Jutta Koether, The Staging of Restricted Means in the Landscape Redefines the Terms of Pleasure of Painting… (via anaanaancard)
I like the way Koether performs various types of language/discourse about art to underscore the idea of “reading” painting. Painter-as-poet-as-performer, she tosses the phrase “seeing red” in the air like a die as if to see what side is up when it lands. The painting and the page. Her hands are red.
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
This post is dedicated to my son, Aubrey, who, when he was 8, told a sales clerk he was planning to go out for Hallowe’en as “Violence” — she heard “Violins” and thought he was so cute. He ended up going as the Periodic Table of Undead Elements.
This paper originally appeared in March/April 1999 edition of the The American Poetry Review
“Combining his quest for total objectivity with passionate bibliophilia, Walter Benjamin once dreamed of authoring an essay that would consist entirely of quotations from his sources. I’m not sure what my motivations were, but last year I wrote a poem largely composed of direct quotes from a 1979 guide to artists’ videos. For the texts of other recent poems I’ve lifted from such sources as the table of contents of a 1950s literary journal, a review of an obscure 1960s film, an article on the Swiss pop music scene, and the intermittently legible legend on an old Mexican retablo. In some cases I simply transcribed the passage I wanted, while in others I also had to translate it. What amazes me about these acts of literary larceny is how satisfying I find the process. Even though the words are not mine, I derive from them the same kind of pleasure and pride I get from lines I have written in a more conventional manner. Why, I wonder, should it be creatively satisfying to simply transpose lines someone else has written into a text I intend to sign with my own name?
It is to answer that question that I decided to delve a little into the history of what could be called “appropriative literature.” I wasn’t interested so much in the 20th-century tradition of collage poetry—exemplified by “The Wasteland” and The Cantos—as in a more extreme approach in which, rather than weave obvious quotations into his or her words, the writer becomes a kind of scribe, transferring small or large passages, usually without attribution or other signals that these words were written by someone else.” Read more…
“Learn to Read Art,” whose title derives from a work by Lawrence Weiner, is an exhibition of Printed Matter’s history looks at their books, prints, photographs, multiples, and other editions from 1976 to the present.
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
