Avantgardenet: Call for Papers – Session on Language Materialism

Avantgardenet: Call for Papers – Session on Language Materialism
I wish I could attend this!!

bp nichol online archive

bp nichol online archive
I’m so excited that York University has just launched the online archive of the late poet bp nichol.

Language and materiality

I have always been interested in the materiality of language and the possibility for addressing that in different forms of writing—poetry (the obvious one) but also various kinds of critical and theoretical writing. It consistently surprises me that some who make a living writing care very little for the look and feel and sound of the words they use (not to mention the socio-cultural framework through which they signifiy), as if the words are just an expedient and convenient mode of transport for their ideas to lodge themselves in the minds of readers. While such writers may insist on looking at other things as material constructs—like art, for example—they may have a blind spot when it comes to their own writing.

I haven’t come to any crashing insights regarding this issue but I do enjoy thinking about what new forms of writing a full consideration of its materiality might yield, especially in light of digital media. And I enjoy thinking about the words I’m using to write right now.

Paola Pivi, installation view

Italian artist Paola Pivi, who won the top prize at the Venice Biennale contemporary art show in 1999, has opened her first major solo exhibition in her hometown of Milan, Italy. The exhibit, shown in this picture taken on Friday, Nov. 17, 2006, which is running through Dec. 10 at the Old Warehouse of Porta Genova Station, comprises three works: her Biennale-winning piece “Untitled,” an airplane flipped upside down meant to evoke an animal lying on its back, and two works conceived specially for the Milan show: a living sculpture of 46 white animals and 2,000 coupled objects, ranging from test-tubes to tractors. Pivi, who lives in Anchorage, Alaska, was born in 1971 and is considered one of the leading figures in Italian contemporary art. (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)

courtesy daylife

This is one of those instances where I don’t necessarily find myself in agreement with the artist’s own explanation of the work (for instance, I don’t think seeing an airplane upside down would make me think of an animal lying on its back). But Paola Pivi’s gestures are compelling enough on their own that they don’t need verbal justification, just as a poem does not need language around it in order to exist. It simply needs to act on the reader.

Something else I appreciate is that, using a literary analogy once again, the works do not clearly belong on the side of metaphor (objects representing something else) or metonymy (objects being what they are). They seem to agitate uncomfortably between those two realms.

Glenn Gould, The Idea of the North

Laurens van der Post

Each of us is aware of far more than we can ever express. Yet those who can persuade themselves to be guided thus in their pursuit of the totality of truth, find themselves rewarded not so much by a surrender of any significant part of the essential mystery, as by its transformation into something accessible as living wonder

—Laurens van der Post

via www.designboom.com

via www.designboom.com

Vito Acconci, Read This Word (1969)

READ THIS WORD THEN READ THIS WORD READ THIS WORD NEXT READ THIS WORD
NOW SEE ONE WORD SEE ONE WORD NEXT SEE ONE WORD NOW AND THEN SEE ONE
WORD AGAIN LOOK AT THREE WORDS HERE LOOK AT THREE WORDS NOW LOOK AT
THREE WORDS NOW TOO TAKE IN FIVE WORDS AGAIN TAKE IN FIVE WORDS SO TAKE
IN FIVE WORDS DO IT NOW SEE THESE WORDS AT A GLANCE SEE THESE WORDS AT
THIS GLANCE AT THIS GLANCE HOLD THIS LINE IN VIEW HOLD THIS LINE IN
ANOTHER VIEW AND IN A THIRD VIEW SPOT SEVEN LINES AT ONCE THEN TWICE
THEN THRICE THEN A FOURTH TIME A FIFTH A SIXTH A SEVENTH AN EIGHTH

courtesy Parkett 78 2006

*type is intended to read in eight lines, fully justified.

Mark Strand

Our Masterpiece Is the Private Life
I

Is there something down by the water keeping itself from us,
Some shy event, some secret of the light that falls upon the deep,
Some source of sorrow that does not wish to be discovered yet?

Why should we care? Doesn’t desire cast its
… rainbows over the coarse porcelain
Of the world’s skin and with its measures fill the
… air? Why look for more?

II

And now, while the advocates of awfulness and sorrow
Push their dripping barge up and down the beach, let’s eat
Our brill, and sip this beautiful white Beaune.

True, the light is artificial, and we are not well-dressed.
So what. We like it here. We like the bullocks in the field next door,
We like the sound of wind passing over grass. The way you speak,

In that low voice, our late night disclosures … why live
For anything else? Our masterpiece is the private life.

III

Standing on the quay between the Roving Swan and the Star Immaculate,
Breathing the night air as the moment of pleasure taken
In pleasure vanishing seems to grow, its self-soiling

Beauty, which can only be what it was, sustaining itself
A little longer in its going, I think of our own smooth passage
Through the graded partitions, the crises that bleed

Into the ordinary, leaving us a little more tired each time,
A little more distant from the experiences, which, in the old days,
Held us captive for hours. The drive along the winding road

Back to the house, the sea pounding against the cliffs,
The glass of whiskey on the table, the open book, the questions,
All the day’s rewards waiting at the doors of sleep …
- Mark Strand Blizzard of One

courtesy whiskey river

Marina Abramovic, Art Must Be Beautiful

Marina_Abramovic – art must be beautiful (via fungiblast)