#wreading response

This week I looked at the Finlay works and Mirra’s Instance the determination.

An obvious contrast is the particular types or aspects of space that the works interact with. Finlay’s work is concerned, not exclusively, but heavily, with the outdoors: pieces like Untitled (Wave) interact with the outdoor both in the actual physical context of the piece and the content (”wave”) and form of the text, which builds up on itself as the eye moves left to right and forms a wavelike swell. Even pieces interacting more directly with manmade objects and spaces––e.g., Sails/Waves, meant to be part of a wall, Homage to Jonathan Williams, about a ship–– focus on the physical and natural; color and shape are emphasized, and most of the pieces involve the natural environment in addition to the manmade. The text Finlay adds to the space heightens the viewer’s awareness of its physical and nontextual properties by highlighting or transforming these properties through the poem.

Instance the determination, meanwhile, deals with its space in a significantly different way, consciously engaging with the space it occupies as a specific human institution. As other students mentioned, I had encountered parts of Mirra’s work many times, but was not actually aware of the origins of the piece. I think my only-mildly-questioning acceptance of the presence of the work is a testament to how seamlessly the texts fit into the specific institutional context and ethos of the wider installation space. The installation in Kent, for instance, seems minimally comprehensible in the narrow context of its placement in a building used exclusively for chemistry and physical sciences; a wider view of the text as one of many such pieces of indexing on campus immediately places it instead in conversation with the heavily text-linked University as a whole. Unlike Finlay’s work, any single piece of Mirra’s installation brings little out of its immediate physical context; it interacts with the buildings on an almost symbolic level, as the diffuse embodiments of the abstract entity of “the University.”

I chose to focus on two of the works that I have most experience with--Helen Mirra’s installation on campus and Jenny Holzer’s “For the City” exhibition. My experience with Mirra’s installation is through my physical experience with it, running into excerpts of the project throughout my time on campus, while my experience with Holzer’s exhibition is primarily through online documentation. I thought it might be interesting to compare two works which I came into contact with in different ways to also explore the ways that my experiences of reading inform my understanding of the works at large.

Mirra’s project is essentially about the fragility of context and the process of recontextualizing. Within the context of the institution, isolating fragments of text and inviting them into the sphere of the artistic through installation seems to propose and heighten a dichotomy, perhaps allowing us to explore the ways in which institutions can become homes to fixtures of language or question the ways in which language functions differently within the realms of the institution. In this case, installing language in space is about calling attention to liminal spaces and asking readers to become readers through participation in their daily lives. The function of the installation is to create new associations of space within the mind of the reader or viewer and to repurpose space with the intention of exploration of overarching systems that govern these shared spaces.

Holzer’s project is also deeply invested in the institution. Her work aims to call attention to space and the historical, social, cultural, and political implications of space. However, because her work is projected, her installation has a particular emphasis on the ephemeral and temporary. Her language’s relationship to the location is focused on the idea of power and it’s complicated further by the fact that she uses borrowed language to create a link between the location and the language. As readers, we are asked to focus on the overlap and the mapping of word and space; to make mental connections that synthesize the installation as a whole. Holzer’s installation mimics the fleeting nature of the reader, just like Mirra’s installation highlights the liminal. While Mirra’s work fixes attention to an often-forgotten point in time and space, Holzer creates attention on the temporal by creating a continuous shift that articulates and re-articulates itself.

“The Jew’s Daughter” provides a new way of progressing through text— that is, more progressively. As a single-paragraph prose poem it lacks “lines” as such— instead the units of the poem are 1. the entire page 2. the hypertext-altered “text block”/“paragraph”, a unit that is especially interesting because, until it is altered, the reader is not at any given time aware of which part of the page does/will constitute that unit. Its mouseover-triggered interface is an interesting contrast to clicking, as well— while the reader’s engagement is still required, it is much easier to trigger the text change by accident or without the intentional motion of engagement, clicking, normally assumed to be needed to interact with hyperlinks. It creates a higher mutability and, with the subtlety/narrative difficulty of the text and text changes themselves, removes some of the visceral feeling of agency for the reader used to being the active navigator of a digital landscape.

I was really interested in the way that Young-Hae Chang’s work presented the idea of proceeding through a text as well—I looked at “MY DMZ”, which progresses through a text in units of a few words at a time. The breaking up of words and sentences again destablized traditional line/sentence/word units and created a new sort of “unit” of poetry in the single visible page/screen. This could be in some ways construed as very heavy lineation, as it would appear if it were all written out in order; however, the synchrony to music and the extremely heavy “enjambment” create a unique rhythm to the text. I additionally noticed in this work, though it’s also present in “The Jew’s Daughter”, the way that hypertext lends itself to an impermanent text (and not just because 50% of the links in the syllabus are broken). The way that, with little or no intervention from the viewer, the appearance of new text requires disappearance of the old, creates a very controlled, immediate, almost stream-of-consciousness feeling to the text. I almost felt more open to the text, having to absorb it rapidly with only my memory of the previous broken-up words to guide me in analyzing the actual content.

Language is naturally tied to meaning, which is emotion and thought and perception. At its most basic level, language and the words that construct it are features of advanced communication. I can make a sound with my mouth: ˈfī(-ə)r. That sound is communicated from speaking me to listening you, and you interpret that sound. Meaning appears when the sound I made is translated to image (bright, orange, spreading, smoke) and/or instinct (turn around! duck! run for your life!) and/or word (fire). While a fundamental relationship between language and meaning exists, this relationship only takes on a static dimension when on the page. The communicating body, the sound of language, the context of speech — each a function of time and space — distort and abstract language so that meaning is not standardized but subjective and dynamic.

This question of medium creates many possible routes of exploration about how the language is changed— but for me it is at least in part a question of accessibility. Accessibility is for several reasons a somewhat loaded concept, but that doesn’t detract from its relevance.

In the most fundamental sense, of course, there are aspects to these works, e.g. in live performance, that necessitate, and even trade on, inaccessibility. The premise of a live performance as distinct and meaningful necessarily means that some components of the experience of the work will be rendered permanently inaccessible to anyone not in the audience. Aspects of the text and language, either due to the ways in which they are conveyed and vary from performance to performance or (as in Antin, Beson, and Patton’s work) an interactive quality to the performance, will be obfuscated from anyone not present even if they are recorded or conveyed later in other means.

Meanwhile there is a disability theory aspect to the question of whether these media “get in the way of the language”, as a purely audio-based or purely visual text is for obvious reasons fundamentally inaccessible to persons with disabilities that limit their capacity to engage with such media. For me, I find that a pure-audio-medium piece is almost necessarily “getting in the way of the language”: I have auditory processing issues that, while minimal and rarely an issue interpersonally or with any visual cues, can make it inherently more difficult for me to pay attention to or understand a purely-audio piece. The language becomes literally less accessible. This is not without its productive side: the lack of a visual guide or the ability to go back and consult can put me in a position of very carefully trying to be attentive in a way I might not be with reading, which I find easier and more comprehensible. The interpretive difficulties that an audio piece creates (or, similarly, a visual-flow piece with hard-to-read writing) can create productive mishearings, ambiguities, or tensions between the nature of language as an attempt at communication and the obfuscation created by the medium.

This week’s works push me to think more dynamically about the role of language in a poetic context. Throughout the course of the class, my conception of language has expanded to encompass language as a means for communication, language as tangible object and tool for the formation of texture, language as a translation of sound, language as a historically crafted visual object, language as what is spoken and what is not, etc. In thinking about poetry’s specific relationship to language and the ways in which language can be manipulated to push into increasingly new, dynamic forms of art-making, performance this week asks me to think also about language’s relationship to the body and the ways in which language as an action can relate to meaning.

Our desire to view language as meaningful can still push us to discover new forms of meaning-making and new definitions of meaning. Performance that requires language to move or exist in the confines of time isolates language and the components of that language within the specific sphere of a context dedicated to art-making. It asks us to pay closer attention to things we might not normally notice and it allows us to think about the trajectory of language--what happens at the beginning, middle, and end and why? I think adding another medium to traverse the production of language can either be disruptive (and in some cases, purposefully so) to the way in which we as readers understand communication and/or I think the addition of a new medium can push us to reconsider yet another aspect of language previously unexplored. In terms of improvisation, I think removing oneself from established expectations for what a work of art should do and allowing the body/voice/language to react free of these constraints can allow us to explore the qualities of these tools and open up new possibilities for their use.

One of the fundamental changes between an oral/performed and written work, for me, is the temporality of it. An oral work essentially has a strictly inbuilt order and takes up a set amount of time, however long it takes for the work to be read. Even if it is a live or repeated performance, such that the length of time varies, the time it takes to consume it depends entirely on the performer. The viewer is essentially “locked in” to the duration and order that the artist chooses for the work.

Caroline Bergvall specifically disrupts the clear storytelling of the lyric poet and imbues the work with the drama, the interruption, and the rewriting and speaking over that history often performs. She poses the central question--what and how can we speak in the face of what renders us speechless? How can we signal aspects of that speechlessness in ways that exist beyond the medium of text? Drift seems to be an attempt to answer those questions. This helps me start to identify a set of tools for accurately tackling the questions that poetry poses to us, and think beyond the conventional tools of poetry-making to cross genre, medium, duration, and space in answering questions with a new scope of practices. For example, obfuscation seems to be a technique which, while engaging directly with the subject, attempts to communicate through visual or linguistic gesture rather than navigating the web of semantic language. I would like to, through discussion, create a larger set of non-linguistic tools.

The pieces for this week highlight yet another element of poetry’s interdisciplinarity. We started to discuss this a bit with the process of creating sound through the body in reference to sound poetry last week but Caroline Bergvall’s work particularly stresses the performative element of producing poetry. Her work, Drift, is part historical document, part hearkening towards an unnamed archive, part reconstruction and deconstruction of history. In her naming of an uninvestigated or unnamed event, she is again presencing an absence and allows us as readers to identify how the poetics of her work function alongside this notion of the lack. This tension between the named and unnamed is heightened by not only the visual and linguistic barriers the book poses, but also through the notion of the poetry as performance. For the poem to be performed, a certain lyric is invoked. The position of poet as lyric poet, acting as a representative part of a whole is called upon and the performer/poet must then reckon with those implications.