Freedom’s just another word for…

Paul Chan, “What Art Is And Where It Belongs”

I highly recommend this amazing essay, which appears in issue 10 of e-flux journal and on the artist’s website. What follows is an excerpt:

“What art ends up expressing is the irreconcilable tension that results from making something, while intentionally allowing the materials and things that make up that something to change the making in mind. This dialectical process compels art to a greater and greater degree of specificity, until it becomes something radically singular, something neither wholly of the mind that made it, nor fully the matter from which it was made. It is here that art incompletes itself, and appears.

The irony is that because it cannot express what it truly wants to be, art becomes something greater and more profound. Its full measure reaches beyond its own composition, touching but never embracing the family of things that art ought to belong to, but does not, because it refuses (or is unable) to become a thing-in-itself. Instead, art takes on a ghostly presence that hovers between appearance and reality. This is what makes art more than a thing. By formalizing the ways in which objective conditions and subject demands inform and change each other over the course of its own making, a work of art expresses both process and instant at once, and illuminates their interdependence precisely in their irreconcilability. And it is as a consequence of this inner development that art becomes what it truly is: a tense and dynamic representation of what it takes to determine the course of one’s own realization and shape the material reality from which this self-realization emerges. In other words, whatever the content in whatever the form, art is only ever interested in appearing as one thing: freedom.”

Jack Smith on Museums

As it is, the museums give nothing. They pretend to give you art and then take it away after 2 or 3 weeks. This is a disgusting performance. When you think that art could be free. Everything should be free and it could begin with art.
[He points at a museum outside the frame.]
Make that goddamn place open til midnight! Or put something interesting in it and keep it open until 5 in the morning!

—Jack Smith, from “Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis”

Slo-mode

This blog has been on “slo-mode” for the past couple of months as we prepare to relaunch it early in the new year. The “new and improved” mysweetnothing.com will include artist interviews, original writing, and ongoing posts on issues related to art and language. More as it develops…

The Political in Art

“Even artistic experimentation and creation that is not explicitly political can do important political work, sometimes revealing the limits of our imagination and at other times fueling it.” —Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

Jack Smith on Language

Look what I have to do in order to think of thoughts. I have to forget language. All I can do with no education, nothing, no advice, an insane mother I mean no background, nothing, nothing, and I have to make art, but I know that under these conditions the one thing I had to find out was if I could think of a thought that has never been thought before, then it could be in language that was never read before. If you can think of something, the language will fall into place in the most fantastic way. The language is shit, I mean it’s only there to support a thought… Whatever new thoughts you can think of that the world needs will automatically be clothed in the most radiant language imaginable. — Jack Smith, Semiotext(e), 1978

Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than show what it means.—Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation

Did not know until just recently that this essay is named for her friend Paul Thek

The Problem of Language

“To work on language, to labour in the materiality of that which society regards as a means of contact and understanding, isn’t that at one stroke to declare oneself a stranger (étranger) to language?”*—Julia Kristeva

*translated by Toril Moi in her book Sexual/Textual Politics

Why Do This Blog?

As I was chatting with an artist friend yesterday, I had one of those “Aha!” moments regarding this blog and its contents. (Even as I post, as often and as broadly as possible, I am constantly asking myself why. Why do this?) Back when I was a young art writer, I used the word “ineffable” a lot to describe thinking about/perceiving/being in the presence of certain works of art. (The best works seemed to elicit this response.) My fall-back position was often to lament the limitations of language to talk about art and adopt a rather melancholic attitude overall, regarding the entire enterprise of writing about art with some degree of hopelessness — even as I was consistently (and professionally) engaged with it.

Yes, it was lazy. But I could not think my way out of it for some time.

I read Julia Kristeva and was drawn to her ideas about the Semiotic, as that which exists “pre-language” — pre-Oedipal state, pre-Mirror Stage, pre-awareness of differentiation prompting the need for communication. I still believe that such a state exists (even moreso since I have had the opportunity to spend time with infants), but it is difficult for one within language to conceive of something that exists without language.

Getting back to my conversation with my friend…I was finally able to articulate for myself how I have somehow been able to reconcile my conviction regarding the Semiotic with my (no longer melancholic) interest in language, especially within the realm of art. It is simply this: nowhere is it more evident to me that language is an adaptive, mutating, and dynamic system than in (some) writing about art. Art regularly confronts us with experiences that leave us struggling to find the words to describe them. Or even questioning what relationship language can hope to have to art. We are acutely aware of being at the threshold of language while deeply engaged with its most primary informing impulses: the need and/or desire to communicate. (“I want to tell you about this thing.”)

Some artists recogize the need to create a discourse, a foundation in language, into which their work can be received. That discourse does not necessarily exist until they make it. And so these artists write. And they make art out of language.

So, through this blog (a word that was itself born only recently), I write, and I present what these artists write. And I learn why I do it through talking with friends.

Charles Olson

“It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature… . If he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way… . This is not easy. Nature works from reverence, even in her destructions (species go down with a crash). But breath is man’s special qualification as animal. Sound is a dimension he has extended. Language is one of his proudest acts… . I keep thinking, it comes to this: culture displacing the state.” —Charles Olson

Aram Saroyan’s Minimal Poems

Click here for a terrific review by Richard Hell of Aram Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems, which I am reading right now. One especially wonderful short poem goes like this:

y

ou

Here’s another one I like:

an oyster

can’t

read this