In his essay ‘Misconstruing Lorine Niedecker’, Gilbert Sorrentino, as was his way, took many critics and readers to task for their naive conflation of Niedecker’s life and rural retreat and the elegant spidery clean lines of her poetry, which seem borne out of immense struggle, all astringent and precise. He mocked those who labelled Niedecker a ‘bumpkin-savant’, barely confessing to his own such reading of her work and life, as could be found about 200 pages earlier in his non-fiction collection Something Said. It was always a tempting story – the early life in New York, the relationship with that baffling High Modernist Zukofsky, the exile, the cleaning jobs, the ignominy and silence. But condescension can creep into such portraiture.
And what’s the ‘theme’ of a portrait? Is the subject enough? Do we simply infer from there, with all the terror and ambiguity that everyday encounters fill us with? And what if the theme of a painting is ‘people are beautiful’ and what if it took seven years to paint that, as one might say it did for Ingres. Is that the equivalent of saying something inescapably banal but inescapably true? But what if one felt this very simple sentiment with a persistent, consistent depth which in scale of feeling compared to religious rapture?
Business is business, but beyond the brute necessities of the market, which makes breadcrumb collection a meal, and a writer’s best efforts of suppression into a posthumous collection, the dead should be left alone. No more tributes to DFW, no more personal recollections, no more confessions about your creative hero. Honour the dead with silence, and let the absence, finally felt, be the real mark of respect. A hundred copies of This Is Water don’t equal one page of ‘Good Old Neon’.
End of Year Lists – a tidal wave of the essential, the year’s finest, presented in such an unrelenting fashion, each with accompanying whinnying claim, that the likely effect is nausea, and a desire for nothing, or nothingness.
One small beautiful thing that insisted upon repetition, and would not be returned for a new number.
No wing of arts criticism or writing period is more prone to self-consciousness, fakery, cowardice, fashion or orthodoxy than music reviewing. An agreeable enough sentence, perhaps, but something to keep in mind next time we find our eyes dazzled by end-of-year praise for the meretricious and grotesque, with whole armadas of the nodding chasing each other’s tails in praise of the over-praised.
A freedom is what is extinguished.
Of all the many reasons to distrust folk singers, surely the greatest is their tendency to announce the subject of their song before they sing it. What could meaning, dead quicker than the artist’s assertion of meaning, mean?
Our perpetual shame in knowing what’s best for ourselves and rarely acting upon this knowledge.
How many images or sentences do you have a decade after your initial and solitary contact with the work of art. That’s all that’s important here.
‘It’s rather hard to be a good artist and also be able to explain intelligently what your art is about. In fact, the worse your art is, the easier it is to talk about, at least I would like to think so. Ambiguity seems to be the same thing as happiness or pleasant surprise. I am assuming that from the moment life cannot be one continual orgasm, real happiness is impossible, and pleasant surprise is promoted to the front rank of the emotions. The idea of relief from pain has something to do with ambiguity. Ambiguity supposes eventual resolution of itself whereas certitude implies further ambiguity. I guess that is why so much ‘depressing’ modern art makes me feel cheerful.’
John Ashbery, Paris Review interview
Of course, we assume history will slough off subpar works and the noise of glad-handing culture and leave us, grateful peasants, with the works and the works alone. All our current oversharing does is give culture’s invisible hand more mud to wipe off the boot.
Criticism, that beleaguered sow, has this to trumpet at the very least: it’s not speech.
Curatorship is the providing of silence, of absence. Or should be. The most pleasurable gallery experience would be the one with just enough white wall space between paintings – room to think, to breathe. No deadening thesis work cluttering the walls, insisting on carrying thematic resonance. Space, please. Single poetry collections are always more visually engaging than collected works: each poem to a page, as opposed to the clutter of a squeezed page. You can grow too casual with your glories. In some of the Louvre’s main rooms they have Eugène Delacroixs stacked three high, culture reveling in its own surfeit.
The Waste Land’s notes were at the publisher’s insistence. Thank the publisher.
And then there’s the bad installation art, or bad conceptual art, or hopelessly lazy video art, or whatnot, which is all about the room too – at best, a nice clean white room might find itself only moderately soiled with the presence of such meaningless, meaningful work, all dismal wank, a tired eight-generation po-mo fatigue, barely engaging enough to justify the copious notes handed out at the entrance.
He built four houses to keep his life. Three got away before he was old. - Niedecker
A desire for an art which has banished explication.
Can you justify spending all those hours on a key that won’t open a door? What do you tell your family at Christmas? Will even they find time for your work? Your Dad asks for nothing but DVD boxed sets, year after year. And that’s just the leisure angle, a hotly contested zone of a million barking distractions. Imagine it from – dead language now – the production end of things. Can you, mere scribbler, justify spending years – a decade, even – on a prose work which is about, when asked, well, you’re not quite sure, you couldn’t say. What are you going to say each morning when your co-workers ask you what you were doing? Voice risks failure, public statements risk failure.
Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings Of those white elders; but, escaping, Left only Death's ironic scraping. ‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’, Wallace Stevens
In this video he wore a brown sweater vest. Gawky. He politely explained his work, in his own terms: ‘Photography lies – that’s just how it is.’ Then an awkward giggle. And nothing else. Much better, surely, than being bogged down by catalogue copy. I quote, labouring to type laboured lines: ‘Yet Cauchi has no interest in simply reviving or celebrating antiquated technologies. He uses historic processes to explore contemporary questions around our relationship to the photographic image.’ There’s more, miles of it. Embarrassed, clunky language. ‘No interest’. That perpetual clunker: ‘contemporary questions’. Mere journalism, of course. So what instead then, in place of this familiar copy? A more personalised reaction? But this would be close to describing what scares someone, and from there you might as well start getting into what sexual arouses them, what makes them laugh, why they vote the way they do. That wide intractable field of mystery, where art, as much as humankind, exists as phenomena, not as the solution to newspaper profundities.
Art is a beautiful way to fail on one’s own terms.
