Bells & Whistles

My hope is to gather more thoughts on this "School of Quietude" issue while I may, running up against this logic of the blog, which is to permit spokes of divergent meaning that could distract from a potentially absent core (I like the centripetal / centrifugal dialectic but it has its dangers). However, Ron Silliman asks, on his blog, whether a certain statement of his on "vispo" -- visual poetry, a sort of grab bag descendent of Concrete poetry and, I guess, visual digital stuff -- is what I, in my statement on Lowell, characterized as RS's "famously knee-jerk, even reactionary, positions."

I'm not going to claim that what I wrote was very nice -- it wasn't, of course, and I suppose I could become infamous for being knee-jerk as well -- so I apologize. But one might almost believe that Silliman is the most read critic in our decidedly uncritical America right now (certainly his advertisements of his hit count, a weird tick that other bloggers have picked up, seem to suggest it) along with the most trusted (I don't ever actually read much in terms of criticism of his very content, and he's certainly very selective of what he links to). Anyway, so I poked the growning behemoth, if only to give a little flavor to what I wrote and, more importantly, to keep it honest. Going out on a limb with something a little off-color like that while trying to make a point leaves one vulnerable to being dismissed outright.

Most recently, Ron writes:

One thing that all the works I looked at here have in common is that they’re static – straight JPEG files, no Flash, not even an animated GIF. This I found very liberating. It puts all of the demands of the work right back onto the image itself, rather than trying to distract us with bells & whistles. It also suggests work that, over time, will be able to survive beyond current computing platforms. Anyone who is old enough to have seen “animated” poems written in Harvard Graphics or Ventura Publisher when they were the presentation software programs of the day will recognize the advantage of that. At the very worst, these works can just be scanned into whatever new platform exists ten, fifty or 150 years from now & be good to go, something you can be certain won’t happen with the present generation of animated, sound-augmented writing.

There are several obvious flaws to this statement.

For starters, this assumption that .jpegs and .gifs will be what creators of new computer platforms will want to preserve from old ones, and not Flash and sound files. Why is this? Both formats are simply rows of digits that are then interpreted into something -- an image, a sound, a bit of interactive software -- that is translated by a machine into something more or less comprehensible by the senses and intellect. That one is for a "two-dimensional" image file and the other a "three-dimensional" or time-based digital object should not distract one from the like basis of each.

The second is a sort of purism about the "image itself" apart from the "bells and whistles." Did one ever write, after the first decades of film, that "I like this photograph because, unlike a movie, we are not distracted by the motion of the objects -- they just sit there to be looked at"? Or after listening to a quartet of Beethoven's: "I would have much preferred one stringed instrument as the other three were distracting." Certainly, any Flash artist would want to create works that integrate the separate elements into a whole -- if it fails, that's one thing, but the tool or the motivation itself cannot be blamed. (I've never used sound in my Flash works because I suck at it.)

The third is to compare the trivial experiments in the very nascent stages of a technology -- the animated poems of Harvard Graphics or Ventura Publisher (I haven't seen them, but no doubt these are silent and without interactivity) with poems in Flash. This would be comparable to criticizing cinema based on the films of Muybridge and Edison, or criticizing live motion digital graphics -- the stuff that brings you Titanic and Matrix Reloaded -- based on an anecdote about Max Headroom and early episodes of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Ironically, people love to look at these early incarnations of art in new media -- the retrospective of video work from the 70s that was up at the Whitney two years ago was fantastic, and emulators of early computer platforms are rampant on the internet -- there's even one for the ZX81 (search my blog to find it).

Lastly, it's quite obvious that Flash cannot be "scanned into a new medium" but neither can film -- can you imagine people walking around holding flip-books of Abel Gance's three-screen, 6-hour or so long Napoleon in front of gas lamps? And can visual poetry be "scanned and good to go"? I suppose the assumption is that one prints out a .jpeg, that the paper on which it's printed will last 150 years, and then it can be scanned to reproduce what the original .jpeg looked like. But inkjet inks don't last that long, and cultural memory is even shorter -- who will be around to say you got it right, and who is creating verbal descriptions for this work now? (Needless to say, one can't scan in ballet.)

One thing I always ask, though, when I see "vispo" is not "is it poetry" but, in the most basic sense, "what is it about"? I rarely see discussions of content, of social relevance, of ethics, or even of art history -- as in the use of appropriation to give a discursive element to what might otherwise be a completely non-linguistic creation -- in relation to "vispo." Is it all just tweaking the sign / image divide? Is it's only purpose to make us ask questions of genre? Why have no visual poets tried to occupy the same space in American culture that, say, Andy Warhol did, or try to be as politically relevant and upsetting as the Situationists (or the clowns who made that "Empire Strikes Back" poster with Rumsfeld cast as Darth Vader)?

I think there is content to Miekel And's work, for example, it seems to have some spiritual / ecological dimension -- some relation of the organic component of graphemes that suggests an interest in biodiversity -- and Basinski often incorporates aspects of Greek mythology in his work that seem to suggest a relationship to the paintings of Cy Twombly when drops in tags about the sacking of Troy, etc. There's probably writing on them somewhere but I've not investigated it.

The list of great predecessors -- Finlay, de Campos -- are rich in social and aesthetic dimensions that I've written about elsewhere (my article in Jacket appears here; a better one by Drew Milne appears here). Certainly, the TRG -- Steve McCaffery and bpNichol -- have created a rich discourse around their work that investigates some of the classic concepts familiar from Language poetry and deconstructionism, but with a "pataphysical dimension and modal variety that make reading this work fulfilling in its own right, beyond its use as "theory."

"Content" might be a clumsy word to use when discussing the thematics of what Finlay is doing -- I often use the term "thematics" instead, since, at best, the disparate universe of his works points to some pre-Socratic philosophical landscape (located "here and now" in Scotland, of course) that simply cannot be revealed in material world. His content is the lava of history that flows under our fragile creations -- the Roman coliseum, the Macintosh computer -- and which only reveals itself in moments of terrible conflagration, social "eruptions" in a sense. It's all very scary. But certainly, one might look at his use of charged political symbols, such as the guillotine and the swastika, as some attempt to insure his work is never discussed in purely formal terms -- is it "poetry" or not? -- but rather to throw the focus on these subterranean aspects of his themes. If only for this reason, I've often focused on Finlay's place in the "vispo" universe -- he doesn't let you relax into your prejudices.

Ironically, Ron has chosen a purely aesthetic -- dare I say "quietist" -- stance, and one based on fairly conservative aesthetic positions (the "pure" image released from any sort of social or historical considerations) to discuss, and subtly shout down, the innovations that are being made in poetry using Flash and other new media technologies. His statement are even angled such as to preclude the possibility of such innovations, without a single piece of historical data to justify this preclusion.

I'll be the first to say that there is a lot of pretty clunky stuff being done in Flash, but my sense is that no "tradition" (or shall we say "lineage") in the arts is never as clean as one would like (but who wants it clean?). One needn't throw away the technology after discovering that the technology itself does not provide enough material for the theme of the work -- quite the contrary, this void or emptiness can be a beginning (not to sound too much like Yoda). I'll be happy when Flash works are not "about Flash" or "about interactivity," not to mention when poetry is not "about language" or "about lineage." I hope this doesn't sound prescriptive -- all options seem, to me, open (except, of course, that of being "quiet").

Posted by Brian Stefans at July 7, 2003 10:26 AM | TrackBack