanding and consideration of it as an artwork is necessary a priori to viewing it in order to “see” it as a work of art. Advance information about the concept of art and about an artist’s concepts is necessary to the appreciation and understanding of contemporary art. Any and all of the physical attributes (qualities) of contemporary works, if considered separately and/or specifically, are irrelevant to the art concept. The art concept (as Judd said, though he didn’t mean it this way) must be considered in its whole. To consider a concept’s parts is invariably to consider aspects that are irrelevant to its art condition – or like reading parts of a definition.

It comes as no surprise that the art with the least fixed morphology is the example from which we decipher the nature of the general term “art.” For where there is a context existing separately of its morphology and consisting of its function one is more likely to find results less conforming and predictable. It is in modern art’s possession of a “language” with the shortest history that the plausibility of the abandonment of that “language” becomes most possible. It is understandable then that the art that came out of Western painting and sculpture is the most energetic, questioning (of its nature), and the least assuming of all the general “art” concerns. In the final analysis, however, all of the arts have but (in Wittgenstein’s terms) a “family” resemblance.

Yet the various qualities relatable to an “art condition” possessed by poetry, the novel, the cinema, the theatre, and various forms of music, etc., is that aspect of them most reliable to the function of art as asserted here.

Is not the decline of poetry relatable to the implied metaphysics from poetry’s use of “common” language as an art language?24 In New York the last decadent stages of poetry can be seen in the move by “Concrete” poets recently toward the use of actual objects and theatre.25 Can it be that they feel the unreality of their art form?

We see now that the axioms of a geometry are simply definitions, and that the theorems of a geometry are simply the logical consequences of these definitions. A geometry is not in itself about physical space; in itself it cannot be said to be “about” anything. But we can use a geometry to reason about physical space. That is to say, once we have given the axioms a physical interpretation, we can proceed to apply the theorems to the objects which satisfy the axioms. Whether a geometry can be applied to the actual physical world or not, is an empirical question which falls outside the scope of geometry itself. There is no sense, therefore, in asking which of the various geometries known to us are false and which are true. Insofar as they are all free from contradiction, they are all true. The proposition which states that a certain application of a geometry is possible is not itself a proposition of that geometry. All that the geometry itself tells us is that if anything can be brought under the definitions, it will also satisfy the theorems. It is therefore a purely logical system, and its propositions are purely analytic propositions. –A. J. Ayer26
Here then I propose rests the viability of art. In an age when traditional philosophy is unreal because of its assumptions, art’s ability to exist will depend not only on its not performing a service – as entertainment, visual (or other) experience, or decoration – which is something easily replaced by kitsch culture, and technology, but, rather, it will remain viable by not assuming a philosophical stance; for in art’s unique character is the capacity to remain aloof from philosophical judgments. It is in this context that art shares similarities with logic, mathematics, and, as well, science. But whereas the other endeavors are useful, art is not. Art indeed exists for its own sake.

In this period of man, after philosophy and religion, art may possibly be one endeavor that fulfills what another age might have called “man’s spiritual needs.” Or, another way of putting it might be that art deals analogously with the state of things “beyond physics” where philosophy had to make assertions. And art’s strength is that even the preceding sentence is an assertion, and cannot be verified by art. Art’s only claim is for art. Art is the definition of art.




NOTES

* Reprinted from Studio International (October, 1969).
1 Morton White, The Age of Analysis (New York: Mentor Books), p. 14.
2 Ibid., p. 15.
3 I mean by this Existentialism and Phenomenology. Even Merleau-Ponty, with his middle-of-the-road position between empiricism and rationalism, cannot express his philosophy without the use of words (thus using concepts); and following this, how can one discuss experience without sharp distinctions between ourselves and the world?
4 Sir James Jeans, Physics and Philosophy (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press), p. 17.
5 Ibid., p. 190.
6 Ibid., p. 190.
7 The task such philosophy has taken upon itself is the only “function” it could perform without making philosophic assertions.
8 This is dealt with in the following section.
9 I would like to make it clear, however, that I intend to speak for no one else. I arrived at these conclusions alone, and indeed, it is from this thinking that my art since 1966 (if not before) evolved. Only recently did I realize after meeting Terry Atkinson that he and Michael Baldwin share similar, though certainly not identical, opinions to mine.
10 Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language.
11 The conceptual level of the work of Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Morris Louis, Ron Davis, Anthony Caro, John Hoyland, Dan Christensen, et al., is so dismally low, that any that is there is supplied by the critics promoting it. This is seen later.
12 Michael Fried’s reasons for using Greenberg’s rationale reflect his background (and most of the other formalist critics) as a “scholar,” but more of it is due to his desire, I suspect, to bring his scholarly studies into the modern world. One can easily sympathize with his desire to connect, say, Tiepolo with Jules Olitski. One should never forget, however, that a historian loves history more than anything, even art.
13 Lucy Lippard uses this quotation in a footnote to Ad Reinhardt’s retrospective catalogue, January, 1967, p. 28.
14 Lucy Lippard, “Constellation by Harsh Daylight: The Whitney Annual,” Hudson Review, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Spring, 1968).
15 Arthur R. Rose, “Four Interviews,” Arts Magazine (February, 1969).
16 As Terry Atkinson pointed out in his introduction to Art-Language (Vol. 1, No. 1), the Cubists never questioned if art had morphological characteristics, but which ones in painting were acceptable.
17 When someone “buys” a Flavin he isn’t buying a light show, for if he was he could just go to a hardware store and get the goods for considerably less. He isn’t “buying” anything. He is subsidizing Flavin’s activity as an artist.
18 A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (New York: Dover Publications), p. 78.
19 Ibid., p. 57.
20 Ibid., p. 57.
21 Ibid., p.90.
22 Ibid., p. 94.
23 Ad Reinhardt’s retrospective catalogue (Jewish Museum, January, 1967) written by Lucy Lippard, p. 12.
24 It is poetry’s use of common language to attempt to say the unsayable that is problematic, not any inherent problem in the use of language within the context of art.
25 Ironically, many of them call themselves “Conceptual Poets.” Much of this work is very similar to Walter de Maria’s work and this is not coincidental; de Maria’s work functions as a kind of “object” poetry, and his intentions are very poetic: he really wants his work to change men’s lives.
26 Op. cit., p. 82.

Copied from: http://www.ubu.com/papers/kosuth_philosophy.html