This musing is the work of Susan Parr–learn more about her work on the author’s page. –TM
Theories–and other thick things–can be pleasures in themselves. But they are often too leaden for the play of art in the making. I mean, it is not frequently recommended that an artist work from a given theoretical program. Commissions can be tough, I hear.
Some wits and creators, nevertheless, come equipped with folders and files and heavy cabinets of their attendant theories. Even minus all this furniture, we tend to read such writers less like solo voices, more like dialogues, attached as they are to a built-in quarrel. Is this the age of the twin-engine artist-analyst? Poet and critical program in one strand?
Posit a reader–free in her rambling–who finds a theory she likes, and then stumbles, as if onto some mushrooms, a writer performing that very idea, embodying it like an eerie, autonomous gnome. Lucky find. Now our reader proceeds with a special pleasure, because it is in her reading, in her own unique ordering of events, that those two aforementioned strands have twined. And so she comes back from her rambles a bit fuller in the apron-pocket (cue scent of mushroom caps in butter, sizzling away in the background).
I’ve had myself a little Red Vine today–the sensation, I mean, of something intertwining, of topography touching, of good vibration. (It’s like the antecedent of a hyperlink: what a hyperlink imitates by casting a literal glow on a single entity which, as it turns out, contains a two.) The theory I came across? A provocative one Susan Sontag has regarding staring, in her essay “The Aesthetics of Silence.” The other writer? The one I mentioned in a previous post, but then unwittingly, neutrally, Nico Vassilakis.
It happens that Nico has just-published a book, Text Loses Time. It’s a big compendium of work, various in its non-thematic flow. It’s also a nice square shape. Some parts of Text Loses Time can be called textpo, other parts, vispo. Here’s one of the vispo pieces under the title “Formulas”:
How so? Like a very compact score, maybe this is an arrangement which can transmit a tone poem in a glance. It shows voiced or coded text (“bdbd”); it shows acoustic direction or speaker location (sounds coming from S-SW, W-NW, etc.) and, lastly, it shows volume, with the loudest sounds in the center. But the silence implied by the long ellipses, the XXXXXXs, that central O? It gives one pause.
In “The Aesthetics of Silence” (part of Aspen 5&6–thanks, K.O.!) Susan Sontag describes contemporary art’s pull toward minimalism as evidence of a “dream of a wholly ahistorical, and therefore unalienated, art.” She continues:
Consider the difference between looking and staring. A look is (at least in part) voluntary; it is also mobile, rising and falling in intensity as its foci of interest are taken up and then exhausted. A stare has, essentially, the character of a compulsion; it is steady, unmodulated, “fixed.” Traditional art invites a look. Art that’s silent engenders a stare. In silent art, there is (at least in principle) no release from attention, because there has never, in principle, been any soliciting of it. A stare is perhaps as far from history, as close to eternity, as contemporary art can get.
I think we look first, then stare, at Nico’s “Formulas.” We look a lot–eyes darting left to top to bottom–so much that we notice ourselves looking. Once our expectation for the click of the concrete has been completely frustrated, do we stare. Complex enough to feel like narrative poems, maybe these are tales of the tabula, narratives of looks coming to rest.
So, in Nico, has our lucky reader found her eerie gnome for the Sontag gnosis, a centaur for her stare? Other work in Text Loses Time does stop her eyes from roaming. The “Negative Alphabet Alphabet,” for example, is not so much a story of seeing, as a picture of something un-sound. Stark, broken characters in direct or reverse siloutte create the visual equivalent of vibrations or hums. To me, the hums are not quite audible:
This bold series, almost absurdly minimalist, consists of the Roman alphabet arrayed in 13 separate letter-pairs, each pair displayed in oppositional diagrams. The diagrams trade figure and ground by reversing black and white, while the letters themselves face off (suggesting the predicament imperative found throughout literary fiction, i.e., there must be a conflict).
Already severed by the clean work of perfect, invisible cutting, the amputated segment has then migrated along one of the rank-and-file motions of a chess board: perpendicularly, 45 degree diagonal, or via the L-shaped move of the knight.
The resulting images may in fact comprise a record of a peculiar chess game. On the surface, though, it’s more a numbers game with two as the defining digit. Two letter-boxes per page, two fragments per box in a two-color siloutte. If this is a “Negative Alphabet Alphabet,” then the alphabet doubles itself, the alphabet is alphbetting, placing a bet on increasing by splitting up. Chromosomally, this would not be XX, but something more like Xx?
Return to our title, in which the word “Negative” is both highly visible and almost hidden in its ambiguity. Fitting, then, that each fragment of a letter creates an optical illusion against its own negative space. For example, the amputated stem of the capitol D appears to be bigger than the space it leaves behind. Each picture is a small, preposterous experiment–as if to say, here is something unbelievable; can looking alone be the answer? Perhaps we’ve arrived at what’s commonly the proving ground of scientist and mystic, both.
In “The Aesthetics of Silence,” Sontag moves deftly from her discussion of the stare to a moving reading of Keats. She tells us that we may find in the opaqueness of silent art, with its proximity to eternity, a deliverance from the anxiety of history. She writes, taking the position of the poet in observation of his subject, that “one can stare endlessly at the Grecian Urn.” And so our lucky reader, stirring her pan of piping hot mushrooms, dropping a slice of bread in to toast, can’t help recalling Keats’ idea of “negative capability” with a untraceable smile. How odd such a notion comes to us in almost critical-prose form, as a fragment of a letter to a relative. She almost wishes Vassilakis’ Negative Alphabet Alphabet weren’t in a book at all, but printed on a sturdy deck of bond playing cards that she could build into a house of shadows, of all up-stairs and doors for her eyes to behold–as a reminder that “thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought/As doth eternity.”