No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.
The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.
T.S. Elliot’s Tradition and the Individual
Stories themselves, are passed on a changed from generation to generation; Engulphed by T.S. Elliot’s Tradition and the Individual and illustrated rather beautifully by Salmon Rushdies’ Haroun and the Sea of Stories. The way we appropriate historical information is impacted by Benjamin’s Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin’s Arcade project relates to this in interesting ways. As does Gilles and Felix Guaittari’s work as does Ezra pounds CANTOS.
Story 1
Ekphrasis - Picture of Dorian Grey or The Girl with the Pearl Earring.
An early recommendation for this PHD process, was exploring notions of Ekphrasis, and historical ideas which pertain to: changing of images into words. Ekphrasis is a rhetorical device in which by defining form and essence, one medium of art attempts to illuminate and relate to another medium. This specifically led to thinking about popular literature, inspired by art or paintings, such as Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracey Chevalier, where the writer tries to imagine the life of a Girl from a Vermeer painting. Setting this character in a historical place, based on where and when the painting was made. However, this writing style is a very obvious approach to recontextualising an image so one wanted explore and look at new and interesting ways to do this, such as in Wilde’s, the Picture of Dorian Grey, where the painting/art is treated quite differently, here, it is inside the story itself. Unlike, Chevalier’s which imagines a storyline or life events inspired by a real person that was painted, in Wilde’s work it’s more about what paintings do to people, and how they Capture/Mirror and perhaps skew reality; akin to the Alice’s Wonderland in Carol’s work, which also plays with ideas about place and time.
2.
Using ‘The Great Battle’…in the first work, the first NARRATAGE story uses characters from this picture and places/images into a written narrative…
This story sequence uses nostalgic memory, written in the first person. Also, It was decided here to utilise ‘A Hero’ Tale myth style (as that also related to the (ethical) ‘…Great Battle’ image itself), and the characters in the story are taken from this Image, interjected into the story and they interacte with a main character, assumed to be the writer. Initially this had a form that was considered to be a writer’s (Artists’) own voice but quite soon into the writing process, the notion of What voice was being used? sparked a considerable amount of discussion. Conversations around ‘Voice’ were unsettling and outside of any comfort zone because as an Artist, one rarely considers this factor. Artist’s usually think what does an artwork mean? and what does it communicate? but rarely, if at all, What voice is being used or what voice should one use? Therefore, this was deliberated until a new understanding of ‘Voice’ in writing was understood, as of course this is a significant factor in the creation of a Narrative. Therefore, this notion of ‘Voice’ was unpacked, and was then understood as not just there, but must be carefully considered.
Because this initial assumption was always to use one’s own voice, the initial ‘Voiceless’ approach, however was derived from remembrances of visits to Venice and used life-events, that were tweaked and further contemplated, but this soon led to a shift in thinking about the possibilities regarding using a multitude of written Voices. So here was a shift, from “whom am I?” to “whom could I be?” and also how should my personal; writing/notes/memories relate to other texts.
RESTRAINT/PROCESS
Oulipo the pioneers of experimental writing, use restraint and process, and this has parallels with many Fluxus ideas, whom use scores which limit/effect how work is made. Artists such as Cage and the Black Mountain group were also concerned with such concepts/games/working restraints.
Famous Oulipo works: Raymond Queneaus’ One Hundred Thousand Billion Sonnets and Perec’s (Void), where the letter E isn’t used. Notions of what art/writing can be, and creating and breaking constraints are central here. There’s also links with Josephs Beuys notion that art can be anything, and his social sculpture (blackboards) are prescient here, as an expression of writing. Also, perhaps Derrida could glue a lot of this together?
Inspired by Oulipo who use restraint as a way of informing writing these RESTRAINST/Instructions were created to inform my writing process.
NOTE: it is clear that Oulipo’s rules are more restrictive, as in the way that Georges Perec wrote an entire novel without the letter ‘e’. My rules are more like Hemmingway’s. Therefore, in response to these it was suggested when writing one should think like an artist, and to treat the words as a material, like painting pixels, to be manipulated. (Akin to the Gigatage)
During the making of the second story the ‘ideas lightbulb’ shone a little brighter above my head, with a realisation that it now made sense, to allow myself the permission to write in a collage manner similar to the GIGATAGE collages, which I am calling a NARRATAGE. This central fact would provide more clear focus for further research. Therefore, the research became more honed, at looking notions of collage within writing.
World events…
Given the state of the world at the time of writing story two due to Cov-19, and also how this coincidental related very succinctly to The Three Idiot Monkey’s work I had recently completed. I chose writing which tangentially related to current or previous plagues and pandemics, world traumas and gleaned this into my second story:
England”
A Burroughs Experiment
Using some of the sentence structures from an Excerpt from: William Burroughs. “Cities of the Red Night.” Thoughts/words were added which can be seen in the ‘The three idiot monkeys image) and also some of the same word patterns were also used. Here is a collaging of responses to my image with Burrough’s text, that has some of the same sensibilities of the image.
Burroughs Text My Text
Once we got off the main streets I saw that the place hadn't changed all that much: the same narrow unpaved streets and squares, with booths selling tacos, fried grasshoppers, and peppermint candy covered with flies; the smell of pulque, urine, benzoin, chile, cooking oil, and sewage; and the faces—bestial, evil, beautiful.
A boy in white cotton shirt and pants, hair straight, skin smoky black, smelling faintly of vanilla and ozone. A boy with bright copper-red skin, innocent and beautiful as some exotic animal, leans against a wall eating an orange dusted with red pepper ...
a maricón slithers by with long arms and buck teeth, eyes glistening ... man with a bestial Pan face reels out of a pulquería ... a hunchback dwarf shoots us a venomous glance.
I was letting my legs guide me. Calle de los Desamparados, Street of Displaced Persons ... a farmacia where an old junky was waiting for his Rx. I got a … He motioned us to chairs and got an envelope from a filing case and handed me a picture. It was an eight-by-ten replica of the postcard in the window. As I touched the picture, I got a whiff of the fever smell.
Three youths were hanging from a pole supported by tripods, arms strapped to their sides by leather belts. There were two overturned sawhorses and a plank on the ground below them. The blond boy […]”
Excerpt From: William S. Burroughs. “Cities of the Red Night”. Apple Books.
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Dreaming of the square again. I saw that this place hadn't changed all that much: the same open areas and civic buildings, the open air YSL butcher sells questionable meat, fried dog’s heads, and hooves covered with flies; the non-smell of virus, no-smoke, non-sweaty tofu, and non-clogged-drains of shit; and the faces around—forgone, lost, ugly. The scientists are testing the flesh vender to see if he knows that his pockets full of bugs are worth more than a Lexus.
Right Hand-Blue. Girls playing Twister in white dank unwashed skirts and dresses, hair tied, skin smoky white, non-smelling faintly of rice cakes and gravy. A boy with dark Mongolian skin, guilty and ugly as some exotic bat, falls down eating a puppy sausage on a stick white dusted with questionable cheese. Chairmen Mao slithers by with short arms and filed down teeth, eyes sparkling...his portrait covered by Vendettas settled. Child
My left ear guides me. Heading towards Chang’An Avenue, The Street of the Beaten Children... Con trick couples with old junk Rolex pouches waiting for the Kentucky fried bearded one, who stares from the flag of the deaf man. Foreheads covered in electrodes. Shaolin monks sponsored by Chrysler put on thier show, no-one has told them it’s the end of days. Mao’s henchmen posing for photographs...money belts and Stylish Raybans at odds with tradition. Three monks on a makeshift scaffold, two
Left-hand-Red. When the door closed, it shut out all non-noise from the square. In a crowded blackened room with no furniture lit by a barred window that opened onto the Tian’anmen Gate. The Co-co channel sales lady motions us towards a man who is shaving another all wrong, he gets a shopping bag from a safe Right-Leg-Green. Outside again. The nationalistic dancers dodge bullets by the central monument and a naked-women does Tai-chi, pretending that her blind woman’s stick is still potent. Archaic music wafts silent as the dead. The unconscious man in Gucci suit has the same status as the comatose cleaner in muddy street clothes. His e-bike batteries are long dead. White suited men spray anti-bacterial chemicals… Left-Leg-Yellow. Six strangers are mingling on a mat with four different coloured circles, one has her arms taped to her ears |