Undoing Art

Michel Delville, Mary Ann Caws

• Publisher: Quodlibet
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9788874629909
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

«Here is, we think, the point. It doesn't matter for what reason the writer or painter or lover destroys the creation: the real point is that destruction itself, like a gigantic statement. It is, in fact, something of an excitation, a stimulation to further thought: what is this ACTION about?»What do Stéphane Mallarmé, Antonin Artaud, Meret Oppenheim, Asger Jorn, Yoko Ono, Tom Phillips and Martin Arnold have in common? Whereas a wealth of critics have diagnosed contemporary art's preoccupations with madness, depression and self-abuse as well as its tendency to cultivate an (anti-)aesthetics of the negative, the excremental and the abject (say, from the Vienna Action Group to Serrano, McCarthy or Delvoye), much less attention has been paid to how modern and contemporary artists and public have thrived on the destruction, disfiguration and obliteration of work by the artists and/or by that of others. From Artaud's «terminal» notebooks to the recent upsurge in «erasure poetics», the history of «undoing» art deserves to be recounted in a positive mode and rescued from popular narratives of the decline and death of the avant-garde.

Acts of Undoing and How We Care

M.A.C.: What best undoes something to make it something else? Undoing to do better? Here’s a model case: Mallarmé striking out every other word from his sentences to make the prose unjournalistic, enigmatic, to make it the poetry of a sentence.

Acts of undoing can be drama in style, without any apparent reason. Or they can be quite simply, in very low key indeed, the refusal to accept or answer to one’s own name, a pseudonym. And then there is the high style: the poet Pierre Reverdy, contemporary with Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, to mark – apparently – his separation from the worldly life and Coco Chanel, with whom he had been closely associating for years, sets fire to a pile of papers on the corner of the rue Bonaparte in the 6ème arrondissement. Are these some of his poems or his other manuscripts, with the publication of which Coco has helped, or then her letters to him, or others, from others? We will not be knowing, but we will – really, really – be caring. When Henry James sets afire his correspondence, is that to avoid his identification as a gay guy, as many of us assume, or some deep cultivation of privacy?

Here is, we think, the point. It doesn’t matter for what reason the writer or painter or lover destroys the creation: the real point is that destruction itself, like a gigantic statement. It is, in fact, something of an excitation, a stimulation to further thought: what is this ACTION about?

It is always a marking of a before (whatever it might have been) and an afterwards, a time of post-action, so that the mark itself is the moment on which we might well want to concentrate. We could imagine hovering over it, delectating in it, were we only to be witnesses, as of course we are usually not.

Not Doing

M.A.C.: Of more interest, perhaps are two other kinds of cases. One is the not doing what one has been asked to do, or what one has indeed promised to do, so that the act itself perseveres, along with its undoing. Here I am thinking of Rainer Maria Rilke, asked, invited, to edit the letters and journal entries of the great German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, and refusing, alleging that it would do her reputation no good:

For even at the moment that the greatest images of her comes alive within me, how in that very moment am I to bring myself to put together and then promote an inferior and tentative image? … After much thought and hesitation I finally decided last winter not to edit the written remains of Paula Becker; indeed, I advised Frau Becker to abandon altogether the idea of such an edition ... My principal argument against their publication is this: that they depreciate rather than enhance the already tenuous image and understanding of her art … Quite apart from her development as a human being, how is one supposed to gather from [these documents] that we are dealing with the painter, the artist, who …1

And so on. Right, but still he wrote the extraordinary Requiem for a Friend, about the same painter, and in response to this we have the equally (and perhaps more) extraordinary poem of Adrienne Rich, for Clara and Paula, as it were, another requiem, saying what cannot be – and so is – said.

Perhaps, on the other hand, these are absolutely the high points of what Paula left, which have of course now been restituted to their prominence. But the point is really the arrogance (oh, alas, Rilke’s) of rejecting the writings of another creator, as if one were the person to decide what is and is not worth it. And as we now read what she left, the journals and the letters, as well as viewing her art, we might find ourselves saying with her, as she remarked to Clara her friend about her early death after childbirth, «what a pity», and meaning, this time, how sorry we are that the great poet mistook what was at stake, beyond the corporeal loss: a truly moving corpus of writing.

How remarkable which myths of refusal persist. Think what this seemingly trivial anecdote undoes … It is a case of final judgment. And it is our judgment that gets worked on, willy-nilly.

Another crucial example is that of Marianne Moore not writing the preface she said she would for Marsden Hartley’s poem. Interesting about the non-generosity of spirit in those you might think the most likely to praise, to confer beneficence: but I well remember her grudging acknowledgement on a recommendation for a Guggenheim Fellowship for Joseph Cornell, that he was perhaps an interesting artist but lacked the «finish»2 of more accomplished artists.

Disownings

M.A.C.: Ken Russell, working with Derek Jarman, disowns his film with Nureyev; years before, Antonin Artaud, angry with the way in which his film La Coquille et le clergyman (The Shell and the Clergyman) had been directed by Germaine Dulac, disowned it as a badly-interpreted product of his mind. Of course group disownings go even further: Artaud, and then later Salvador Dalí were disowned, as was even the best surrealist poet of them all, Robert Desnos, by the surrealist group. Group disownings remain celebrated, exclusions, just as celebrated as are inclusions.

We would be hard put to it to figure out if a work of art said to be by one person by that artist was then akin to another work by that same artist but claiming to have been produced by another name. Does a name have everything to do with the product? These elements so capital in commerce enter into the world of art as conundrums, interesting to some of us, a big yawn to others.

Refusals

M.A.C.: Sadly, the Whitney Museum has just turned down, for the public plaza in front of its new building, Charles Ray’s statue of Huck and Jim, remembering Huck Finn. «The runaway slave, Jim, is nine feet tall, in the prime of life», as Calvin Tomkins puts it in his article «Meaning Machines: The Sculptures of Charles Ray»3. Jim is reaching out with his right hand protectively over Huck’s body, as the fourteen-year old bends over and scoops out something below him. It relates to the story in which they are looking at the stars, Huck is saying they were always there, but Jim says perhaps the moon laid them, to which Huck responds: «sure, because I’ve seen a frog lay most as many»4. Ray points out that this story is about our Homer, and that Huck Finn is our American Ulysses. He reflects on the statue of the Kouros (590-580 B.C.) in the Metropolitan Museum as the statue steps forward: «He is a meaning machine»5.

And the Huck Finn statue cannot be shown, because – as Adam Weinberg, director of the Whitney says – it is too disturbing right there. They are, of course, naked (Huck says: «We had no use for clothes nohow»6.). And when he reckons he is stealing the property of his Aunt Polly, whose slave Jim is, he says: «All right, I’ll go to Hell, but I won’t turn him in»7. A heart-gripping moment, and the controversy is about the Whitney’s declining the sculpture …

Obliterations and Deviations

M.D.: And then, of course, there are acts of disowning, refusal and obliteration perpetrated by artists upon the works of other artists. Among these, the success story of erasure poetics deserves our attention, if only because it has been ignored or relegated to the margins of literary and art history. Erasurism is rooted as much in contemporary philosophy’s deconstructionist turn as in Duchampian found objects and Situationist détournements, of which many of the examples examined below constitute both an extension and a critique. Recent and current developments in erasure art are closely associated with visual artists and writers (many of them poets) appropriating already existing texts with a view to modulating their meaningfulness and legibility.

This says a lot about the relevance of erasure to today’s culture which, by and large, values concepts over technique, rewriting over originality, self-reflection over aesthetic norms and values. Poised between effacement and defacement, erasure pursues a logic which considers the artwork as an unfinished object that awaits future readings and negotiations to be provisionally refashioned, recycled and reconsumed. As the source text becomes the model for the artists and the victim of their transgressions and violations, the boundaries between creator and creature, process and product, producer and consumer, are dimmed in a haze of colliding gestures and interpretations.

In an age of uncertainty that does not cease to proclaim the «death of the avant-garde» and in which «suspicious readings» have become the norm, the disfiguration of found texts has been an important part of experimental literary and artistic production since the 1960s (which, incidentally, is when the failure of the «historical», self-critical avant-garde reached its apex, at least according to Peter Bürger’s canonical thesis8).

To some, erasure art will appear a belated revisitation or, worse, a depoliticized rip-off of the familiar collagist, plagiarist and other foundist methods of modernism and/or a mere epiphenomenon of the much-celebrated cut-up method, the writing-through experiments of John Cage or Jackson MacLow, or what Kenneth Goldsmith recently theorized and promoted as «uncreative writing»9. Others will regard it as an interventionist trend which seeks to rescue the critical and revolutionary potential of experimentalism from the aporias of postmodern pastiche and quotationism.

The critical narrative of the avant-garde’s loss of revolutionary potential and its gradual assimilation into the world of commodities is another story of «undoing» which this short book does not purport to describe or resolve. Instead, our intention is to focus on a limited number of examples enacting forms of poetic appropriation which are geared towards a different understanding of how art can be undone and, in turn, potentially undo its creators: in such works, the author, far from being abolished in the Barthesian sense, is understood and redefined against the materiality of text, book and body.

M.A.C.: Furth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acts of Undoing and How We Care
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Credits
• Abstract
• Biographies