hi keston,

i'll try but can't promise i can make anything useful of it without
spedning the next month seriously thinking it all through. Anyway, the
problem of course is that i'm hopist by own jean-claude picard or some
awful pated anglo-fate in the wearing the colours of another and one
selcted at speed to perform just what you asserted yourself  -  being to
try to get away from 'feeling for words' towards social nexus. Thanks for
that particular rejoinder  -  it was the flipside in operation.

OK. The point you make about the possibility that Andrews is putting his
words together with little or no attention whatsoever to the effect of
coercion for the purposes of ego recognition is a response that I've heard
(and made) to his writing before. That doesn't mean that you're off either.
The tiny excerpt btw is from an issue of 'open Letter' a generally strong
magazine out of Canada. I happened to have got a copy in the post the day
before and that's why it was to hand so to speak.  I also ought to say that
the piece is laid out as justified prose and i typed it keeping the right
hand margin as printed, but that does in this e-spac have the effect of
making it appear that it might be more akin to poetry. Whatever.

>From afar it does seem as if there has been a kind of get Bruce campaign in
certain of the New York scenes in the past 5 years (ish?) and one of the
accusations i've heard hurled in his direction results rom his 'women=eggs'
line contributed to the 'LEGEND' collaborations with Ray di Palma, Ron
Silliman, Steve McCaffery and Charles Bernstein back at the tail end of the
1970s, which line shall we say put some people off! Be that as it may (mud
flying pretty rudely here) any look at the scope of his work over the past
30 odd years suggests that a dynamic between constructivism and
decnstruction is its overriding trope.  My sense is that the result can
feel relentless but then for some people the buzz of Manhattan has felt
relentless. I'm not putting anybody, let alone yourself in that frame here
-  please, I know you're comfortable in that milieu. What Andrews does do
is to pile up what he hears and sees and overhears and mishears. These
piles (not those piles) have tendencies in common with 1960s
conceptualists. Let's take Robert Smithson's spat with Michael Fried over
Tony Smith's account of his experiences under the then under construction
New Jersey Turnpike.

Fried accuses Minimal sculpture of theatricality, embodying  the presence
of the artist in an object that theatricalises the artist's absence. The
object is a person in disguise. He considers 'theatre and theatricality are
at war today, not simply with modernist painting (or modernist painting and
sculpture) but with art as such'. (6) Fried interprets Smith's 'experience'
of the turnpike as that of an abandoned 'situation'. He suggests that
Smith's experience was essentially one of 'theatre', thereby disclosing:
'precisely in the absence of the object and in what takes its place, what
might be called the theatricality of objecthood.'

Fried, in asserting that:

'failure to register the enormous difference in quality between, say, the
music of Carter and that of Cage or between the paintings of Louis and
those of Rauschenberg means that the real distinctions  -  between music
and theatre in the first instance and between painting and theatre in the
second - are displaced by the illusion that the barriers between the arts
are in the process of crumbling . . . whereas in fact the individual arts
have never been more explicitly concerned with the conventions that
constitute their respective essences.'

defends the legacies of Modernism as tenaciously as Smithson interrogates
them.

                    Smithson reads Smith's account of '"a dark pavement"
that is '"punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes and colored light"', as
referring to the "language" and "building" of 'linguistic sense-data, not
rational categories', that are the 'raw materials of communication'. For
Smithson, 'without linguistic awareness there is no physical awareness'.
Articulation of experience is a necessary moment of closure in order that
perception can register. Picking 'punctuated' as the key word of Smith's
passage, he argues that:

'the "dark pavement" could be considered a "vast sentence," and the things
perceived along it, "punctuation marks." ". . . tower . . ." = the
exclamation mark (!). " . . .stacks . . ." = the dash (-). ". . . fumes . .
." = the question mark (?). ". . . colored lights . . ." = the colon (:).
Of course, I form, these equations on the basis of sense data and
rational-data. Punctuation refers to interruptions in "printed matter." It
is used to emphasize and clarify the meaning of specific segments of usage.
Sentences like "skylines" are made of separate "things" that constitute a
whole syntax. Tony Smith also refers to his art as "interruptions" in a
"space-grid". (7)

                   Smithson's 'A Heap of Language', saved from the
potential banality of the over-literal by its ironic ambiguities, attempts
to bring 'language' and 'building' together in just such a 'space-grid'.
The container is as important as what is contained by it. The all-pervasive
twentieth century binary of Form and Content, is subjected to accretions of
slippage, that seek to achieve what Smithson called 'a wreck of the former
boundaries'. He risks exactly what he accuses Michael Fried of shying away
from (Harrison 865), nameley ' the rhythm of dedifferentiation that swings
between "oceanic" fragmentation and strong determinants'.

                    However, understood in the context of Smithson's work
as a whole, this piece is a monument every bit as specific to its site and
its materials as the larger-scale works, 'Spiral Jetty'; 'Amarillo Ramp';
'Partially Buried Woodshed'; 'Asphalt Rundown' and others. The site for
writing, a page, and the materials for writing, words arranged in
relational flow mirror one another. The page is as much a part and symbol
of this 'heap', as are those words placed onto it that jointly and
severally form a simulacra of a heap. The work is allegorical.

It is no surpise then to learn that Andrews has for years been working on a
translation of Dante's 'Inferno'. Perhaps one way of trying to get to grips
with Andrews intent is to examine whether he really does have only one main
mode of writing.  Certainly he works from small units outwards. I've got a
little set of cards by him and John Bennett in 1979 called 'Joint Words'.
This is a pack of loose cards on each of which are two words, alongside
each other:

SAME RATION            THAT UNIT               BOOM BOOM               SEND
LINKS

ACTUALLY CLEAVES             WHITE PULP	 and so on. Now ok that's nothing
new. Aram Saroyam and Clark Coolidge were doing this kind of thing more
than a decade previous. Proves little but furthers my point a little i
hope. But it's here that I start to get a little stuck as so much of his
writing, either essay or poem can be typed into this space and sent with
any efficacy. He's a commentator on himself, the worlds in which he finds
himself, the language he uses and the literatures it produces and
reproduces  -  somewhat from this period or old school if you will. Here's
an outake from 'Praxis' (Tuumba, 1978) in which you can see him using this
word by word assemblage in a line by line construction:

'disturbed by
together
reckoning
a morselization of
fordoe
nothing more?
the sound of galloping could be simulated
ourselves
to cool their ardor
rummage
doubt
synonymous with the caution in which it is supposed to reside
speaks of a hill near by
as idle spectators
tattered boners
alluding to candlesticks
as palaver
the adjoining
stiff
divides prayers
and has defenses
is close to this
turrets
but does not use the words
by two consecutive lines
strung, glass
for the outward
omits'

Now you might not line the abruptness of his deliberate artifice but its
deliberation can be left in little doubt. Yet, is it to promote himself as
you charge? Perhaps in so much as he clearly has an agenda and is prepared
to articualte it as a program at times. Try this from 'Text and Context'
(1977):

-To engage in the collective task of creating a literature no longer finds
support on the scaffolding of discourse. In dismantling the scaffolding, we
create a literature - a record of negative retrieval. 'Unreadability'-that
which requires new readers, and teaches new readings.

-  Anything that is not a hypnosis is partial. No text, in that sense, is
'wholesome'-only experiences. Something is lost but something is gained. No
exactly 'dereferentialist'-for can writing be adequately tagged with what
it's not doing? Isn't that the old chest-busting negativism of the
avant-garde? Qualities are to be aufgehoben, not stricken. The sing's
structure is for us by being before us; it does not dissolve into an
outward looking system of radar, or of reading as radar. Reference isn't
banished, except in the extremes of lettrism-and here it even stays on as a
reminder. Remember? Not 'formalist'-for does this display an obsession with
form as apart from the full potential of language? All form is an
expression and an inscription: how personal can you get? how personal can
you be? Form as physical, as material, as unlike the idea of elsewhere.
'Here' is more corporeal, somehow, than 'there'. Look over there = Avert
your eyes. The here and now.
Thus how do we read what is meant precisely to be read? that is given us
for no other purpose, and without distraction (even those distractions
which we often take as the stigmata of 'reading' but are really those of
entertainment, those of good fog). Wordsome.' (pubished in 'The Politics of
The Referent' ed Steve McCaffery)

It's only an small excerpt. And right now i'm gonna have to say that's the
end of part1 and get something else done. Part 2 (sure you can't wait
folks) tomorrow. Keep the pot boiling.

love and love
cris






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