Jackson Mac Low: Boredom and Transfiguration

Despite Mac Low’s long and varied career, he is most often associated with his work of the mid-1950s and 1960s, in which he began to devise methods for writing out of systematic chance procedures. These were texts, as well as verbal and performance pieces, generated by predetermined structures; operations and algorithms that cut up and reworked existing written material. Although the context for these methods extends beyond poetry – to Mac Low’s founding participation in the Fluxus movement and to the importance of Cagean Minimalism on his writing – his experiments with a minimally egoic mode of writing had a remarkable and liberating effect upon the poetry that would follow. These texts made available, in a new and productive light, a poetry directed entirely towards what Charles Bernstein refers to as the ‘physics of language’¹.

Studying these ‘physics’, Mac Low developed one of the more compelling attempts to avoid an ‘expressive’ poetry, a writing against the individual ego (as with Cage, these methods were explicitly influenced by Zen Buddhist practice). His poetry severed ties to the lyric and the construction of a lyric voice in a decisive manner that encouraged further experiments, particularly motivating the Language Poetry movement – where Mac Low found a home in his later career – and has continued in its influence today, becoming a point inspiration for Goldsmith’s conceptual writing itself.

But there is another side to Mac Low’s work, and it is to this that Goldsmith is referring in his account of the poet’s ability to bore. As well as experiments in procedural operations, Mac Low’s writing from this period was most often intended to be realised in performance, and as performances they were undoubtedly invested in the tedious and the boring. That is to say, his texts were to be read as scores as much as poetry, and the discipline that governed the systems for writing applied also to the rules for performance. Take, for example, Mac Low’s well-known Asymmetries, instructions for the performance of which were published as part of the Fluxus collection Anthology of Chance Operations, edited by La Monte Young and Mac Low himself². The texts are built by reading-through a source text using an acrostic method: a word or word string is selected from a text, this appears, and then the following words are selected from the source text according to their initial letter, slowly spelling out the source word. This was coupled with a further set of strict rules for spacing and lineation to produce one of the ‘Numbered Asymmetries’:

Asymmetry 18

inspiring.

                    name sins people instruction
                               reverent "invoking"
                    name
                                                  [Goblins]

name
          Avalokitesvara
                                             magical
          enables

The performance of these pieces were intended for multiple performers, at times using both voice and instrument, reading the same text according to differently prescribed methods. Mac Low was a wonderful performer, and I recommend listening to his voice, his superb command over the enunciation of even the most unreadable of texts. But the performances are far from easy listening. Without necessarily being harsh or abrasive, they are straining, and fatiguing nonetheless. Unfolding according to rules rather than any internal development or narrative, they are stripped to the barest remains of meaning that cling to words even as they appear utterly random. The performances are sparse and austere, moving slowly and repetitively albeit without a regular anchoring rhythm. They are also often lengthy, with multiple numbered asymmetries performed in succession⁴. These performances are reticent, they are a site for rather than of attention, refusing to absorb the attention of the audience.

Whilst as a practice these performances embody certain ideals for art-making and also a certain politics – of non-hierarchical collaboration between participants, for instance – as an individual work, to be engaged with in its entirety, an iteration of Mac Low’s numbered asymmetries requires that the audience actually sit through it. And to sit through these stuttering, minimal performances takes an effort which, much like certain kinds of meditation, asks that we focus on something that does not hold our attention, at least not always or not easily. This is an explicitly boring experience; a monotonous attention to tedious forms of repetition. It produces a sense of time dragging, a lengthening of time because one has become too acutely conscious of its passing.

It was only in the twentieth century that the consideration of boredom acquired a new theoretical significance. Perhaps the first extensive philosophical examination of boredom was carried out in Weimar Germany in the 1930s, through figures such as Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and Georg Simmel, where it became a means of articulating the experience of ‘modernity’ as it was variously theorised⁵. As a judgement registering the qualitative aspect of a particular experience of time, it became in this writing a key figure for the temporal experience of modern life. Boredom, in other words, registers something historical about the experience of time in (whatever we mean by) ‘modernity’. Peter Osborne, building on Benjamin and Heidegger, has drawn out this connection between boredom and the discourse of modernity, ultimately arguing that, ‘boredom is a particular temporal experience of abstraction, or mode of experience of the inherently abstract temporality of modernity itself’⁶. As time is cut up, measured, ordered, standardised, and as this single standard of time takes on the force of a social imposition, it is increasingly likely that we will be caught in a segment from which we want to escape but can’t⁷. A sense of constraint is crucial to the experience of boredom; being forced to remain where one doesn’t want to be; watching the time slowly tick by until the hour when time ceases to linger and you are free to go.

We have all experienced this, say, waiting for a bus; the streets are empty and your phone is dead. Boredom depends on the time set by clocks; it is a time of clocking in and clocking out, of getting paid by the hour (the site most important for the reorganisation of temporal experience being the rationalisations of time management in the workplace). The temporality of our many and varied social practices may conflict with this routinised time, but to participate in social life we must, however tediously, adjust them to the abstract rhythm of one or another timetable. As we experience it in our lives, boring time, as constrained time, is something to be escaped or endured. For when stuck, it demands a response to the surprising effort which is required to do nothing but wait.

Why would an artist want to produce this experience, one that we typically escape at all costs? For the avant-garde of the 1960s, the answer lies in the fact that the site of boredom is one where distraction is absent. Turning again to Goldsmith: ‘the twentieth-century avant-garde liked to embrace boredom as a way of getting around what it considered to be the vapid ‘excitement’ of popular culture’⁸. As a response to the leap in the amount of distraction produced by the expansion of spectacular media and advertising technology, the avant-garde sought resistance in the capacity for art to remain tedious. As Michael Newman suggests, boredom can be seen as a form of withdrawal – a ‘withdrawal of attachment’⁹.

In the context of experimental art this withdrawal became a form of resistance against the supposedly pacifying distractions of new media, taking part in a contest over the time of leisure as it was being rendered more and more productive. Boredom thus became an argument for one political function of the space of the artwork. Nevertheless, its withdrawal depends upon the implicit insistence made by a work of art that we should attend to it, with all our capacity, for its duration. Performances like Asymmetries play with this expectation. They cut out a segment of time, a set duration – and hence the potential for an experience of boredom – but couple it with the insistence that, although it may seem tedious, because it is a work of art we should pay attention.