I've only just opened this ancient mail, which slipped past me somehow while I
was perhaps descaling the cat:
>>>"Dave Lovely" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
I did go to Tate Modern yesterday and was well impressed. Out of many notions
that struck me while there the idea that modern, 'cutting
edge', experimental art can be funny - laugh-with funny, not laugh-at - e.g.
Fluxus, and an installation called OTTOshaft by an artist called Gary Hill ...
Hysterical. I've been trying to think of any, for want of a better word,
postmodern poetry that explores similar areas and come up empty so far. Any
ideas?
Can I just say? that _OTTOshaft_ is a work not by Gary Hill (who *is*
represented in the same exhibition) but by Matthew Barney. I make the
correction only because I am fanatical in my celebratory promotion of Barney,
who is not just an installation artist of awesome power and seriousness (which
is not to disagree that _OTTOshaft_ is pretty funny) but also one of the three
or four foremost filmmakers currently working in the United States.
One of the tactics I'd associate with Barney is the idea of fencing off the
universal set so that a number of very individual tropes and fetishes are then
left to reverberate and recombine across a whole sequence of works. (And I
think it's significant that he does choose to work through multi-part
despatches, such as his _Cremaster_ films.) It ought to be possible, then,
given that this is a life-project seemingly about rearranging the furniture in
little rooms, to point up comparisons with poets: but some ideas about form
and image are quite difficult to think about across the two media. I can think
of no one except perhaps Celan and (oddly) Roethke - neither of whom are
exactly a laugh a minute. I suppose it happens more with writers who have a
particularised point of view (I mean I can think of half a dozen gay poets
whose work is similar to Barney's *in that respect*, even to the point where -
say in Rolfe/Corvo - it becomes a bit risible): but there, it's the
self-confining attitude that mimics Barney's self-imposed perimeter, and it
doesn't then admit the same breadth of image for raiding.
I might come back to this, I don't think I've helped at all yet.
:cx
--------------------------------------
Chris Goode
Director, _signal to noise_
24 Newport Road
London E10 6PJ
UK
+44 181 556 4492
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