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Yeah, we tend to prefer the sketch to the "finished" work, precisely
because it catches the artist in process. This is a pretty recent
phenomenon, so much so that works deemed incomplete in the past are now
ofetn thought to be finished work. Case in point: among the dozen or so
Mont Saint Victioires of Cezanne's last decade is one stripped down to a
few brush strokes on glue-primed but unpainted brown linen canvas. I saw it
in a retrospective, with a bunch of the others. They were all beyond
wonderful, but this one was on an astral plain.
Related, I think, is our taste for pentimenti in finished paintings, which
were often invisible inthe state that the artist left them, and as such not
part of said artist's final intention. Over time they have asserted
themselves through the upper layers of paint and laid bare some of the
process. Similarly, etchings tend not to hide their process, but even when
they do there are usually earlier state proofs, sometimes of fifteen or
twenty states (Picasso's girl leading the minotaur, for instance, but also
a lot of rmbrandts and 19th century print makers. The different states seem
to us works of art in their own right, and sometimes the artist viewed them
as such. They allow us to walk the process with him/her, to experience the
whims and decisions.
In a wonderful documentary, The Mystery of Picasso, we get to watch him
through the entire process of a painting. I think it's readily available in
rental stores.
All of this I think goes back to the Renaissance and later taste for ruins
and fragments that led people to construct artificial ruins in their
gardens and caused them to value the fragments of Sappho and Holderlin not
for our sense of what they might have been if complete but for what they
are in themselves, a taste that continues. In the visual arts the silliest
example that comes to mind is an art critic's gushing about a fragment--a
mouth--of an Egyptian granite statue in the rehoused Egyptian wing of the
Metropolitan--he called it the most beautiful thing in the collection. The
thing is, within the rigidly standard rules of Egyptian art the mouths of
almost all of the other statues in the Met could have been separated from
their faces and the critic would have been hard put to tell which was
which. But I think that the fragment allowed him to see the form without
the interference of whatever his sense of the culture as a whole.
I'm not suggesting that it's always so silly, tho preferring a part of what
was intended to the realized whole seems like an invitation to vandalism.
But I think what follows from this, or stems from the same source, is our
interest in found objects (I have boxes of to me unnameable industrial
parts), in collage and in bricolage. And also composition by field and
other process-driven art.
I imagine there's been a lot of writing about this. I regularly reinvent
the wheel.
Mark
At 10:01 AM 1/7/2005, you wrote:
>Terrific, Mark, a wandering through the dictionary discarded (ing?).
>
>And, ideally, I would hope to go along with you in that seeking for the
>structure that only appears as you get to it.
>
>I am reminded of something similar in painting: I once made the mistake of
>accepting the earphone (as they were free that time) for a retrospective
>show of Degas at the Tate. Reached this stunning brown study of a woman
>after a bath, only to hear the voice tell me that Degas 'never finished'
>it, as he had not returned to it after sketching it in in the one colour.
>Blah blah. Well, I looked at it, & _saw_ that he had looked at it at that
>point & found that it was finished, it was _there_. Magnificently so.
>
>Doug
>>
>>
>>LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT
>>
>>The truth is I only care about words, not every word (I don’t care for the
>>Ìword word, if truth be told) snow isn’t a word I care for (I don’t care
>>to be cold, and snowI mean to say lyric snowhas become so commonplace)
>>one less word now: and for the letter n there are others. A multitude.
>>Nabob, an exotic wordnot the least chance to use it, a sonorous word,
>>but there’s an overabundance of sonorous words, we can discard it: what’s
>>left? The fugitive image of any word, lacking an image leaves a concept
>>(leaping inside us) it crumbles: in truth I care not at all for the word
>>nothing, abstractions leave me limp with boredom, tepid tepid
>>abstractions: I want to see and touch (above all touch); I want to sniff
>>the spoor of the word buckwheat, my god, how many combinations: the words
>>are mill-stones turning; whatever word a mill-vane broken into syllables;
>>and on the shore the dying, what does it say. Marah, marah: is that what
>>it says? I listen closely, nothing but interference; and I taste, I crush
>>a stem of purslane against my palate, but it clarifies or tells me
>>nothing now: here on the edge, manna, masquerade are the remaining words,
>>backward, or forward to this place, at the edge: what, to what to speak
>>with words: listen to me, the bread that I’ve put on the table parts,
>>down to the center of its husk, brings forth ash (ants brought forth once
>>more): and then, what. Things are obscured by so much thought,
>>classification and description, description doesn’t bring the chameleon
>>back to the chameleon, doesn’t bring back the mother, doesn’t bring
>>anything back to us, let us yield, that the jacaranda of this life is
>>passing, I am homet (the lizard): nothing. A green thing that lost its
>>tail. The masquerade of her whose veil is dropped, see the face’s skull,
>>the body’s bones, skin of golgotha peeled away now: the donnybrook I was
>>once, now I hear myself and slide inwards: outside a lovely day.
>>Euphrates. Much distance. A god of nickle or zinc can’t cope with peo-
>>ple, nitrogen has been enough to keep me alive. Spurious, but alive. With
>>some or another word but not with every word. The word Capulí tells me
>>nothing, it has nothing to do with me; dying, let’s see, I can’t adjust
>>to its destiny: nor, finally, to the dictionarytoo vast. At the final
>>moment any word will do; linen, for instance, at that moment: the ark on
>>one’s shoulder, bread on the table, hand on head, and at the head’s point
>>of transcendence, be it the word wheatfield that I hear, for instance, in
>>the yellow crossing of axles: or be it bread, by omission. And might I
>>see made whole all crumbled things.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>At 06:25 PM 1/5/2005, you wrote:
>>>On 6/1/05 3:15 AM, "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>
>>> > It seems to me that inversions are mirror images of systems of order
>>> (which
>>> > is I think what we mean by "sense") and as such make coherent and
>>> > consistent "sense": what's been changed is the core metaphor, not the
>>> > process by which it's elaborated or the pattern it forms.
>>>
>>> > What I take to be
>>> > nonsense, and I'm very invested in this, is unstructuredness, which,
>>> given
>>> > our human natures and the nature of the languages we've generated, may in
>>> > fact be impossible to achieve, either as writer or reader; attempting to
>>> > approach it nonetheless can serve to extend the boundaries of possibility
>>> > at the same time that it marks them.
>>>
>>>Hi Mark
>>>
>>>Swiftly - Yes, there's a difference between parody and satire or what I
>>>called "black humour" and nonsense. Which is not to say that the boundaries
>>>between them are not murky. The former very often rely on inversion for
>>>their various anarchies. They are not "revolutionary", in that they do not
>>>challenge the existing order but in a strange way pay tribute to it; great
>>>satirists (Swift, or even Terry Pratchett) are very often conservative.
>>>Though there's Brecht: you could argue however that his parodies of homily
>>>texts in the Manuel of Piety might be said to be equally tributes.
>>>
>>>Pure nonsense - some surrealist texts, say - baffles any attempt at "sense".
>>>But complete structurelessness is, as you say, an impossibility, and I'm not
>>>sure it's even a desirable impossibility - I find it very difficult to
>>>imagine a poem that might give me aesthetic pleasure that had absolutely no
>>>structure. I very often like the kind of stuff which loses all connectivity
>>>except syntax, it does interesting things to my brain... And if it is to be
>>>funny, or not simply affectless, there has to be some recognisable trace of
>>>logic there, to permit the recognition of incongruities, to set up enough of
>>>an expectation for it to be imploded. This process is a bit more complex,
>>>anyway, than simple inversions, especially if seemingly random elements
>>>suddenly intrude and derail it.
>>>
>>>Best
>>>
>>>A
>>>
>>>
>>>Alison Croggon
>>>
>>>Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
>>>Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
>>>Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
>>
>
>
>Douglas Barbour
>Department of English
>University of Alberta
>Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 Canada
>(780) 436 3320
>http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
>
>We both know the reason why you called
>So stop wastin’ time tryin’ to soften up my fall
>I know you wanna sweeten up the taste
>But if you don’t mind I’ll just take my sorrow straight
>
> Iris DeMent
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