Terrific postings: thanks for the tips and the
thoughts, everybody. I especially enjoyed Fiona's
detailed posting eg
"One of the basic ways in which the work was able
to be successful was when it worked towards, not an
either-or of the disciplines, nor a juxtaposition, but in
fact a third issue."
I, for one, would really like to hear more in detail
of the projects you're describing, not least the ones
with scientists. Would it be not "third issue" enough
to ask if they were in any sense lab experiments,
hypotheses, fact-finding etc, or how did they reflect
on these hopes?
Fiona, are you citing Ric's pun - " it seems to me that much
of the textual incorporation which occurs in & around
britpack is disappointing - bit of a missed opportunity
- using text just as texture" - as mine, though? What I said
was
"A lot of recent art I've seen uses words,
in over the top or deadpan ways, not often very
interestingly to me - or showing any sign of
reading anyone, MacLow, Cage, anyone."
I *love* text as texture, and texture as the text of
some art, pour it on! It was art that is the
objectification of statement or expression that I
was looking at, art that uses statement as Warhol
uses soup cans, to focus "reverent" attention on it
but "ironically". The feeling I often get off this
is contempt for language, the supremacy of texture,
or just the supremacy of the art-school lifestyle
over the dullards. That, I admit, is a value judgement.
Some have written here of "response" work,
art responding to poems and v.v., but I also asked
(hey I'm not the headmaster here, but I'd love to know)
"Could there be (do people know of) "settings" by
artists of interesting poets; *interesting* words in art
works?
Responses are problematic to me in the way they seem to
be a little to Fiona: too in their field. Settings, in
music, and here I think of some of Pound's favourites,
Waller and so on, as well as Stravinsky, bring out
something in the text, as if shaping the white space
"under" the words. Clearly, someone like Susan Howe
does this with word-experiments in painting. I just
long to see the kind of glamourous *intensifying*
gloss (my kind of pun!) on a poet's sentence, rather
than an adman's sentence or a vox pop sentence or
whatever - something where the surface under the
poem ripples the poem, as a melody and soundworld
ripples it in a setting... To repeat an earlier
question: have poets attempted this?
"Could poets here collaborate with artists,
or do it themselves, to produce "gallery-standard"
visual work with words (or are there phobias against
that as against commerce, hanging over from the
70s?)?"
Ira
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|