notes on objecthood & memory
Posted on February 2nd, 2004 in musings and
note scribbled on the back of page 47 in akramer’s thesis:
art cannot be object-based anymore. objecthood has devoured the world, it has consumed and been consumed–it governs every relationship (only material?). the politics of objecthood? is this what I mean?
say it another way. be clear. so much of the world is beholden to objects. object worship. maybe it’s ultimately not about the things themselves, but about the desire of the things. but, still, there are all of these things, these objects. a statement: objects are symbols for collective desire.
the idea of poetry is perfectly… pure. minimal form, maximum depth. entirely efficient, beyond objecthood, the residue of desire.
so, art cannot be object-based anymore. but art can deal with the object. I may be conflicted–only because I’m desirous of objects!
art must be utterly poetic. efficient. no objects, no false proclamations, no semantic pretensions.
only being. only questions. only living.
follows an excerpt from an email to a colleague:
memory and making. it’s just so tricky. how do we take something so subjective and personal and give it form which has meaning beyond that initial significance? critics claim that when transmogrified into palpable form, memory’s utter subjectivity silences any real communicative power. they ask if we’re only idolizing memory. I’m trying to think about memory in more general, cultural terms. memory as an agent/catalyst/conduit of vernacular critical theory. what I mean is that everyone relies on memory in order to operate in the world; memory as a kind of interface or filter. I’m still trying to formulate this.
you need a haircut.
remember that!
i’ll see you tonight, in the kitchen with a sharp pair of scissors!
10L
how is poetry so pure?
words are in fact objects right?
Letters have meaning. Words have meaning.
poetry does not find its only meaning through syntax, but first with meanings which are inherent.
Memory transmogrified does not idOlize unless the thing that is made is the final aim.
an object of memory may in fact idEAlize the memory if it even comes close to speaking WITHOUT speech, the simplest form of communication.
furthermore,
Jeremy doesn’t need a haircut.
maybe purity is not quite what I mean. rather, immaterial, or ephemeral, or boundless. poetry is not hindered by material constraints. yes, poetry requires some medium – language, speech, text – but it is utterly weightless and portable. that poetry can have such depth, such resonance without the weight of physical presence (literally) is what interests me. if it can be spoken and heard, written and read, the poem connects artist and audience – no, it’s not that simple, but there isn’t the problem of objecthood to deal with. many of the conceptual artists of the ’60s and ’70s were attempting to get closer to the ideas behind their art, were moving away from reliance on material things to communicate their concerns. many ultimately ended up using only language as a medium because of this. I guess that’s what I’m thinking about when I idealize the “purity of poetry.” I’m skeptical of the ability of art objects to mean anything significant beyond the context of the art world. but I also love many of these very same art objects. it’s imperfect and confusing. it’s both/and.
For inside him there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector – ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.
I’m wondering what on page 47 of my thesis brougt this to life…none the less…I think I had a conversation with someone somewhere, maybe it’s in my thesis, maybe I had it on the phone in West Texas, I think it was with Hillpfrog, but we were talking about poetry, et al. and I just think that I don’t agree with you at all.
if you haven’t seen the movie about Louis Kahn, don’t;
1) poetry need not be text, speech or language;
2) objects, what fun (I just finished an thuroughly un-philosophical McMurtry book, Cadillac Jack, that is about an object freek, I mean collector)
3)I am still working on our institute for meaningbuilding; I came much closer this week to making it a reality, but it’s going to take about 10 years to do it;
4)my roommate who never heard a peice of classical music before last week, is now a Charles Ives fanatic; my sister, who, bless her heart, has not the faintest clue that people could even write things like this, let alone think them, requested a year long membership to anyone of the local art museums in Dallas, which I happily purchased, and has happily taught me many many things about art that I would never have thought of, ever; so art objects do have a power all their own outside of the art world, whatever that is;
5) your own website dispells the whole notion that “art objects” are special things all their own, accessible only to the strange sort of people who would think that they had really found something, namely an art object: I really, really, really enjoyed the photographs about the unfinished potentiality, an unfinished symphonic building (?);
6) the dallas museum of art has an exhibition of about 15 quilts from all over the country, and there were several of them that bore a striking resemblence to your art, especially the paintings, which I thought was wonderful, and I wondered if you had used them (meaning quilts) as a source?
7) I am leaving for Morocco, where I may or may not take up more or less permanent residence, to the extent that this world will allow us (I recently read a zodiac description entry that says that people of my sign are wanders);
9) hillpfrog, was a big fan of Buber, and I am to an extent, but he has a great way of looking at poetry, mystical, objective, subjective, existential, situational, religious, transcendental and proceedural, etc, etc…als and isms will be the death of us.
10) I was shooting guns the other day, shotguns, and I had the most poetic experience, but one that belongs only to me, the clay pigeon, my eye, my mind, and my reactions; there is tremendous poetry in action;
11) one of my favorite passages is from Musil’s Man(y) [sic] without Qualities, in the chapter where he talks about the genius of horses, and the to him degneration of the idea and the vulgarization of the term, from its “pure, efficient” roots;
12) I have now revealed to myself a great thought about the book, it’s title, and one stratum of meaning, that I couldn’t possibly share at this moment;
13) poetry is vulgarized and whatnot, but hey, I just had another great thought: once upon a time, our world believed that we basically knew everything, there was nothing that wasn’t already complete, just uncatigorized…meaningbuilding is an evolutionary step, away from that, which is great, because it means that we don’t know anything, really, which means we can just go on and on forever building and meaning and building and meaning, and never run out of anything…isn’t that interesting, we might never run out of anything, because we can always go on meaningbuilding?
14) would you say that meaningbuilding is autoproduction, a sort of perpetual motion machine? I might not be able to tell you what I was thinking about in the morning, certainly not in a week, and won’t even remember that I had said anything in a year, but that’s what I mean…can’t we just forget it all, build it over and over and over again to mean something different everytime…all of those conversations from all of those places and with all of those people and through all of that time, and now here I have forgotten most of the details, I only have a residue of desire left behind and am forced to buildmeaning again, this time new, this time with a touch of poetry, but is it poetic?
Thanks for all the references. I’ll keep you up to date on the progress of the Meaningbuilding institute. I just emailed Hillpfrog about the necessity for her to get a transcendent degree (under-, over-, transcendent-graduates) in order to join us, not because I’m a snob, but because why the hell not?
email me sometime
Thanks