I think this is interesting too,

> 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.

however, I wonder too. In reading Holderlin's later work, there are fragments of
great beauty, but they are fragments, embedded within meandering texts that
break apart on often pedestrian things, and so to see the beauty of them is to
not 'take the fragment for the whole' but more like taking the fragment _from_
the whole, isolating it out from the dreck of ruin. Of course, with Holderlin,
there are those many complete poems, the great elegy of "Bread and Wine", and
so perhaps they function as a kind of sense 'of what might have been' if
Holderlin's later utterance had not been so broken. When he does in later life
write a more complete poem is often flattened, lackluster, rather conventional.
In both the case of Sappho and Holderlin, there might be at work some sense of
'rescue', of utterances broken, in different ways of course, one whose work was
deliberately destroyed, another who was broken, and so in the reader, some
sense of how those fragments are what's left. I've sometimes had this
impression in reading translations,  the clumsiness of the translation manages
still to evoke the sense of the original as beyond its grasp.

Best,

Rebecca

An interesting take, Mark, & I see its point, but am not wholly
convinced that we are only or simply taking the unfinished fragment for
the whole, although clearly with Sappho we manage something like that.
I would want to argue that her fragments mean more than that mouth, but
I'm not sure how to do it. On the other hand, yes, those various states
of a print do seem to have their own integrity. Maybe it's that (even
if its only our) feeling of integrity that signs something as
'complete'...?

Doug
On 7-Jan-05, at 3:16 PM, Mark Weiss wrote:

> 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

Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton  Alberta  T6G 2E5 Canada
(780) 436 3320