A brief snippet, from the '60s

A head-to-desk moment from Louis Simpson, reviewing Gwendolyn Brooks's Selected Poems in the New York Herald Tribune Book Week, 1963 (and pulled by me from Hoyt Fuller's essay, "Toward a Black Aesthetic" (1968), whose language surrounds the quote):

the Chicago poet's book of poems "contains some lively pictures of Negro life," an ambiguous enough opener which did not necessarily suggest a literary putdown. But Mr. Simpson's next sentence dispelled all ambiguity. "I am not sure it is possible for a Negro to write well without making us aware he is a Negro," he wrote. "On the other hand, if being a Negro is the only subject, the writing is not important."

It's comments like that in mainstream presses that are motivating a bibliography project that I'm working through right now (and which I'd be happy to hear suggestions about). I'm curious about the way that poetics became (or continued to be, as it were) racialized in the post-war era, and how we get from such moments of overtly racist condescension to the Language poets (I'm thinking primarily of a couple prominent spokespersons here, and am quite aware that the umbrella involved is basically unfair) actively reading their practices through the tactics of marginalized groups' poetics. I'm ending the annotations' train of thought on a portion of Timothy Yu's recent book on Race and the Avant-Garde, and an essay by Charles Bernstein ("Poetics of the Americas") that's collected in Aldon Nielsen's Reading Race.

Processing the Rape Tunnel

See the original article here:
http://www.artlurker.com/2009/09/the-rape-tunnel-by-sheila-zareno/

I would highly suggest reading it through prior to reading my reading, below.

Dated the day after the original article's posting, Artlurker posted a hasty explanation of the hoax, asserting that:

When the author of The Rape Tunnel pitched the idea to us we loved it. Of course it’s an extremely sensitive subject, but our motivation for publishing the piece was to comment on contemporary art, not rape.

We cannot say what the intentions of the author were, but ours were simple: to generate conversation on the state of contemporary art based on the fact that an event like this is not so unrealistic today. So we edited the piece like we would any other and published it.

There's a lot going on here, but I think that the thing I'm most drawn to is the editors' claim that "it [rape]'s an extremely sensitive subject, but our motivation for publishing the piece was to comment on contemporary art, not rape." As a statement of intent, I can fully understand this, but it highlights an act of interpretation for me that's pretty important.

The suggestion implicit in this interpretation of the article's significance depends upon a reading that decides between two possible focuses in the fictitious interview. One of those is the very real comment (in a somewhat contaminated sense of the word) by the fictitious artist and interviewer on what exactly constitutes rape, and the relationship between rape and the experience of an aesthetic object. In the interview, this comes up in two exchanges. Here's the first:

Are you pro-rape?

Not really. I personally think rape is morally reprehensible and something that should generally not be allowed in our society. Most people feel this way, which is why the act is exploitable for the purposes of my work. If people were not so repulsed by rape then this project would fail.

The artist and interviewer in this exchange move past what we're supposed to understand to be an unsustainable position toward the act of rape (being "pro-rape"), but instead of taking a position regarding the moral or ethical status of rape, we get the artist taking a position of equivalence about whether it should exist as a category of action. He says he is "not really" pro-rape, and continues, saying that rape "should generally not be allowed in our society" [italics are mine]. For my purposes, it's not really important that the rest of the artist's rather obvious suggestions about the social standing of rape are equally equivalent, but for the sake of completeness, one should certainly be paying attention to the suggestion of language like "repulsed" or "most."

The next instance of rape as a focus for the article comes in the following exchange:

It would seem that what you are proposing to do will not technically constitute rape for the obvious reason that whoever enters into the tunnel is acting of their own free will, therefore making the act consensual. If you aren’t really raping anyone, doesn’t that undermine the credibility of the project?

First of all, I want to make it clear that I plan to make the experience as unpleasant as I possibly can to anyone who dares to crawl through the tunnel. I will try to the best of my ability to make them regret their decision.

Secondly, rape is not always a black and white issue. The definition is argued almost everyday in courtrooms around the country. The woman who gets too drunk one night and regrets having sex the next morning, was she raped or not? There is no easy answer. I hope some of that ambiguity will manifest itself in this project.

Rather than dwell too much on the specific ways in which the status of the proposed art-act as rape is being negotiated, I just want to point out that there is some very specific parsing of whether and how rape can function as, as our fictitious artist claims in the very first exchange, "an artistic gesture" (I think somewhere George Lakoff has suggested that in a post-9/11 context, the most important thing that people making art with words can do is study euphemism...that seems apt here, as well).

However, this focus--one that's very available to the editors of Artlurker, should they only have been looking for it--is not the one that our attention gets summoned toward in the Artlurker explanation. Rather, the editors deflect our attention from the issue of rape and point instead to the article as a "comment on contemporary art," suggesting that "an event like this is not so unrealistic today." Presumably, these editors have a number of examples to call us toward: performance and conceptual art are very broad and not very well-bounded categories--that's part of what would make their tactics so appealing to an artist whose notion of the purpose of art is to have "some effect on people’s lives," as our fictitious artist puts it. The reader of the article is supposed to see the comment, I think, on the displacement of "effect" and "impact," on the part of the artist, from the perceptual to the physical--he wants to physically impact people. And, one could conclude, psychologically and economically impact people as well, as the interviewer's suggestion that people who interact with this art could have their lives "ruined." Further comment could be derived from the artist's equivalence (much like that about the status of rape) toward the nature of the impact that the "work" has on people. Readers should understand, I suppose, something about apathy, about the paradox that the artist feels the need to make an impact, but doesn't seem to care what that impact might be.

But, however we read the comment about the state of art / the artist in this article, as I suggested above, a more telling--because more explicit--comment resides in the interpretive choice to focus on this second option, and to ignore the very obvious potential to read the article as a comment on rape, and the interaction between rape and art. The elision of rape (or, worse, its reading in the blog-post's comments as merely 'provocation') by the editors of Artlurker is a rather loud silence in the mechanism of explanation at work here. This elision does the work of reifying the hierarchy that the fictitious article establishes: the editors make the material and social fact of rape secondary to the primacy of art. In other words, social and sexual violence exists here only as a means toward the achievement or explication of art. And, aside from hoisting up a hoax artwork for Gawker and all to see, that's the real effect of Artlurker's explanation. Rather than owning up to the hoax and the proposed artwork as real ideas, the editors disavow any real engagement with rape, and only further the very real social repression of the fact of rape in society (and in historical moments where 'society' doesn't quite seem like the appropriate description, such as what is euphemistically referred to as 'total war').

Oh, It's Been So Long

So, three months later, I'm returning to this site to post things again. Classes have started at the U of M, and Carrie and I are getting more comfortable in our apartment in Uptown Minneapolis; so, since things aren't quite so topsy-turvy for us right now, I'm getting back into the habit of reading things and writing about them. Right now, I'm finishing Marc Bousquet's book How the University Works, as well as easing my way into Jane Eyre, so that I've got a handle on at least some of the pertinent Bronte stuff for my class on them this Fall.

But---for another class, on Fascism and Film, I've been revisiting sources on the historic avant-gardes, the Futurists and Constructivists primarily, and also some of the pertinent discussions of the avant-gardes more generally, so that I've got material going for an annotated bibliography that I'll need to produce in the Methods course here. I wanted to post this little bit from Paul Mann's The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde today, because I think that it's swell, and because I think that it points to a line of inquiry that I've been interested in lately:

Art exhibits an active relation to the discursive economy, a will to discourse that is its most general if not its most basic commitment. Barnett Newman's dismissal of commentary [("Aesthetics is for the artists as ornithology is for the birds")] is, as Wolfe sensed, itself a form of commentary and, as "mot," becomes currency, a token of exchange passed by Wolfe, by me, etc.; it is a basic element of the economic medium in which the artwork is circulated and exchanged. The hypothetical totality of such exchanges, willing or unwilling, voluntary or conscripted, voiced or even suppressed, would provide a map of the discursive economy within which the avant-garde operates, and which services and is managed by the wider systems of circulation and exchange that constitute the culture at large. (7)

One of the kinds of scholarship that's been most interesting to me lately is that which interrogates that active periphery of discourse controlling the production and reception of literary works--or at least that's what I'm realizing has been drawing me to certain folks writing about poetry lately. There's obviously plenty of that writing already, so I don't know what holes my own thinking could fill, but it's something I'd like to be more on top of, as an area of interest...

Robert Frost's Poetry of the 30s

From "Two Tramps in Mud Time:"

Out of the woods two hulking tramps
(From sleeping God knows where last night,
But not long since in the lumber camps).
They thought all chopping was theirs of right.
Men of the woods and lumberjacks,
They judged me by their appropriate tool.
Except as a fellow handled an ax
They had no way of knowing a fool.

Nothing on either side was said.
They knew they had but to stay their stay
And all their logic would fill my head:
As that I had no right to play
With what was another man's work for gain.
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right--agreed.

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.

More synecdochal modernism from Nathanael West, "The Day of the Locust"

In this section, our friend Tod is chasing after the object of his desire, Faye Greener, who he followed onto a studio lot (Tod is a painter for the studio). In the scene that follows, the set collapses underneath a Napoleonic battalion--Faye was excused from shooting, though acting as one of the extra French vivandieres. Oh, what to read into such a thing? Surely this doesn't mean that the mock-up make-believe that Faye's been living in will also collapse!?

At any rate, this is from Tod's escapades through the studio's sundry set-pieces:

He left the road and climbed across the spine of the hill to look down on the other side. From there he could see a ten-acre field of cockleburs spotted with clumps of sunflowers and wild gum. While he watched, a ten-ton truck added another load to it. This was the final dumping ground. He thought of Janvier's "Sargasso Sea." Just as that imaginary body of water was a history of civilization in the form of a marine junkyard, the studio lot was one in the form of a dream dump. A Sargasso of the imagination! And where which wouldn't sooner or later turn up on it, having first been made photographic by plaster, canvas, lath, and paint. Many boats sink and never reach the Sargasso, but no dream ever entirely disappears. Somewhere it troubles some unfortunate person and some day, when the person has been sufficiently troubled, it will be reproduced on the lot.

I think that one of the ways that it might be interesting to read this passage would be as an allegory of artistic production more generally speaking. In this way, Hollywood (the place) becomes a kind of metaphor for the issues of permanence and cultural waste that get set off as an aspect of the period's crisis/crises, most canonically in Eliot's The Waste Land.

From Nathanael West, "The Day of the Locust"

A brief quote that does something to encapsulate...um...something about modernism:

He reached the end of Vine Street and began the climb into Pinyon Canyon. Night had started to fall.

The edges of the trees burned with a pale violent light and their centers gradually turned from deep purple to black. The same violet piping, like a Neon tube, outlined the tops of the ugly, hump-backed hills and they were almost beautiful.

But not even the soft wash of dusk could help the houses. Only dynamite would be any use against the Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles that lined the slopes of the canyon.

When he noticed that they were all of plaster, lath and paper, he was charitable and blamed their shape on the materials used. Steel, stone and brick curb a builder's fancy a little, forcing him to distribute his stresses and weights and to keep his corners plumb, but plaster and paper know no law, not even that of gravity.

On the corner of La Huerta Road was a miniature Rhine castle with tarpaper turrets pierced for archers. Next to it was a colored shack with domes and minarets out of the Arabian Nights. Again, he was charitable. Both houses were comic, but he didn't laugh. Their desire to startle was so eager and guileless.

It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.

From Mark Nowak's "Revenants"

A passage from the third section (it should probably go without saying that these earlier poems are very very different from the two more recent books--even in Revenants, it's as though the last two sections of the book were written by a different poet than the first three):

Most of us live beyond the shadow of you, powoli, an inch farther than
your arm could reach if it needed to.
                                     Because to speak your name
is to say it at dawn, or sometime when the sun is reaching or just has reached

the beginning of the sky.  But there's a basket at the other end, we're told, and
it's not our own.
                 And yet we want what's there, so we stretch our hand
beyond the edge of the table because we've heard there's some better fruit
to be had.
          And we have been.

Apologies to the few people reading this that the type is so small--the lines are long and my space here is narrow (not the best for quoting poems, I think). There's a "d" cut off at the end of the line that ends on what looks like "an," I should mention.

The one revenant here, the thing returning, is both the poet as assembler, returning to his childhood neighborhood, and the language that comes with that neighborhood---each of the passages (a term that I am coming to prefer in sequences like this, enjoying the spatial metaphor) centers on a word or phrase of Polish. This passage is one that I read as something of an emblem of the whole, with its suggestion that to reach for the thing just over the horizon, to reach for what those others (you know, over there) have, is to be had. A charming pun, but also a reminder to value the given, and a rejection of the drive toward social competition, toward happiness through possession and consumption, which can disintegrate a community, and the false consciousness of which powers capitalism. I read the choice to focus on the story of Sonny in the book's last section as one of elegy not just for a time and for a neighborhood, but an elegy as well for even the idea that drinks should be bought in rounds and not alone.

In this sense, the book is deeply nostalgic, and there is a way that I am tempted to read this poem that would suggest that its closing suggestion (essentially: we've been had) lacks the force of a direct blow at the globalizing capitalism that drove and is driving de-industrialization, and so addresses the excrescence rather than the system itself (this, of course, being essentially the same critique Wheelwright levied against Rukeyser's Book of the Dead). But to make that argument, I think, is to miss the point of what art does here---the mourning of the book is not a call to arms, but call to attention, and a gesture of collective identification. I don't think it's until Nowak's most recent collection, Coal Mountain Elementary, that I'm really able to apprehend a thoroughly political (and not, primarily, aesthetic) project.