The largest work in the gallery, The Jynx, belonged to Bedwyr Williams; it was the site of a caricatured accident. The scene itself presupposed a narrative where Williams ascends some precariously placed boxes and scaffolding to monograph a perched bird onto the wall. The exact cause of the scaffold’s collapse was not clear. Amidst the rubble I retrieved a short publication that recounted the calamitous incident. With ‘caps lock’ set firmly in the ‘on’ position, Williams leads the reader through a few minutes of a vindictive inner monologue, in which few are spared. The final page was cut short by his smashing descent to the concrete floor, where he vomits a kebab and dies. On the far side of the room, there was a set of six short films variously projected and televised on a set of steel workshop shelves. In Doug Fishbone’s two-minute pledge drive, It’s Not You, It’s Me – Promo, a greasy winking sleazebag asks what the greatest nation on earth is. According to him, it isn’t the US, the UK or even Costa Rica: ‘the greatest nation on earth is donation’. There was a coin box underneath the television, which vacuously promised to ‘give children hope’. The video ends with a white logo depicting a fish skeleton, and the presenter’s surname emblazoned below it.

 
Behind the television, Hayley Newman’s My Studio took the viewer on a projected tour of the artist’s workplace: a graveyard. Newman walks the camera around, mentioning that the other residents are mostly quiet and that she receives few visitors. A few minutes later, she enacts the same studio tour in her bed, wantonly disregarding her own tenuous grip on reality. The grip was loosened further in Kim Noble’s video It’s not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand. ~ Brian Stimpson, Clockwise. Here, a small clay figurine tires of his days spent working at the office photocopier, and imagines life as a caped superhero. As the scene shifts to starry-eyed dreams, our figurine is fastened to a metal prong on the windshield of a double-decker bus, zooming along the latitudes of London city. Noble’s video is set against a majestic orchestral score, the sort that can sweepingly accompany a steely-jawed paragon far across the universe.
 
Every ten minutes Noble’s low orchestral motions were interrupted by a loud hiss from the ceiling, courtesy of a sound work entitled Last of the Red Wine Sound FX, which had no listed creator. It possibly constituted one of O’Reilly’s contributions to the show, which were entangled with her status as co-curator. This is the place where the Last of the Red Wine’s relationship with mediation became simultaneously tricky and fascinating. O’Reilly was not only acting as curator here, but also included work in the show; for example, her collaboration with Marc Accensi on the match-lit title sequence, or in a video produced with Colin Perry comprising a 37-minute set of utterly ludicrous characterisations of artists taken from classic sitcoms. These were complete works, but they had an additional curatorial and contextual status that gave them a significant role in situating the show within the sitcom’s lexicon of visual culture. On the other hand, one of O’Reilly’s works had no curatorial status. She placed a fax machine on top of a high white shelf, to which she intermittently sent pages of her forthcoming book as they were written. A long ream of brightly lit thermoscript paper cascaded from the antiquated device down towards the concrete, where it pooled into a hill. It was possible to follow the narrative back upstream for a few pages.
 
In some places, O’Reilly is a curator working within The Last of the Red Wine, and her focus groups, scripts and clips mediate avenues of the show’s outsized personality. Elsewhere, she is the show’s primary protagonist, appearing in every scene and taking a production credit to boot. This state of irregular distraction is the most appropriate manifestation of a sitcom about art. The Last of the Red Wine devised complex arrangements of, and reactions to, this broadly accepted and useful genre of superficiality. And, it simulates some bizarre behaviour within that same comic mode of representation: Everyone gets involved in the dreamy fun, but always while thinking about something else, and always while pretending to have better things to do.
 
 
The Last of the Red Wine (the prequel / sequel) was on view at Project, 11 November 2011 – 14 January 2012.

For Kubler, the appearance or detection of a prime is comparable to the perception of the light of a dead star, he writes ‘[w]e know of their existence only indirectly, by their perturbations, and by the immense detritus of derivative stuff left in their paths’. This metaphor of the light of a dying star seen from Earth resonates further with Upton’s project, which anticipates the re-opening of the Earth Station – due to start a new life as a deep space radio telescope, capable of detecting a range of phenomena such as exploding or dying stars.

 
Ma Bice Bolje (It Will get Better) (2002 – 2005) is an installation combining photography, video and text by Swiss duo Goran Galic and Gian-Reto Gredig. The project explores the residual impact of the Bosnian war on both the landscape and on those who were directly affected, being comprised of a series of photographs of differing sizes, that document the visible scars and fractures left on the landscape. These images are accompanied by a series of five documentary-style films. There are many overlaps between the films and photographs: in one film, for instance, we meet a photo journalist who was witness to a massacre in a market place (his portrait hangs among the photographs). The photographer explains that he did not feel it appropriate to photograph the aftermath of the massacre, and instead helped clean up, shockingly sweeping a human brain down a drain. Although he didn’t take a photograph he adds that this image remains forever burned into his memory. This story illustrates an ongoing concern of Galic and Gredig: the gap between personal memory and the portrayal of events in the media.
 
While this project draws attention to the still visible remnants and traces of the Bosnian war, possibly more disturbing than the war itself are the anaesthetised relationship the country has to its own recent past. In one photograph we see a portrait of a woman in overalls smiling for the camera in a muddy landscape partitioned by tape. Accompanying text by the artists informs us that the woman is a forensic scientist working on an exhumation site, attempting to trace some of the 30,000 people still missing. It recalls the strangely relaxed atmosphere among the workers on site, who were laughing and cracking jokes whilst digging up the remains of children killed in the conflict. Ma Bice Bolje oscillates between these highly painful and personal eye-witness accounts of the conflict, and an almost complete detachment and divorce from it. Galic writes of the photograph of the forensic worker, ‘I had the idea to photograph the grave the way most Bosnian Serbs saw it – meaning not at all, looking past it’.
 
 
Both works were on view at the former P+D Furnishings store, Perry Street, Cork, November 19 – December 15 2011.

The work of seventy artists spread over 140 paintings, forty drawings and prints, as well as a small number of sculptures and photographs, offered new perspectives on familiar works by relocating them in their original artistic context. In addition, the inclusion of exceptional examples by lesser-known artists, a number of whom are rarely studied even in Germany, and in certain cases may be regarded as newly discovered artists, permitted a reconstruction of the overall picture of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement in Dresden, and reveals the astonishing depth and breadth of work produced in the Saxon capital during the 1920s. The exhibition addressed how Dresdener Neue Sachlichkeit took on a distinct character of its own, highlighting the formal and stylistic features specific to the region, particularly its marriage of social realism with an elegance reminiscent of the Old Masters.

 
The result is a tightly-composed overview of this artistic trend during the Weimar Republic in Dresden, a period of rampant inflation, short-term stabilisation and fragile peace, in which artists sought to picture their world in a so-called objective manner, with cool distance and precision. On entering this exhibition, the visitor is met by one of the most salient images categorised under the term Neue Sachlichkeit, Otto Dix’s In der Schönheit (To Beauty, 1922). In the midst of the temptations of the modern metropolis, stands a resilient Dix, his right hand casually placed in his jacket pocket, the left almost defiantly holding a symbol of the new industrial age, the telephone. The viewer senses Dix’s unease, his broodiness. Enforced coolheadedness amidst the rollicking decadence of the early 1920s, is the theme of this painting, and one that partially translates the meaning of the term Neue Sachlichkeit, the common English translation of which – ‘New Sobriety’ – does not fully convey its meaning. Dix’s centrality to this exhibition was fitting: aside from his stature as a major proponent of the style, the Kunstakademie, located next to the Kunsthalle, was where he taught as professor of painting from 1927 to 1933, and from whose studios emerged a number of prominent artists who would form part of the Dix-Schule, several of whom were represented in this exhibition and hitherto had received little attention. Their inclusion here, particularly through the quality of Gerhard Meyer’s portrait of his father (1930) and Kurt Eichler’s Mädchen im karierten Kleid (Girl in a Plaid Dress, 1930), reveals the extent of Dix’s legacy.
 
Meticulous instruction given in drawing, coupled with the study of old master painting at the Dresden Kunstakademie was reflected in the sturdy portraits and other figurative works which dominated the exhibition. George Grosz’s scathing social commentary in Grauer Tag (Grey Day, 1921) and affectionate portrait of friend Max Hermann-Neiße (1925) exemplified his superlative draughtsmanship while the virulent grotesquerie of Dix’s Drei Weiber (Three Women, 1926), countered by his more sympathetic images of mothers and children such as Frau mit Kind (Mother and Child, 1921), issued his debt to German masters, in particular Lucas Cranach (1472-1553). Studies of the single figure predominated, ranging from the refined elegance of Irena Rüther-Rabinowicz’s Selbstbildnis (Self-Portrait, 1925) to poignant images of the destitute by Erich Ockert, Wilhelm Lachnit and Curt Querner. While the prevailing themes were by no means peculiar to work produced in Dresden, the union of exquisite detail with the technique of applying successive layers of oil in the manner of German old masters (and sometimes emulating their use of panel) emerged as a definitive trait of Dresden artists.
 
If one had a gripe, it would have been the absence of perhaps the most representative image of postwar Dresden, Dix’s dadaist collage painting Prager Straße (Prague Street, 1920), which shows a crippled war veteran begging on an affluent Dresden street to the indifference of passers-by. The relatively deficient quantity of war-related imagery in the Kunsthalle somewhat altered the postwar impression of the city; Dix’s watercolour of facially-disfigured veterans Zur Erinnerung an die große Zeit (Memory of Greater Times, 1923), Hans Theo Richter’s etching Amputierter Bettler (Begging Amputee, 1924) and Horst Naumann’s commentary on German militarism Weimarer Fasching (Weimar Carnival, 1928/29) were among the handful of images presented. A short walk to the nearby Albertinum proved corrective, nonetheless: it houses Dix’s darkly sumptuous pièce de la résistance, the massive triptych Der Krieg (The War, 1928-1932), based on his study of Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheimer Altar (1506-15) and arguably the most powerful anti-war painting produced in any era.
 
Overall, this exhibition, and the substantial catalogue that accompanies it, filled an important research gap in the examination of Weimar German art. While it may not have attended fully to the strength of artistic endeavour in 1920s Dresden, it succeeded in defining a Dresden school of the Weimar period. Perhaps more significantly, it initiated a point of departure for the study of previously neglected artists whose rightful place in this exhibition allowed for a more comprehensive understanding of one of the most dynamic moments in the history of twentieth-century art.
 
 
New Objectivity in Dresden was on view 1 October 2011 – 8 January 2012. For more visit www.skd.museum/en/special-exhibitions/new-objectivity-in-dresden

In his film October Eisenstein had developed an ‘intellectual montage’ style, in which complex ideas – such as the existence of many gods all claiming to be the one God -found expression through the sequencing of images. Film’s meanings emerge from chains of association, and cutting contributes to an undercutting of the screen image. One episode in October shows the raising of a bridge across the river, a key moment in which the authorities attempt to split the city, dividing it along class lines. In the film the bridge-raising is shown from multiple angles, as time is stretched and the significance of the moment is underlined and subjected to concentrated analysis. Seeing is re-invented, infused with reflection and analysis, as a result of the technological capabilities of cinema. Building on this, in his notes for a film of Capital, Eisenstein claims that it is the ‘montage fragment’ itself that assists in the formation of thoughts.² Eisenstein cited Pudovkin’s favourable analysis of October, which noted its ‘restructuring of ordinary perception’.³ Through film, thought is rethought, locally, in relation to what is seen on screen, and more generally, in the sense that the method of montage demonstrates how motile thinking – or consciousness – might be or become.

In Eisenstein’s hands, film can emulate the sublime flights of thinking itself, modelling abstraction and process. But sublimity is not enough for him. For the filming of Capital, Eisenstein’s use of montage aimed to combine a serious social end with the seeding of his film of Capital with ‘salvos of laughs’. Heady thought had to be dragged down to earth in a belly laugh. The film of Capital, he insisted, would be satirical and use elements of the grotesque and farce. Its irony would be ‘bloody’ and pathos would be expunged.

Eschewing a story-line, the film was to be composed of vignettes, or what Eisenstein termed ‘historiettes’, or ‘petty events’. Eisenstein noted, for example, that the Stock Exchange would be rendered as ‘thousands of tiny details, like a genre painting’.⁴ Other subjects in the film would include a day in the life of an average man, a sequence of events ranging from an analysis of one centimetre of silk stocking to the appearance of a bowl of soup to the sinking of a British ship. One day in a man’s life, followed in minute detail, could be one organising theme. From such a fragment, torn out of everyday existence, chains of connection could be unfurled, much as Marx’s cell-like commodity form was a tiny starting point that proved to reveal chains of connection and a weave of relations. In the film scenario, these chains linked the system of exploitation, commerce, competition, and even questions of morality in relation to the length of skirts, exposing thereby contradictions between the desires of clothing manufacturers, textile manufacturers and religious authorities.⁵ Eisenstein’s notes sketched out other patterns of connection from the production of one little button to systemic overproduction, or, from a little plate of food to ferocious global conflict, from the trivial to the world system in all its irrational super-productiveness and destructiveness. A note for the film project lists a sequence of connections:

Pepper. Cayenne. Devil’s island. Dreyfus. French chauvinism. Figaro in Krupp’s hands. War. Ships sunk in the port.⁶

This methodology enabled a coherent view of the world made out of what might seem to be random fragments. It had implications for filmic form:

The ‘ancient’ cinema was shooting one event from many points of view – The new one assembles one point of view from many events.⁷

The crucial aspect of the film of Marx’s work was its presentation of a perspective, or rather the perspective of workers’ struggle and proletarian consciousness. In an ironic flourish, Eisenstein dedicated the film to the nineteenth-century Marxists who came after Marx and had formed the Second International. He noted that Capital was the refutation of all they thought, for these were the so-called international socialists who had voted for war credits, that is to say, for destruction of one nation’s working class by another in the interests of capital. The note also cited, however, a very different source for the film’s technique.

Capital will be dedicated – officially – to the Second International! They’re sure to be ‘overjoyed’! For it is hard to conceive of any more devastating attack against social democracy in all its aspects than Capital. The formal side is dedicated to Joyce.⁸

1928 was the year of the film’s conception. It was the same year in which Eisenstein had read Joyce’s Ulysses, with the help of an English-speaking friend. Eisenstein appreciated Joyce’s deployment of language and genre.⁹ Ulysses offered Eisenstein a model for what he called his ‘de-anecdotalization principle’,¹⁰ a film without a story, a film that worked rather with historiettes and scenes snatched from everyday life. Through these fragments, ‘the very principle of logical reductum ad limitum of one fundamental detail’, the basic structure of the social world is established.¹¹ Eisenstein’s notes observed

In Joyce’s Ulysses there is a remarkable chapter of this kind, written in the manner of scholastic catechism. Questions are asked and answers given. The subject of the question is how to light a Bunsen burner. The answers, however, are metaphysical. (read this chapter. It might be methodologically useful.)¹²

Later in his notes Eisenstein indicates how the relay between abstractness and concreteness intensifies the impact of the former.

The maximum abstractness of an expanding idea appears particularly bold when presented as an offshoot from extreme concreteness – the banality of life. Something suggested in Ulysses provides additional support for the same formulation. ‘Nicht genug! Ein anderen Kapitel ist im Stil der Bücher für junge Mädchen geschrieben, ein anderes besteht nach dem Vorbild der scholastischen Traktate, nur aus Frage und Antwort: Die Fragen beziehen sich auf die Art, wie man einen Teekessel zum kochen bringt und die Antworten schwifen ins grossen kosmische und philosophische ab …’ (Ivan Goll, ‘Literarische Welt’, prospectus for Ulysses).¹³ Joyce may be helpful for my purpose: from a bowl of soup to the British vessels sunk by England.¹⁴

The question and answer chapter, known as ‘Ithaca’, is a catechism of 309 questions and 308 answers. It was Joyce’s favourite in Ulysses, and he called it ‘the ugly duckling of the book’.¹⁵ Although its method came from a religious question and answer practice, its style is rather the polysyllabic impersonal language of science and technology. Most of the questions posed are answered in extraordinarily drawn-out detail. Through these questions and answers a work of re-threading is set in motion. All the parts of the world and the cosmos, the banal and the cosmic, are reconnected. Water supplies are traced back to source,¹⁶ the day’s budget is outlined,¹⁷ a toenail shard is sniffed, insurance polices are described.¹⁸ Everything from the biggest to the smallest is outlined, described, analysed. Joyce described it thus:

I am writing ‘Ithaca’ in the form of a mathematical catechism. All events are resolved into their cosmic physical, psychical etc. equivalents, e.g. Bloom jumping down the area, drawing water from the tap, the micturition in the garden, the cone of incense, lighted candle and statue so that not only will the reader know everything and know it in the baldest coldest way, but Bloom and Stephen thereby become heavenly bodies, wanderers like the stars at which they gaze.¹⁹

The two main characters, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, exist both in the domesticity of the kitchen and plotted on the celestial map. In ‘Ithaca’ the entire world is strung together, from the most banal human event to its cosmic-physical analogue. Through such objectivity, myth enters, as Bloom and Stephen become the very stars they observe. But this is not astrology – it is scientific in the most fantastical way, for it proposes an inkling of something that is about to become known. Just a couple of years after Joyce wrote Ulysses, Harlow Shapley, in January 1925, broadcast the discovery that we ‘are made out of the same materials that constitute the stars’.²⁰ And again, in a New York Times magazine article under the headline ‘The Star Stuff that is Man’, Shapley reveals

We are made of the same stuff as the stars, so when we study astronomy we are in a way only investigating our remote ancestry and our place in the universe of star stuff. Our very bodies consist of the same chemical elements found in the most distant nebulae.²¹

There is a connection between us and the universe that contains us. Our bodily, material banality is of utterly cosmic significance. Ulysses is bursting with bathos, or what could be conceived as a rapid passage between the cosmic and the comic, the mythical and mirthful. Some moments include the ‘three smoking globes of turds’ plopping from the horse drawing a ‘scythed car’ in ‘Eumaeus’, the lists and catalogues in ‘Cyclops’, the headlines in ‘Aeolus’ or the back slang at the close of ‘Oxen of the Sun’.

The ‘Ithaca’ chapter takes its place next to the hyper-subjective stream of consciousness of the final chapter, Penelope. There, objectivity turns on itself to produce its opposite, an absolutely subjective, flowing, unpunctuated monologue. Sinking into the depths of the unconscious, Molly gets embroiled in a primal language of the body. Her bodily ejaculations present another perspective on high-flown language and rude ditties, Man and stars, tea kettles, sewers and oceans, rhymes and reasons. Joyce was keenly aware of the juxtaposition:

Struggling with the aridities of ‘Ithaca’ – a mathematico-astronomico-physico-mechanico-geometrico-chemico sublimation of Bloom and Stephen (devil take ‘em both) to prepare for the final amplitudinously curvilinear episode Penelope.²²

In ‘Ithaca’, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom sit in Bloom’s kitchen and drink Epps cocoa, after a visit to the brothel. They talk about the Irish and Hebrew languages, ritual murder, previous encounters, mutual acquaintances. They look at the stars. They urinate. Bloom wants Stephen to be his lodger, and while living there it is proposed that he might coach Bloom’s wife Molly in Italian to aid her operatic singing. Stephen has no such intention. He leaves, and Bloom potters around before going to bed. In bed, he kisses Molly’s buttocks, and his sexual arousal is described:

The visible signs of antesatisfaction? An approximate erection: a solicitous adversion: a gradual elevation: a tentative revelation; a silent contemplation.
Then?
He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonious hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative mellonmellonous osculation.²³

Bloom, star-traveller, is drawn back to the earth, to the fundament, to Molly’s buttocks. He assumes the position of a foetus in the womb. The language gives way to a language of the body, a punning, crude, infantile, evocative language to describe Molly’s rump. All of Ulysses is about the human body – indeed Joyce called the book ‘the epic of the human body’.²⁴ Bloom is at rest, having travelled, a mythic journey completed. In bed, the remains of the day, the fragments of the workaday, batter between conscious and unconscious mind. His last waking thoughts before falling into dreamsleep are word and image coagulates designed to trip up an inhabitant of modern Dublin, especially one who works in the world of advertising. In ‘Ithaca’ the following is noted:

What were habitually his final meditations?
Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder, a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life.²⁵

At the gateway to Bloom’s unconscious is the advertisement. This is no surprise. The surrealists also discover the proximity of advertisement and unconscious soon after this. Bloom imagines a poster that would grab the attention, a piece of street debris, so meaningful and absolute it arrests the pedestrian, if only for a moment. Picture writing invades urban space. As if involved in an uprising, newly liberated from between the pages of a book, written words dance across the city skyline, screeching from posters, or flickering their neon messages above shops. Joyce’s is a visual age where writing turns pictorial, becoming logos. The urban dweller must be able to read such a cityscape – its signs, its words, its images. This arrest must not last for longer than a second – in fact, mostly these signs crash into memory in an instant, stored there as traces to return in the night as dreams and nightmares. They are perceived in a fraction of a second, not a second longer than the busy pace of life in the city demands. (That moment, however, may be just like the moment that erupts into Eisenstein’s montaged vision and after which things are re-ordered or re-conceived.)

The advertising poster has affinities with the cinematic image as it streams past the eye. Audiences learn to quickly absorb the speeding chains of data, and to extract significance from the smallest, momentary glance, the sudden pratfall or the shine on a car’s bumper. Film even had an armory of technical devices to intensify its efficiently expressive language: slow-motion, speed-up close-up, montage of images, montage of image and sound. Such were the visual and sonic aids that were perceived by montage enthusiasts of the 1920s to reveal some new perception within the familiar aspects of reality, perhaps something hitherto unseen, and in film, as in a book such as Ulysses, held up for a moment for reflection.

Exchange: Joyce /Eisenstein

Ulysses, in its recognition of the fecundity and speed of city life and the significance of the detail, was quickly grasped as ‘cinematic’. Warner Brothers considered turning Ulysses into a film and asked Joyce about the rights. Joyce dismissed the idea, claiming that it would be impossible to film Ulysses in any adequate way. But he did take up discussions elsewhere, with Sergei Eisenstein, thereby reciprocating the interest that Eisenstein had shown in him while working on a film treatment of Capital. The two men met for discussions in Paris in 1930. They listened to Joyce’s recording of ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ from Finnegans Wake and watched sequences from Battleship Potemkin and October that tried to develop ‘inner film-monologue’.²⁶ An almost blind Joyce flailed around with his arms as he struggled to find Eisenstein’s coat upon his departure.²⁷ According to Hans Richter, Eisenstein described the visit to Joyce’s house as a ‘ghost experience’. They met in a room so dark, it seemed as if two shadows conversed.²⁸

In 1932, while travelling in California, Eisenstein remembered his desire to film Ulysses. For Ulysses, as with Capital, he conjures up a ‘cinema of the mind, a film capable of reconstructing all phases and all specifics of the course of thought’. It would render ‘interior monologue’ -that is, thought itself. It would portray the dissolution of the ‘distinction between subject and object’, as in Joyce.²⁹ Film, far from being an objective recording mechanism, is the very tool to probe the imbrication of subject and object, inner and outer, the workings of the mind and the body, for all of these are co-joined.

Criticisms

According to the new Soviet Stalinist orthodoxy, Eisenstein’s interest in Joyce was wrong-headed. In 1934, at the Soviet Writers’ Congress where the doctrine of Socialist Realism in culture was officially launched, Karl Radek championed the Realist novel. In order to elevate this essentially nineteenth-century form, he specifically trashed Joyce’s ‘cinematographic’, approach to everyday life in a speech titled ‘James Joyce or Socialist Realism’. For Radek, Joyce looks at the mucky business of the everyday, rather than the grand sweep of ‘big events’, ‘big people’, and ‘big ideas’.³⁰ Radek attacks Joyce’s Ulysses, which he calls:

A heap of dung, crawling with worms, photographed by a cinema apparatus through a microscope- such is Joyce’s work.³¹

What is seen under the microscope? As Radek observed, it is the seething micro-lives of worms. The Stalinist apparatchik could not confront this reality, wanting instead the fantasy-scapes of class-warrior supermen and hard-working peasants. It is significant that Radek picks up on Joyce’s style as ‘cinematic’. He was using the term as an insult – the more ‘cinematic’ a novel the less ‘literary’ it must be. That a novel must be literary is, for Radek, an unquestionable fact. Contemporaries on the Left, however, motivated by new political, technological and aesthetic imperatives, made quite different claims about the relationship of film and literature. That literature might have a cinematic aspect was actively promoted by left-oriented modernists. Alfred Döblin, author of Berlin’s own city-based novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), had called for a cinema style in 1913. For Döblin, this meant writing characterized by urgency and precision, three-dimensionality and liveliness. Film sets the standard for a new aesthetic. In practice it meant a development of, on the one hand, montage methods and, on the other, the folding-in of non-literary, reproducible matter into the work of art. Literature imports such devices as scenic cutting or discontinuity, close-up and a play between internal and external perspectives. Filmic montage in literature consists of arranging snippets of external ‘reality’, just as film always bears some indexical relationship to a world out there, or external reality. ‘Authentic reality’, the stuff of life, is incorporated into the text. In Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, this is evident in the quoting from advertisements, official documents, bus timetables and tram routes, weather reports and stock exchange reports, radio broadcasts, mortality statistics, scientific treatises, wisps of street conversations, and so on. A new type of writing emerges, designed less for self-expression and more for the sampling of objective, social reality, though it never lets go of the possibility of flight into hyper-subjectivism, or even expressionistic distortion. The dominant normative criteria of an authorial concept of writing, which implies an integrated personalised vision, are deposed. In a 1930 review of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Walter Benjamin argues that the novel can survive only if it adopts an epic, cinematic form.³² Modern social experience, increasingly dependent on the mediations of impersonal social forms, demands a new art. In montage film, a documented banality is elevated into analytical form through filmic technique. Equally montage – as understood in the modernist literary sense as the folding in of lowly themes, everyday bric-a-brac, base and abject materials into artistic form – can be seen to drag down the sublime aspirations of art. But Radek noted the ‘cinematic’ nature of Joyce only to condemn it. The doctrine of Socialist Realism insisted on maintaining traditional literary forms, and traditional literary relations, just as Stalin’s new Russia insisted on traditional institutions like patriotism, hard work and the family.

Despite the attacks from official state policy, Eisenstein stuck with Joyce, and a few months after Radek’s speech, in a lecture at the State Institute of Cinematography, in November 1934, he praised Joyce’s microscopic treatment of phenomena.33 The word ‘microscope’ dominates this short lecture to students on the fourth year of a film directing course. What exactly did Joyce do, he asked.

He took one character, one person, one event and he looked at it under an incredible microscope, that is, he completely unfurled everything that you see at that moment.³⁴

The significance of this was that it compelled art to be science. It is not just events that are subjected to the microscope’s vision. The texture of the writing is also ‘under the microscope’. Eisenstein assimilated Joyce’s sense of language into a more general sense of language as consisting of ‘various genres: questions and answers, figurative definitions, enumeration of facts, and so on’:

…what do we get with Joyce? He also enlarges each stylistic possibility to the size of a chapter and he has a chapter written in a different style. One chapter is written in the form of catechism: the whole plot is laid out in the form of questions and answers. So what did Bloom and his companion do at such and such a time? They walked up to their house. And after that had walked up to the house what did they do? They looked for the key ….³⁵

There is also, Eisenstein notes, a chapter on sound and onomatopoeia, and there is one composed of newspaper headlines. The point is that each of these chapters is not arbitrary in style. It finds a language and a genre appropriate to its subject matter and the specific nature of the plot. One chapter follows the development of language itself in analogy to the birth of a child. In terms of the understanding of language and human motivation, it constitutes:

A literary discovery of almost the same scope as the possibility of seeing the human texture under a microscope for the first time, which was of tremendous importance for physiologists.³⁶

Eisenstein criticises Radek in the lecture – though he refuses to go public with his criticism. Radek’s main criticism, he notes, is that such microscopic detail of the outside world (specifically a world of ephemera, everyday activities and residues) is unnecessary. But, counters Eisenstein,

would one say to a doctor that the microscopic view of microbes teaches us nothing? Of course not! In its enlargement of something subvisible, it reveals things unknown before and of crucial importance in the understanding of biology.

Joyce’s literary practice teaches Eisenstein how to make film politically and analytically significant. Something like a microscope is used in the filmic close-up. Walter Benjamin had asserted as much in his own researches into film aesthetics, motivated by Eisenstein as much as by slapstick American film. In 1927, in a defence of Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin, Benjamin notes how, through film’s dealing with an objective world, ‘a new realm of consciousness comes into being’. This consciousness enables people get to grips with the banal disconsolate world:

To put it in a nutshell, film is the prism in which the spaces of the immediate environment -the spaces in which people live, pursue their avocations, and enjoy their leisure  are laid open before their eyes in a comprehensible, meaningful, and passionate way. In themselves these offices, furnished rooms, saloons, big-city streets, stations and factories are ugly, incomprehensible, and hopelessly sad. Or rather they were and seemed to be, until the advent of film.³⁷

Film opens up the banal, uninteresting everyday spaces of the world to vision and analysis. Cinema blasts apart a ‘prison-world’, so that we, from the comfort of the cinema seat, may take extraordinary adventures in its widely scattered ruins. Film’s experience of the world extends our own. Film allows us to penetrate the secrets contained even in very ordinary reality. It is as if a microscope is held up to reality, allowing the structural forms, the interconnections, the molecular structure to be seen. We penetrate it through its mediation and through the opportunity given us for reflection. For Benjamin, filmic material captures something repressed, screened out by the regulative workings of consciousness.³⁸ The naked eye cannot penetrate all the constituents of a scene. Photography reveals these secrets invisible to the unaided eye. Photography and film employ a microscopic gaze and bring into view the unseen structural elements of the social world. This is a materialist analysis of actuality. Brought to light are things hitherto unseen but crucial. Benjamin assumes that the uses of photography – and by extension film – exist in the scientific realm. He dismisses soulful portraits and atmospheric landscapes, in favour of the structural analyses of microscopic photography. Film’s writing in light and its language of montage and technical tricks and Joyce’s modernist epic alike bare an underbelly of reality, pricking the pomposity of the repressed present, unmasking the resonant ambiguity of communication.

Eisenstein’s Critique of Joyce

According to Eisenstein, Joyce was pushing literature to the limits of what it could achieve. But there were still limits. Joyce was trapped within a bourgeois naturalist sense of things. Technically and ideologically, for Eisenstein, the next step was film, a more appropriate mode for revealing and analysing inner life and its embroilment in social contexts.

From Joyce the next leap is to film, where it’s much easier … In this respect film has many more possibilities than literature. Joyce and I talked about this in Paris and I explained to him the arsenal that we have. Take for example non-sequential action. Joyce has the following scene: a man is walking along the street thinking about something. Joyce has it written down almost stenographically. At the same time, it’s on three levels. One, the man is thinking about something he has to do; two, the accumulation of what in psychology is called trauma. There you are walking down the street and thinking how to get to the cafeteria complex as soon as possible and your conscience is bothering you because you haven’t finished your work. And the third thing is that you meet a street car, you meet some girl. And that is all mixed in with what you are thinking about. … And Joyce manages in some parts of the novel to write this way. But here it is typical that Joyce, as a bourgeois artist, doesn’t see beyond the surface of the phenomena … he sees how external circumstances change a train of thought but he doesn’t see the understanding of social phenomena which outgrow consciousness.³⁹

Eisenstein’s thought moves quickly. He begins by showing how film is more attuned to the non-linear, multi-activities present in any slice of everyday life. Joyce can achieve this in writing, but film’s array of technical devices make it easier to access inner and outer realms, rapidly cutting between character and world. It conveys a visualisation of inner thought and the world outside crashing in. All the techniques of film allow an implied attitude towards what is seen and thought – perhaps attitude could be conveyed through the distance or closeness of what is seen, its blurriness, sharpness, its stiffness or wobbliness, speed or languor. Eisenstein develops a criticism of Joyce. What he, as bourgeois, is unable to do is to convey the social mechanisms that contextualise all this activity. This is what Eisenstein as Marxist hopes to do – to make the unconscious impact of social relations conscious, and precisely through the mechanisms of film. Eisenstein’s lecture finishes with an indication as to why Joyce’s mode of writing has so much to offer film. It is because it is an anti-writing. It is closer to the workings of the self in dialogue with its self, via the body.

He uses the syntax and grammar not of emotional thought but of, so to speak, sensual thought. When you think to yourself, you don’t use words, you have another system.⁴⁰

Inner thought is imagetic and lingual. Such a mapping of inner thought was what Eisenstein hoped film could be formally. Eisenstein’s film of Ulysses was never made,⁴¹ nor was his Joycean version of Marx’s Capital. There was a greater, and certainly more serious (in the tedious sense) bathetic art of Socialist Realism to be made by others.

Notes

1. Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Notes for a Film of Capital’, translated by Maciej Sliwowski, Jay Leyda and Annette Michelson, October, no. 2, Summer 1976 p. 10.
2. Eisenstein, ‘Notes for a Film of Capital’, p. 12.
3. Eisenstein, ‘Notes for a Film of Capital’, p. 6.
4. Eisenstein, ‘Notes for a Film of Capital’, p. 7.
5. Eisenstein, ‘Notes for a Film of Capital’, p. 10.
6. Eisenstein, ‘Notes for a Film of Capital’, p. 17.
7. Eisenstein, ‘Notes for a Film of Capital’, p. 18.
8. Eisenstein, ‘Notes for a Film of Capital’, p. 21.
9. See James Goodwin, Eisenstein, Cinema, and History, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1993, p. 102.
10. Eisenstein, ‘Notes for a Film of Capital’, p. 5.
11. Eisenstein, ‘Notes for a Film of Capital’, p. 5.
12. Eisenstein, ‘Notes for a Film of Capital’, p. 7. ‘Bunsen burner’ would appear to be a poor translation of tea kettle.
13. It translates as ‘Not enough! Another chapter is written in the style of books for young girls, another one takes as template scholastic tractates, composed of question and answer. The questions relate to the way in which one brings a tea kettle to the boil and the answers veer off into the cosmic and philosophical …’
14. Eisenstein, ‘Notes for a Film of Capital’, p.15.
15. Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’, Grayson & Grayson, London 1934 p. 264.
16. James Joyce, Ulysses, The Bodley Head, London 1960 p. 782.
17. Joyce, Ulysses, p. 836.
18. Joyce, Ulysses, p. 852.
19. See a letter from Joyce to Budgen, 1921, quoted in Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’, p. 263.
20. Quoted in Holly Henry, Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2003, p. 43.
21. Quoted in Henry, Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science, p.43. It stems from the New York Times Magazine, 11 August 1929.
22. See a letter from Joyce to Claud W. Sykes, spring 1921, Stuart Gilbert, (ed): Letters of James Joyce, vol. 1, Faber & Faber, London 1957 p. 164.
23. Joyce, Ulysses, p. 867.
24. Budgen, The Making of Ulysses, p. 21.
25. Joyce, Ulysses, p. 848.
26. See S.M. Eisenstein, ‘A Course in Treatment’ (1932), Film Form, Harcourt, Brace and Company, San Diego, 1977, p. 104.
27. See S.M. Eisenstein, Immoral Memories, Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1983 p. 214.
28. See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1959, p. 666.
29. See Annette Michelson, ‘Reading Eisenstein, Reading Capital, October 1927-April 1928’, October, no. 3, Spring 1977 p. 86.
30. See Maxim Gorky et al, Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934; The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism in the Soviet Union, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1977 p. 153.
31. See Gorky et al, Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934. Radek’s condemnation of Joyce begins on p. 153.
32. See Walter Benjamin’s ‘Krisis des Romans; Zu Döblins Berlin Alexanderplatz’ (1930) in Gesammelte .Schriften vol.III, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt.Main, 1992, pp.230-6.
33. See Sergei Eisenstein’s Lecture on James Joyce at the State University of Cinematography, November 1, 1934, in James Joyce Quarterly 24, no 2 (Winter 1987), pp. 133-42.
34. Eisenstein’s Lecture on James Joyce, p. 135.
35. Eisenstein’s Lecture on James Joyce, p. 135.
36. Eisenstein’s Lecture on James Joyce, p. 137.
37. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings volume 2: 1927-1934, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999), p.17.
38. See Benjamin, Selected Writings, pp. 511–2.
39. Eisenstein’s Lecture on James Joyce, pp. 140-1. Eisenstein discusses the same question in relation to Joyce and the proposed filming of Theodor Dreiser’s An American Tragedy in S.M. Eisenstein, ‘A Course in Treatment’ (1932), Film Form, pp. 103-6.
40. Eisenstein’s Lecture on James Joyce, p. 141.
41. translation of Ulysses into Russian was begun in the Popular Front period of 1935-6, but after ten chapters it was abandoned, much to Eisenstein’s dismay. See his comments in his lecture on Joyce, James Joyce Quarterly 24, no 2 (Winter 1987), pp. 133-42.

My first encounter with a Buharov film was at Thessaloniki Film Festival in 2008 in a major retrospective of films that emerged from Hungary’s Béla Balázs Studios (or ‘BBS’). Although it ceased production in the ‘90s, the BBS is an extraordinary phenomenon, unique in the history of East European cinema. Its official purpose was to act as a state-owned ‘workshop’ that functioned as a stepping-stone between film school and the industry. What it became was a self-regulating, government-funded experimental film studio, working with an unprecedented degree of freedom from Communist state censorship. Granted, the films made there were almost never shown, but they were made and the rich heritage of innovative work that emerged from it is truly remarkable.

The Buharovs’ short Hotel Tubu (2002) was the only post-BBS film included in these programmes, selected as an indication that its visionary spirit lives on. And the Buharovs are quick to acknowledge BBS films as a crucial influence and inspiration. Yet even in the context of watching hours of often highly impressive BBS work, Hotel Tubu kept insistently, repeatedly floating to the surface of my consciousness, the most haunting film of the festival by far. Its almost confrontationally unselfconscious use of faux naïf imagery presented with a peculiar lyricism and a mysteriously plaintive atmosphere was apparently quite simple. Yet it left an unshakeable impression of highly charged elusiveness, as of a half-remembered dream that unsettles and nags at us because we have either forgotten what it was trying to impart or because what it reveals is ultimately untranslatable into terms other than those contained in its form.
Fortunately, the curator at Thessaloniki proved sympathetic to my urgent need to see this film again and gave me a couple of DVDs featuring two of the Buharovs’ three features and several shorts. Watching Hotel Tubu again (and again and again and again…) confirmed my first impression: it wasn’t a case of ‘getting it’, of finding a conceptual key to this work. Instead, it held true to what remains the most accurate description of experiencing a Buharov film I’ve encountered: ‘getting lost in someone else’s dream’ (Off Screen Film Festival Catalogue, Brussels 2008). This is not to suggest that their films are without coherent ideas. They can even contain quite explicitly political ones. But they are as perfectly absorbed into the oneiric texture of these visions as any other element.

The promise of Hotel Tubu was delivered on in the Buharov films I subsequently saw, all fractured, extremely surreal movies. Darkly playful hallucinations that share the aura of having been discovered forgotten in someone’s granny’s attic, precisely revealing a world perhaps subconsciously suspected but hitherto un-describable. They have in common an improvised quality and a sense of the homemade. Not only in their beautifully rough visual textures, which are due mainly to being mostly shot on Super-8 with tiny budgets, but often in the people, objects and spaces before the camera. The casts are composed of extraordinary ordinary people rather than film stars: lived-in faces bringing their own stories to the films rather than tools trained to convey fictional confections. The props, which sometimes conspicuously reappear in different films, can likewise seem to have an existence of their own carried over into the picture. This helps lend the films the weird intimacy of children’s games, in which familiar people and places are made alien and the weirdly alien becomes immanent to the everyday. The overall look of the films varies (and often also includes rough animated shots and sequences), but almost always retains the raw appearance of a trippy home movie. The absence of any explicitly up-to-the-minute looking buildings or objects leaves this cinematic universe hovering slightly adrift from temporal specificity, somewhere in the closing decades of the 20th century. This further enhances the sense of a vague collective childhood that we continue to subconsciously inhabit.

The great Polish film director Andrzej Zulawski once made reference to ‘films you cannot tame’. Such films, at least for me, are extremely few and far between. But since my encounter with Hotel Tubu, the Buharovs have become synonymous with the idea of ‘untamed cinema’ to the exclusion of all other filmmakers. In 2010, I screened two of their short films in Cork as part of a Black Sun experimental music and film event. This year, I arranged a mini-retrospective of their work at Corona Cork Film Festival, which both Buharovs attended. Of course, the primary and overt motivation was to share exceptional and little-known work with local audiences. But I suspect a hidden, personal agenda: to see if I could finally put my finger on what it is exactly, that elusive half-remembered-dream element that drew me back to Hotel Tubu and proved present throughout their filmography. But to no avail. Their films remain gloriously ‘untamed’.

The work’s lack of rhetoric (of pathos, of redemption, of mourning) allows it a conceptual mobility that avoids any mooring to a familiar emotional freight of melancholy and remorse. Although not absolutely separable, Evening Echo has little to do with the necessarily unyielding austerity of the monuments of Rachel Whiteread (Vienna) and Daniel Libeskind (Berlin) to the horrors of industrialized genocide. (It is clear, however, that the artist is not innocent of the coincidence of ‘Shalom Park’ and ‘Gas Works Road’ in the newspaper notice). Where there is emphasis here, it is as much upon contingency and provisionality as it is on the work of mourning. Instead, it is not at all clear whether this work is oriented toward the past or toward the future; whether it is a marker of pathos (in its modesty and brevity) or a lightning rod for future gatherings. That emotional ambivalence (rather than indifference) lends the work more not less potential, allowing it to operate in different registers at once and for different people. That the work is constituted by several very different parts means that it does not fully ‘reside’ anywhere. In this, Leach continues to work within the tradition of Conceptual Art’s ‘dematerialization’ of the art object, which need not signal the abandonment of art’s material aspect, but suggests rather that the identity and cohesiveness of the work is not given by its location in any one place. Operating on a vastly dilated timescale, that identity will be formed over the decades in the minds of its viewers via numerous acts of reception, and the network of meanings, experiences and associations into which those acts fold. Who, after all, will see this ninth lamp during its brief periods of illumination? Will it be recognized? What will it trigger? How will it be understood? To those that only know about it and do not see it, the work can operate (or perhaps rather echo) as an idea and can be dwelt upon in the absence of any direct experience.

 
The perceptual effects of Evening Echo are indeed slight – an inconspicuous newspaper notice, a small number of unemphatic posters, three extra park lamps that could easily be overlooked or misrecognized as a small effort at urban regeneration – but the conceptual reverberations, when attended to, are potentially very powerful and far-reaching. In line with a religious tradition of resistance to ‘graven images’ and an emphatic prioritizing of the word, the work moves quickly from an everyday visual object to the symbolic space of language; that is, to the domain of history, memory, social conditions, expressive conventions and emotional experience proper.
 
The work is certainly not all openness and indeterminacy, however. The history, traditions and experiences to which it makes oblique but insistent reference are concrete and specific. Indeed, part of the aspiration of the artist would seem to be to augment an awareness of Cork’s minor histories among the local community, albeit from a viewpoint not often considered and from one which will reveal the city differently. Or, more openly: to deliver a rebus-like object, at once slight, enigmatic and compelling, which would encourage curiosity about that to which it refers.
 
Maddie Leach’s adjustment of an apparently unremarkable public space, then, demonstrates the power of the addition of a frame. What happens to our familiar reality when it is designated differently in language? Evening Echo, as its title suggests, is firmly embedded in the specificity of local history; but just as the threads of that historical fabric themselves unwind into the macrocosmic narratives of world-historical processes, so the reverberations of this public artwork extend into artistic and philosophical territory which travels beyond the local and particular. A largely invisible community given visibility; a communal space animated by new meanings; our time punctuated differently.
 
 
Evening Echo is presented by the National Sculpture Factory, Cork City Council and Board Gais; the lamps were first lit on 27 December 2011, and City Council have agreed to maintain the lamps for the next 50 years. It is hoped that the project continues beyond that date.

This exhibition, curated by John Elderfield, was the first major retrospective of de Kooning’s work since the artist’s death in 1997. Its almost 200 artworks (paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures) were arranged into seven chronological sections, constituting a kind of cradle-to-grave narrative, from the artist’s juvenilia and early encounters with European Modernism during the 1910s and ‘20s, right through to his late, spare, precarious abstractions from the 1980s. While the exhibition was not exhaustive, the selection was superb, with the museum having had the resources to borrow almost all the key works they desired. All the major statements were represented here: the seated figures from the early 1940s, testament to de Kooning’s nuanced and powerful draughtsmanship (and his debt to Picasso); the black and white calligraphic abstractions of the late 1940s, with which he attracted the admiration of the likes of Clement Greenberg; the compositional complexity and corporeal energy of Attic and Excavation (1949 and 1950 respectively); the striking gestural force and chromatic intensity of the ‘Woman’ pictures shown at Sidney Janis in 1953 (although one of these was missing here); the brimming, voracious confidence of the large ‘full arm sweeps’ and ‘abstract urban landscapes’ from the mid-late 1950s; two paired, lambent pastel-coloured Arcadian abstractions (Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point, 1963, and Door to the River, 1960); the spilling, leaking, unsublimated eroticism of his Women from the mid-60s; and, a final triumph, a series of abstract canvases of uniform dimensions (196 x 223cm), titled poetically and possessing the saturated yet composed pleasure of a painter so in control of his medium as to have been able not only to seize upon the surprise gifts of a fast process, but also to have secured for them a potent structural force that strengthens their affective impact.

 
These much-celebrated high-points were accompanied by a selection of less familiar drawings, many of which, especially those from the early 1950s, were equally (if differently) impressive visually. Others, and this went for some of the paintings from the mid-1940s also, seemed selected for the revelations they offered regarding process rather than their specifically visual rewards. Some prints were also included, as well as two mono-prints on newspaper, which were made from the sheets the artist used to keep the surface of his paintings from drying out. De Kooning did not take up sculpture until the 1960s, but Elderfield’s selection shows an unprecious, ribald and subversive plastic imagination, anticipating the low pleasures and slapstick grotesquery of Paul McCarthy, for example.
 
Indeed, de Kooning remains a fecund artist for today, more so in some ways than his now more celebrated contemporaries Pollock or Rothko. His work is not only able to survive a variety of critiques leveled against it (or against ‘Action Painting’ less specifically), but also to respond to and even align with some of these newer priorities and tendencies. In 1953 Robert Rauschenberg, a great admirer of de Kooning, erased one of his drawings and later exhibited it as his own work; but de Kooning’s own drawings were already dense palimpsests of erasures. Pop Art critiqued the emphasis upon privacy and authenticity in Abstract Expressionism, as against the surfaces and spectacles of the commodity and the mass media; but de Kooning himself famously used a smiling mouth cut from a cigarette advert as the fulcrum for his Woman I, and already by 1955 (Gotham News, 1955; Easter Monday, 1955-6) he was including transfers from newspaper pages on the surfaces of his paintings.
 
This is not to reduce the profound differences between the neo-avant-garde and de Kooning’s modes. Perhaps most importantly, de Kooning interrogated painting from within, not from without: there is never a sense that he questions the value of painting as such, or large-scale gestural painting in particular. The extraordinary amount of time de Kooning spent in the studio is testament to his profound existential connection with the activity of painting: while not wishing to hyperbolize, it does seem accurate to say that he devoted his life to it. But for many such an artistic idiom has long been saturated and claims for de Kooning’s continuing relevance will not convince everyone. He was unorthodox even as a Modernist painter, but he wasn’t an avant-gardist at all (in the sense of employing art, often against itself, to overthrow existing economic, political and institutional structures).
 
The status of de Kooning’s achievement with regards to the politics of gender and sexuality is much harder to determine. Neither the exhibition wall texts nor the substantial, beautifully illustrated catalogue will help very much in developing a concern with these issues. The curatorial frame of the exhibition was conservative in this respect. The French feminist philosopher and theorist Julia Kristeva once described de Kooning’s Women as a ‘massacre’ on the canvas. While this is not perhaps the most subtle reading of the paintings themselves, the terms that Kristeva had already developed to theorize poetic language do prove useful here.
 
Kristeva’s concept of the ‘semiotic’ designates aspects of a poetic text (inclusive of painting) that evidence a kind of revenge of the drives upon the conventional structures of language necessary to produce properly socialized subjects. For Kristeva, a poetic space is one where, once these symbolic structures have been mastered and internalized, the unruly, gestural, rhythmic, frequently destructive energy of the drives re-asserts itself. This makes contact with infantile experience in the sense that it brings into visibility aspects of the subject which have had to be silenced or repressed in the process of socialization, but Kristeva was adamant that for poetic language to have any real significance required a sustained going through and not an abandonment of the symbolic order. De Kooning was of course the master draughtsman, by far the best trained and most gifted of his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries in this respect. He had fully mastered the conventions of academic picture making, but subsequently strove to disable, dismantle or bypass the easy satisfactions of the exercise of such facility in favour of something more surprising and unruly. Many of de Kooning’s mature paintings present an overpowering mixture of bodily expenditure and unedited pleasure, sustained by a dense, rich, wet material ground. They are both striking and sustaining in their formal potency and sophistication, but the oddly unsublimated, truant and open quality of their energy (which might usefully be thought of in terms of the drives) means that their structural coherence is never fully divorcable from a ‘semiotic’ excess.
 
Elderfield is rightly skeptical of commentators who read de Kooning’s art as symptoms of a personal misogyny; but the case for the artist’s condition of freedom or his ‘poetic’ experimentations might be interestingly complicated by a more sustained exploration of the formation of subjectivity itself.
 
 
De Kooning: A Retrospective was on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 18 September 2011 – 9 January 2012.

Indeed, this disorienting instability of language is the starting point for several of the exhibiting artists whose work seeks to stage problems of legibility and the ways in which meaning changes over time. Takahiko Iimura’s video projection, White Calligraphy Re-Read, reflects on the temporal development of language by recycling an earlier 16mm film work. Characters from an archaic Japanese script were scratched into the film’s surface and then the projection accelerated to a blur. In his 2010 re-working of the piece, the artist retrieves a level of legibility by digitally slowing the film at points and pronouncing the newly intelligible characters, thus dramatizing the act of translation, not only from the visual to the verbal, or between languages (from Japanese to English) but also between analogue film and digital media.

 
Some works were arguably less successful – Kay Rosen’s Phantom Limb for example, again tackling the mysteries of legibility and coherence, reduces the works title to the letters P and B painted in white against a black background. The aim of the work is to provide a visual co-relation to the linguistic meaning; here, to recreate the phantasmic sensation of a missing body part by equating it with the viewer’s groping search to ‘fill in’ the missing text. The mirrored ‘p’ and ‘b’ also refer to V.S. Ramachandran’s treatment of phantom limb pain, which uses simple visual mirroring to trick the brain into believing the work exists. This level of theoretical richness is rendered with such drastic economy of means, however, that I would argue much of its complexity is muted. Equally, Cerith Wyn Evans’ contribution, So To Speak; white neon quotation marks, framing nothing, seemed irritatingly glib, but perhaps that is a measure of the sly effectiveness of co-opting such a vacuous gesture. By contrast Peter Downsbrough’s site-specific interventions, also modest in their means, are highly effective in their dramatization of the gallery’s inimitable architecture. Apart uses adhesive lettering and slim metal pipes to enact a transition between wall, ceiling and open space, bringing about a new proposition for reading the interior.
 
Other artists played with the materiality of text – playing being quite an apposite description here given the witty inventiveness of much of the work. Michael Stumpf’s Massive Angry Sculpture for example appears to literalize its title with a hulking black sprawl that colonizes much of the floor space of Gallery 2, but on closer inspection, the posturing bellicosity of the title is undercut by the brightly coloured scaffolding that props up the flimsy construction. Similarly there is a strong element of subversive humor in Semâ Bekirovic’s video work How to Stop Falling which explores the breakdown of text by hurling polystyrene letters from the top of an office block in a manner reminiscent of a anarchic Seasame Street reading exercise. In contrast, the fractured casings of Niamh McCann’s cinema sign, Snippet II, are pregnant with a melancholic romance that adheres specifically to the physical character of a type of urban signage fast disappearing.
 
Despite the witty playfulness of some of the work on show, there is serious scholarly impetus driving the exhibition’s curation – a collaborative exercise between Graham Allen, Professor of English at UCC, and Matt Packer, curator at the Glucksman. Allen’s textual ‘provocations’ interject literary and philosophical references which serve both to prick the viewer’s experience and to structure the show’s thematic strands of legibility, monumentality, and ‘wall-writing’ or subversive intervention. The Glucksman’s location in the heart of a university campus means that it is surrounded by people with an investment in the written word – either grappling with academic tomes, trawling through digital databases of research material, or striving to produce their own textual contributions. In such a context, the written word as a medium is usually looked through to get to meaning, or woven to create meaning, clarity and transparency being goals. At its best then, this exhibition, by seeking to dramatize the visual power of language, to make us look at rather than through it, is both liberatory and subversive. Text is un-harnessed from univocal meaning, reading is made problematic and opaque, and the viewer is re-acquainted with the written word’s slippery, unstable nature as well as its capacity for formal beauty.
 
 
In Other Words was on view 22 July – 3 October 2011.

In his notes on the early photopaintings, Richter describes the ‘fortuitous rightness’ of photographic composition, likening its authority to a winning sequence of Lotto numbers over any other combination: ‘the sequence that emerges after the numbers are drawn seems entirely right and creditable in every way’. The early paintings, when seen collectively, bear this out through the tangential dissociations of tigers, toilet paper and photo-erotica. The ambivalence of these works as divested representational paintings gives way to a fascination with paint as skin, and Richter’s authorial agency manifests itself in testing the properties of the medium.

 
Having established a conceptual basis in photopainting, Richter gradually moves to reinvest himself as author and commentator. From the late 1960s the photopaintings site his practice as constituent to a wider socio-political conversation. Richter paints family photographs that address the crisis of identity faced in post-war Germany (such as Uncle Rudi, 1965, painted in full Wehrmacht uniform), and portray tenderness (such as Betty, 1977, where Richter depicts his daughter turning away from the viewer, a counterpoint to the Baader Meinhof series of the same period).
 
The limits of paint as skin are probed throughout Panorama – most emphatically in the series of Grey Paintings made between 1968 and 1975. Having achieved authorial negation in terms of subject, Richter turns to grey paint as a material equivalent. He cites grey as being synonymous with ‘indifference’ and his selection of the material as a removal of commitment or opinion. Indeed, the first grey paintings were, through the over-painting of failed works, acts of destruction, redaction and cancellation. Whilst the grey works are often considered as a form of withdrawal, it is not from but to where, that is most interesting. In these paintings, grey isolation affords a quantum visibility of paint as paint – even the slightest gestures are registered loud in this otherwise silent arena. In Grey, 1974, thick ridges and peaks ascend and descend the tall rectangle, the result of thick oil paint being applied by a large roller. This texture, coupled with the oil-imparted sheen of the paint, results in a surface that appears wet or active, a continuation of its own past some 40 years after creation. The much smaller canvas, Grey Beams, 1968, charts the structural motion of paint traversing the canvas, through the centre-point, from all directions. The resulting rotary pile of brush strokes are stacked in sequence, ending much as they began; their history complete and traceable – a top-down view of a Modernist, teleological account of painting.
 
Other high-points in Panorama are Richter’s works that either exist on the borderlines or escape entirely from the medium of paint. In the room ‘Art after Duchamp’, 4 Planes of Glass, 1967, is posited as a response to Duchamp’s Large Glass. These rotating glass panes, pivoting on horizontal axes housed in sparse steel supports, pre-figure comparable structures made by Daniel Buren and Liam Gillick. Double Pane of Glass, 1977, sees Richter treat glass as canvas, its textured grey surface rendered flawlessly flat when viewed from the reverse. Similarly, the large mirror pieces see Richter return to Duchampian territory, the pieces relaying and refracting images of paintings and denuded spectatorship. In Kugel III, 1992, the mirror is reformed into a small, polished stainless steel ball. Its title alludes to a bullet projectile, lying spent on the gallery floor, while photopaintings of gunshot victims Ensslin and Baader (as depicted in the Man Shot Down 1 and 2, 1988) hang motionless on the walls. Numerous, vast squeegee works drag membranes of oil paint beyond its limits – the snapping viscosity of paint leaving stuttering traces, and voids through which previous layers of process are left uncovered.
 
Panorama presents a body of work of remarkable scope and depth, embedded in moments of significance, art historically, and in terms of wider cultural and political discourse. Just as Richter moves between the poles of abstraction and figuration, affirmation and negation, as first indicated in Table, 1962, it can also be said that his practice pulsates between an internal logic of painting as thinking and an external desire for something more transformative and outwardly connected.

‘One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting. But if one lacks passionate commitment, there is nothing left to do. Then it is best to leave it alone. For basically painting is total idiocy’.

 
 
Gerhard Richter: Panorama was on view at Tate Modern, 6 October 2011 – 8 January 2012. It travels to Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, opening there on 12 February 2012.

There are points, especially lately, where Goldsmith seems to be going in a direction that (like a lot of what he does) has been taken before in the art world, but has been less common in the poetry world. It’s a turn to the idea of the career itself as the most important medium of the art. There are plenty of ways to do this, but the way Goldsmith seems to be going is one that people who are critical of the apparatus of fame, the market in cultural capital and symbolic goods, and the construction of status might find disconcerting … Goldsmith distances himself from the idea of the text-as-art-object, and moves toward the effect, the stimulation of thought, and the generation of conversation about the object as the real medium of his art. It’s not quite the artist’s career as the artist’s medium, but it is a step in that direction …. It’s a direction I personally see as a bit — what? — I suppose ‘destined to produce unhappiness for those who take it’ is the phrase.⁸

While I’m curious as to how a perfect stranger might be able to predict my future mental state, Archambeau’s skepticism is typical of the unexamined reaction that the poetry world often falls back upon when they suspect poets of engaging with institutions on any level.
 
A more nuanced – but equally suspicious – reaction was generated by Dale Smith, founder of the Slow Poetry movement, during a public conversation that he and I had:

Dale Smith: By bringing Conceptual Poetry to the Whitney earlier this year, don’t you feel as though you betrayed the radical impulse behind the avant-garde? Or perhaps I’ve fallen for the performative gesture, and in my dismay over the carrying over of Conceptual Poetry to the Art World Institution, I’ve simply fallen for a scheme to generate discussion around Conceptual Poetry? 
Kenneth Goldsmith: Honestly, Dale, if the Whitney wanted to do a night of Slow Poetry, would you really say no? DS: In the context of Slow Poetry, I would have to refuse, though I would lose sleep over it. Or, perhaps, I’d pull a Marlon Brando, and send someone else to collect the trophy — use the opportunity — put it toward some other purpose. I might ask for the money to document some other kind of event — in a nursing home or something. It would be difficult, and I realize the pressure involved, but that’s how it is. 
KG: Wow! That’s amazing. Tell me more! Why would you refuse? I’m fascinated! 
DS: It has to do with Slow Poetry. It doesn’t belong to me. And there’s nothing to promote. And I don’t want to be responsible for institutionalizing anything in that sense — slipping under the Museum’s covers. I would rather send Jack Collom or Sotère Torregian or Joanne Kyger. Or a homeless person dressed up as me saying whatever they wanted to say — that would be an interesting conceptual gesture, I would think. Kent Johnson has proposed that ‘the poetic politics of [Flarf and Conceptual Poetry] begin where those of Language poetry ended.’ I wonder if by this he means that the new poetic avant-garde is inside a ‘building’ that’s been primed to receive ‘art works’ of the kind you are offering. These installations want to be provocative, but they’re inside a kind of museum, that’s been ready-made for them, if you’ll pardon the pun.⁹

Kent Johnson’s comment about Language poetry is correct in that it was a movement that recognized that it could not survive without the support of the institution. There is so little interest in the avant-garde in the general population that if not for the academy, this work would be nearly invisible. So you have the institution as survival strategy. In fact, for advanced poetries – meaning ones that are decidedly non- or anti-populist – if this work is not received in the academy, it’s not received at all. I, for example, owe my career to academies and institutions; if my work is not being taught or written about, it doesn’t exist. With this historical knowledge, over the years, as the various mainstream institutions reached out to support it – Ivy League universities, well-funded literary and academic journals, major museums, even the White House – I said yes. But with a caveat: I couldn’t be censored and had to be allowed to say what I needed to say in the way that I needed to say it, however distasteful it might be to them, or I would walk away. Shockingly, they all agreed and to this day, no major institution has even attempted to tone down what I say or do. And believe me, I have made some very provocative claims. So an engagement with an institution can be like holding up a mirror to the institution, a limit test to see what it is capable – or incapable – of.
 
Yet old attitudes die hard. The poetry world was largely critical of my acceptance of an invitation to read at the White House last May, most prominently articulated by poet and blogger Linh Dinh, who claimed,

To be a minstrel for a mass murderer is nothing to be proud of… This just heightens my contempt for the state of American poetry. Did Bertolt Brecht dance for Hitler? Future generations will look back at us and retch. Very sad.¹⁰

And yet, the institution – in the form of Al Filreis of The University of Pennsylvania (my employer) – leapt to my defense with a nuanced and moderate argument. He responded to Dinh:

I don’t disagree with you about war, that’s certain, but obviously I do disagree about what Kenny has specifically said yes to. Michelle Obama has been doing a few good things in the arts, but this project (series) unfortunately hasn’t so far been one of them; her people asked the usual suspects (e.g. Billy Collins) and someone in her office had the fairly unusual idea of trying something different, aesthetically, and so Kenny, who must have pondered the down sides of accepting, decided on balance that helping to provide some poetic range was a good thing to do. Goldsmith is no Brecht (in mode or intention) and so I don’t expect him to refuse in a manner that presumably Brecht would have, even in your imagined analogy; and while Obama has been to me and many others I admire (including you, by the way) a disappointment (and, in war policies, worse than that), I don’t consider him a Hitler (I’ve thought about totalitarianism a good deal).¹¹

In regard to my considering the downsides of the invitation, I realized that this would provide a rare opportunity to put radical poetic theory and practice into institutional play; in fact, what it would reveal about the surprising structure of that particular institution – as I’ll get to later – would prove to be more valuable than the blunt warnings against participating at all. But I did stop to consider the invitation: when I was invited to read, I wondered aloud to a colleague whether if, asked by the G.W. Bush administration to read, would I have accepted? To which my colleague responded, ‘Kenny, you never would’ve been asked to read at the G.W. Bush White House.’
 
But let’s look at what actually happened at the White House and see how it played out on institutional terms. The day was split into two parts. In the afternoon there was a poetry workshop led by Michelle Obama in the State Dining Room and then in the evening there was a formal reading in the East Room. While there were eight ‘poets’ invited to read, most of them were entertainers who performed their lyrics as poetry, such as Jill Scott, Common, Aimee Mann, and Steve Martin, who brilliantly sung an Auden poem with his bluegrass band. The only other full-time poets, beside myself, were Rita Dove and Billy Collins. I should mention that one avant-garde visual artist, Alison Knowles, was also present. In terms of the institution, when I was invited to read, I was only given one rule: that I could not read anything political. What that exactly meant I was never told. Other than that, I had free rein to read whatever I wanted. Once I had decided upon my reading, I had to submit it for approval. Upon arriving at the White House in the morning, the poets did a sound check and ran through their short sets while handlers scurried about setting up the room for the evening’s event. During this sound check, our host, Joe Reinstein, The Deputy Social Secretary to the President, was present from the Administration. After my sound check, Joe made a helpful suggestion regarding the pacing of my introduction. It was good advice and made my set flow better. From that time until the moment I went onstage, nobody commented upon what I was to read. In fact, that evening face-to-face with the President, it dawned on me that as I got up on stage, there was going to be nothing stopping me from reading something other than what I had told them I was going to do. I could’ve read something political or made some sort of unexpected intervention; much to my detractors’ chagrin, I didn’t. I stuck to the script, which for my purposes turned out to be the best thing to do. But more about that later.
 
In the afternoon session with the First Lady, when I was interviewed about my practice by Elizabeth Alexander in front of the White House Press Corps, 70 high school students, and dozens of bureaucrats, I wasn’t vetted about what I could or couldn’t say. I simply said exactly what I say again and again, making my arguments against creativity and for copyleft, file-sharing, and free culture. As Marjorie Perloff described it,

Against the usual admonition to ‘Look in thy heart and write’ (Rita Dove has just told the group that ‘Only you can tell your story. So if you remain true to your own experience, your voice will find you!’), [Goldsmith] begins by noting, tongue in cheek, that his own students are penalized for any shred of originality or creativity they might show. As he puts it in the manifesto, ‘Instead they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering and stealing. Not surprisingly they thrive. Suddenly, what they’ve surreptitiously become expert at is brought out in the open and explored in a safe environment, reframed in terms of responsibility instead of recklessness.’ Copying, cutting and pasting, downloading, recycling: these activities, Goldsmith argues, will actually teach students more about literature than the seeming ‘originality’ of self-expression.¹²

Nobody blinked an eye. When discussing my entirely-appropriated book, Day, which is a transcription of a day’s copy of The New York Times, I was interrupted by an engrossed First Lady who insisted on knowing what day I chose to transcribe. The lack of resistance to what I was saying was remarkable. In fact, the White House was the most frictionless place I’ve ever been. Nothing ever goes wrong there. Like walking on air or being on the moon, there’s a complete lack of gravity. Due to the most insane security, it feels like the freest, most relaxed place on earth. It’s like everyone is on a combination of Prozac and Ecstasy. And everything I said there seemed to be met with big smiles and nods of approval, even things that advocated breaking social contracts – or even the law. Strange doesn’t begin to describe it.
 
That evening, with the President sitting five feet away from me, I read appropriated texts. Again, nobody flinched. I put together a short set featuring an American icon, The Brooklyn Bridge, and presented three takes on it, first an excerpt from before the bridge was built from Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’, then the bridge as metaphysical / spiritual modernist icon with an excerpt from Hart Crane’s ‘To Brooklyn Bridge’, finally finishing with an excerpt from my book Traffic, which is 24 hours’ worth of transcribed traffic reports from a local New York news station. The crowd, comprised of arts administrators, Democratic party donors, and various senators and mayors, respectfully sat through the ‘real’ poetry – the Whitman and Crane – but when the uncreative texts appeared, the audience was noticeably more attentive, seemingly stunned that the quotidian language and familiar metaphors from their world – congestion, infrastructure, gridlock – could be framed somehow as poetry. It was a strange meeting of the avant-garde with the everyday, resulting in a realist poetry – or should I say hyperrealist poetry – that was instantly understood by all in the room; let’s call it radical populism.
 
Now let’s take a moment to parse the famous suit I was wearing and examine how that played into institutional critique. John Stewart speculated that it was improvised at the last minute, quipping that the afternoon before I went onstage I glanced at the wall and asked, ‘Hey, does that wallpaper come off?’ An UPenn alumnus, writing in the Penn alumni magazine commented,

Kenneth Goldsmith is pictured standing at a podium dressed somewhat like the clown he apparently wishes to be. But alas, he is not at a circus; he is an honored guest at the White House, reading his ‘work’ at an ‘Evening of Poetry’.

But the suit was actually made by Brooks Brothers, the same outfitters that supplied the suit that The President himself was wearing that evening. My suit was designed by the avant-garde designer Thom Browne under his Brooks Brothers’ owned Black Fleece label, who does pretty much what I was doing at the White House: taking the traditional patterns that Brooks Brothers is known for – in this case paisley – and pushing them way too far. Similarly, during the day session with the First Lady, I wore a Thom Browne pastel suit, which references the insane pastels of the preppy Newport set. For the suit I wore, Brown actually created a pastiche or patchwork of traditional preppy colors and literally made a remix of them. It was clear that Brooks Brothers needed to revitalize their brand, shake up the staid traditions, hence they called in Browne to bring Brooks Brothers into the 21st century, replete with self-conscious winks and nods, engaged with remix culture, and to add a big dose of impurity. Clearly that meant not ditching their classic line, but spinning off another line based on what they became famous for.
 
I figured that The Obamas – preps to the core – would in some way recognize the paisley and the pastels, but be befuddled by the size of the paisley or the way that the pastels were unconventionally stitched together. And that, in fact, was the case. Upon meeting the President, the first thing he said to me was, ‘That’s a great suit! You know? I’d wear a suit like that. But my staff would never let me.’ To which I replied, ‘Mr. President, this is one instance where it’s better being an artist than being the President of the United States: artists can wear anything they want.’ And then he glanced down at my saddle shoes and exclaimed, ‘You’re wearing golf shoes!’ Which in part was true, that being the genius of Thom Browne, to take something familiar and recontextualize it to the point of it being ‘wrong’, which is exactly what I aimed to do with my performance, straddling tradition and radicality, being both and, at the same time, being neither; embracing contradiction, keeping them guessing.
 
Now where this intersects with theory is interesting. Jacques Derrida stated that

What [the] institution cannot bear, is for anyone to tamper with language…It can bear more readily the most apparently revolutionary ideological sorts of ‘content,’ if only that content does not touch the borders of language and all the juridico-political contracts that it guarantees.¹³

As evidenced by the recent Occupy Wall Street protests, institutions were – at least in the beginning – remarkably adaptive and flexible, often sympathetic, to protesters. The modes of discourse, although radical in their political sentiments, were expressed in a common language (Derrida’s ‘contract’), one that was well-understood and mutually agreed upon by both parties. Ideological differences – agree-to-disagree – are a given, but formal challenges to language prove to be a harder pill to swallow. An example of this happened when an artist showed up at Zuccotti Park with a sign that read, ‘Gucci. Do The Dishes.’ He was nearly run out of the occupation by protesters who attacked his language for lack of clarity. They didn’t know what to do with poetic sentiment. Clearly, ambiguity broke the linguistic contracts. Yet Occupy Wall Street’s overarching genius has been to exploit these exact precepts by developing what Brian Eno calls an ‘oblique strategy’, jamming norms by refusing to make a list of demands – adapting an attitude of ambiguity – breaking the contract, leaving the institutions unsure of exactly how to respond. Brilliant, really. Derrida’s ideas were formulated in the wake of May 68, where Situationist-inspired slogans – “Sous les pavés, la plage,” “Ne travaillez jamais,” or the sorts of linguistic détournement that occurred during the Prague Spring, where street signs were painted over so as to confuse the arriving tanks – similarly were able to jam normative discourse by breaking the contract due to their oblique, poetic qualities. The lesson: by taking a rigid position – either / or – one makes oneself an easy target. Occupy Wall Street is a product of the digital age: distributed, non-specific, nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Such strategies are nuanced and complex, causing befuddlement in a binary-based black-and-white culture.
 
What happened in the White House was that radicality was clothed in the nearly identical linguistic garments of normative discourse familiar to the institution. And because it was fed to it on its own terms, the juridico-political contracts were held in tact, thereby going unnoticed. In fact, one could say that most of those in the room were talking heads, daily spouting words written by others. It’s no wonder they felt akin to appropriative and uncreative writing. So what we’re seeing with much new conceptual work is the inability of institutions to muzzle those who tamper with language because – unlike disjunctive modernisms – it is unaware that it is being tampered with.
 
And this cloak of invisibility has affected and opened up certain institutions in ways that even a few years ago, was unheard of. Recently, I was interviewed by a European academic journal and was asked a question I’ve been asked many times before:

Interviewer: The programme of Language writing seems quite congenial to what you do. They as well felt the need to react against poetry as it was/is taught at universities. Many language writers, however, are currently working at a university (and so are you). Isn’t there a contradiction in this? 
Goldsmith: It’s a fact that in the United States, the primary reception of innovative literature happens in the university; there really is very little readership outside the academy. This is a condition that preceded my arrival onto the writing scene, fostered by numerous cultural conditions in the States, as well as the warm reception of Language Poetry by the academy. As such, I simply take it as a given that this is where the readership and study of my work occurs. But it’s not all bad news. At the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach, we are given free rein to teach in unconventional ways. For example, I teach classes in uncreative writing where we encourage the students to plagiarize, appropriate, plunder and sample. They are demerited when they show signs of originality or of conventional thinking. The university supports this agenda, so you see that perhaps the academy is not what it used to be.¹⁴

The fact that I am not only permitted but encouraged to explore this in a university classroom – in plain sight – is a fact that I still find remarkable. And yet I continue on, as I have done for nearly a decade. But it’s not just the University of Pennsylvania who has permitted this: a host of other institutions have also signed on. In 2010 I was awarded the Anschutz Distinguished Professorship in American Studies at Princeton University, where I also taught uncreative writing. In fact, in my application for the award I had to propose a class and syllabus, so there were no surprises: they knew exactly what they were getting. Furthermore, a once-staid university press, Columbia, just published a book of my essays called – you guessed it – Uncreative Writing. The Chronicle of Higher Education – that standard bearer of academic institutions in the United States – recently published my entire introduction to the Uncreative Writing – all 8,000 words – in both print and on the web. And in 2009, I edited a 40-page portfolio of Flarf and Conceptual Writing for Poetry, which is consistently derided in certain circles for its inability to recognize and publish ‘innovative’ work. Think again. This litany is not about bragging: what I find remarkable is these institutions’ embrace and acceptance of what they’re most often accused of dismissing and ignoring. This is not to say that there hasn’t been pushback and anger from the public; particularly in the journals, there have been dozens of harsh responses, shocked that such ‘proper’ institutions would even entertain such ideas, much less unapologetically publish them. But in Derridean terms, this is all part of the juridico-political contract of commonly agreed-upon language.
 
Yet as recently as December 2011, The New York Times published this astonishing sentence: ‘Publishers are extremely sensitive to charges of plagiarism, considered among the gravest sins in the literary world, and in some cases are quick to respond.’¹⁵ Conceptual writing began with legitimizing plagiarism as a literary practice but, having thoroughly exhausted that terrain – need we appropriate the entire internet? – has moved on to explore non- or anti- writing. Plagiarism is still concerned with traditional literary notions (the play between the original writer and the re-writer, and of course, is deeply engaged with a readership, either duped or complicit) and is still codependent upon the role of the author. We’re far beyond the death of the author; now we’re talking about the death of literature.
 
While there are pockets of resistance – some very large ones – it appears that by and large the battle has been won. So what happens when the institutional critique is so easily absorbed by the institution, that it moves from a ‘critique of institutions to an institution of critique?’¹⁶ We’ve seen this already in the art world where performative acts of institutional critique are regularly commissioned by the institutions themselves. Andrea Fraser, perhaps addressing her own practice, writes,

How can artists who have become art-historical institutions themselves claim to critique the institution of art? …. Today, the argument goes, there no longer is an outside. How, then, can we imagine, much less accomplish, a critique of art institutions when museum and market have grown into an all-encompassing apparatus of cultural reification? Now, when we need it most, institutional critique is dead, a victim of its success or failure, swallowed up by the institution it stood against.¹⁷

One way out of this impasse might come from Marcel Broodthaers. After his initial act of institutional critique – embedding his poetry books in plaster – he entirely sidestepped the need to discourse with official institutions by inventing a series of false museums, ones which ran parallel to the world of official culture, thus calling into question what cultural legitimacy means (or more specifically, to perform a critique of what Adorno terms the ‘culture industry’.) Once again, invoking insincerity and superficiality, in 1965 the artist blatantly spoke of desiring status and power:

In art exhibitions I often mused …. Finally I would try to change into an art lover. I would revel in my bad faith …. Since I couldn’t build a collection of my own, for lack of even the minimum of financial means, I had to find another way of dealing with the bad faith that allowed me to indulge in so many strong emotions. So, said I to myself, I’ll be a creator.¹⁸

By creator, he meant founder, curator, and director for a newly created institution he called The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles, 19th Century Wing, which opened in his street-level apartment in Brussels in 1969. Contained in the ‘museum’ were postcard reproductions of paintings adorning the walls and sealed shipping crates strewn about the room. For a man who couldn’t afford the real things that museums showed, his museums would have all the trappings of the museum – the scaffolding and structures of the museum – minus the objects. Over the years, his museums reappeared in various cities in Europe, spontaneously re-opening with newly installed works. And they got more complex: by the time he was done, his project was resolutely and self-reflexively museological, with a complex, invented system of arcane and functionless collecting and naming, resulting in a pataphysical institution, one that proposed imaginary curatorial solutions to imaginary curatorial problems.
 
Broodthaers’ trajectory makes us aware that in any extended artistic practice, there is an inevitable pull toward institutionalization. At age 40, after having transitioned from poet to artist, and now finding himself with the title of Museum Director, Broodthaers wrote,

Of course I now have a job, and I’d have a hard time getting out of it. In my naïvete, I actually believed that I could put off choosing a profession until my demise. How have I been trapped? . . . Yes, now, like all artists, I’m an integral part of society.¹⁹

Broodthaers confesses that his fate is his own doing, understanding that it is the price one pays to play. The other alternative is not to play at all, as advocated by Dorothea Lasky, in her widely discussed 2009 essay, ‘Poetry is Not a Project’. In it, she claims,

The term ‘project’ comes from the visual art world. And other worlds too, like science, business, and education. But especially from the visual art world. And if there is one thing that poets would like to be today, it’s visual artists. Why? Because visual artists have all the money …. A poet with a project (who can name his project and talk about it) shows that everything was all set before he even started. A poet with a nameable project seems wise, and better than other poets with an unnameable one. But this kind of thinking strikes me as BS, because I don’t believe that’s how poetry works …. I would argue that a poet who has a project that he can lucidly discuss is a pretty boring poet, at best. I would argue that a poet with a project might not be a poet at all …. I think the term ‘project’ has nothing to do with poetry …. The notion of a poetic ‘project’ may actually be very toxic to poetry …. Let’s be special for once. In the context of bankers, lawyers, scientists, painters, musicians, we’re poets. Let’s have a little pride. And let’s be gentle when describing our skills to the outside world, so that they can understand us better and we can give each other what we need.²⁰

Lasky’s pose strikes me as contributing to the stereotypical notions of poetry’s powerlessness. At a time when poetry is going out of its way to be confrontational and aggressive, Lasky tiptoes about, asking poets to ‘be gentle when describing our skills to the outside world, so that they can understand us better.’ She begs poets to ‘have a little pride’, but as far as I can see, poets today are filled with pride, filled with rage and don’t feel the need to be gentle about anything. I find her use of the term ‘outside world’ to be equally problematic, when so many have been working so hard to break down such long-standing divisions, to the point where poetry has become a regular part of occupational discourse.
 
Similarly, poets involved with institutional critique are directly inserting poetics and poetic practice into Lasky’s dreaded arenas of business, law, science, medicine, and art:

Kim Rosenfield has been taking ideas from conceptual poetics focusing on fraudulent notions of authenticity & meaning and mapping them onto psychoanalytic theories that, in turn, are being published in professional psychoanalytic journals.
Christian Bök’s Xenotext project — a poem constructed entirely in a laboratory — is being received by the scientific world, with lengthy articles about his endeavors featured in that field’s prominent journals such as New Scientist.
Darren Wershler and Lisa Gitelman have been injecting technology-based poetic ideas into the worlds of media & communication studies which are juicing that field with poetry in ways that haven’t happened since Marshall McLuhan.
Vanessa Place use the forms and languages of law to question the morals and ethics of its professional practices.
Robert Fitterman’s consumerist landscapes boldly employ the hollow rhetoric of shopping malls and catalogues, giving him the ability to critique global late capitalism by appropriating the brutal language of business on its own terms.
My own theorizing of conceptual poetics have been published by and included in the forthcoming Documenta 13 have forced the art world to take notice of what’s going on in poetry instead of the typically inverse situation.

Inspired by the complex projects and sophisticated attitudes of Broodthaers, there’s nothing ‘gentle’ about these gestures and certainly nothing that condescends in order to make the ‘outside world understand [them] better.’ Instead it’s the opposite. Darren Wershler claims that ‘poetry has left the building.’ And he’s right. We’re peeling radical poetics off the page and marching them into the science lab, into the court of law, onto the psychoanalyst’s couch, and into the East Room of The White House, forcing poetry to become a driver of discourse, at once fondly caressing these institutions, while at the same time driving a stake into their backs. To imagine it in any other way would be insulting. I would say that the path to ‘a little bit of pride’ is aggressive activist engagement, to delve head on into the conceptual, political, and institutional complexities of parapoetic practice, not to shy away from them. And until we can permit ourselves to do that, poetry will remain firmly seated on the sidelines.
 
 
Notes
 
1http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/3307/travis_holloway_performing_art/
2 John Kinsella, “Keeping poetry outside the comfort zone,” New Statesman, 13 December 2011 <http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/cultural-capital/2011/12/poem-poetry-disobedience-land>, Accessed December 15, 2011.
3 Judith Barry, Renée Green, Fred Wilson, Christian Philipp Müller, Andrea Fraser, “Serving Institutions”, October 80 (Spring 1997): 120-129.
4 Saltz, Jerry. “Critiqueus interruptus”. The Village Voice. http://www.villagevoice.com/2007-02-13/art/critiqueus-interruptus/, Viewed 15 November 2011
5 That, in fact, turned out to be the case. The plaster-embedded books, entitled “Pense-Bête” (Reminder, 1964) rarely – if ever comes up for sale. By comparison, a minor work, “Le drapeau noir” (The Black Flag, 1968-72) recently went for nearly $30,000 at auction.
6 Quoted in Marcel Broodthaers, Tate Gallery, 1980 p. 13.
7 Ron Silliman, blog entry dated Sunday, October 05, 2008 <http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2008/10/one-advantage-of-e-books-is-that-you.html>, (October 20, 2008).
8 Robert Archambeau, “Kenneth Goldsmith, or the Art of Being Talked About” < http://samizdatblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/kenneth-goldsmith-or-art-of-being.html> , viewed November 16, 2011
9 The Tortoise And The Hare: Dale Smith and Kenneth Goldsmith Parse Slow and Fast Poetries Monday, July 6, 2009 – Saturday, July 25, 2009, Jacket 38, 2009. <http://jacketmagazine.com/38/iv-smith-goldsmith.shtml> accessed November 16, 2011. I have edited the last portion of this paragraph for the sake of clarity. The original was: “Not too long ago, on Silliman’s blog, Kent Johnson left a comment which proposed that “The poetic politics of [Flarf and Conceptual Poetry] begin where those of Language poetry ended.” …. I wonder, actually, if by this he partly means that in fact the new poetry-“avant-garde” is very much, and quite willingly, inside a “Building” that’s quite primed and ready to receive “Art Works” of the kind you are offering. The installations proffered want to be provocative, and no doubt some in the “populist” audience …. will see them as so; but the installations are inside a kind of museum, really, ready-made for them, if you’ll pardon the pun.”
10 Linh Dinh, “Re: Penn’s Kenneth Goldsmith to perform at the White House next week” May 5 2011 <http://wwwwsonneteighteencom.blogspot.com/2011/05/re-penns-kenneth-goldsmith-to-perform.html>, accessed November 21 2011.
11 http://wwwwsonneteighteencom.blogspot.com/2011/05/al-filreis-email-to-me-regarding-kenny.html, Accessed November 26, 2011.
12 Marjorie Perloff, “Towards a conceptual lyric: From content to context” Jacket 2, July 28, 2011. http://jacket2.org/article/towards-conceptual-lyric, Accessed November 20, 2011.
13 Jaques Derrida, “Living On: Border Lines”, in Peggy Kamuf, A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, New York, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991, p263.
14 Sarah Posman, “Interview with Kenneth Goldsmith,” Yang (Ghent), 2006.4 “MAXIMALE VERVANGBAARHEID”http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/Yang_Goldsmith_Interview.pdf>, Accessed November 21, 2011.
15 Julie Bosman, “Is It Plagiarism? Publisher Says No” The New York Times, December 8, 2011 <http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/is-it-plagiarism-publisher-says-no/?hp> Accessed December 8, 2011.
16 This phrase is lifted from Andrea Fraser’s retrospective glance and historical gloss on institutional critique, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique.” Published in Artforum in September, 2005, pp. 278-283
17 Ibid.
18 Marcel Broodthaers, “Comme de buerre dans un sandwich,” Phantomas, nos. 51-61 (December, 1965), pp. 295-296; quoted in Birgit Pelzer, “Recourse to the Letter,” October, no. 42 (Fall, 1987), p. 163.
19 “A la galerie aujourd’hui: Marcel Broodthaers par Marcel Broodthaers,” Journal des Beaux- Arts, no. 1086 (April 1, 1965), p. 5.
20 Dorothea Lasky, “The Poetic ‘Project’ (And Other Poetry-Associated Terms I Hate)” < http://www.themillions.com/2009/04/national-poetry-month-dorothea-lasky_24.html>, Accessed November 27, 2011.