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| Writing in
the Expanded Field Danny Huppatz |
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| Writing on
art The words "art" and "writing" are not proper nouns for discrete bodies of objects/works but discursive words (adjectives) that describe and limit. In this essay I would like to consider the concept of "writing" in the expanded sense, as it extends over its limit into visual art. In this case, "writing" is a verb, an activity within the artworld. What I would like to get away from is the idea of writing on art and discuss writing within art. Following a short exposition of this position, I have included three examples of works by Nicole Tomlinson, Andrew McQualter and Ania Walwicz, all of whom are engaged in writing in the traditional sense as well as in this expanded sense. The established division between art and writing that we live with today can be traced back to the European Renaissance institutionalisation of typography and geometry which solidified the separate identities of "art" and "writing". However, this difference was and is essentially arbitrary. Along with this institutionalisation came the institutionalisation of a particular mode of criticism (both of art and of literature) which sought to put itself above and/or beyond the creative work. The fundamental, inherited problem of criticism was that the creative work, whether it be writing or visual art, is trying to hide something: that the truth is behind the surface which always stands in for something else. This hermeneutic approach to reading/viewing argues that creative work is be "legitimised" by critical readings. Within the artworld, writing has for the most part functioned in the critical role of writing on or about art. The trouble with much writing on art is that it is just that, the imposition of a metalanguage. Visual analysis that starts from a priori categories, conditions or traditions merely judges legitimate codes and a priori criteria. Such judgements necessarily impose limits, especially the absolute and hierarchical limit between theory (writing) and its object (visual art). Since the 1960's, Conceptual art began shifting the limits between writing and visual art and boundaries became blurred. While to some, Conceptual art heralded the power and authority of written language (theory or philosophy) over visual language, to others, the resulting multi-media explosion in the arts opened up a multitude of new possibilities with visual artists writing their own theoretical works. Many artists have followed in the footsteps of Duchamp in producing multi-media works such as the Large Glass, with its accompanying notes Green Box (1917). Other early avant-garde movements such as the Futurists and Constructivists initiated a similar concept of art as an additive game: the art object plus plans, instructions, diagrams, theories and manifestoes. In all of these strategies, writing was made plastic (in the same way Duchamp "sculpted" sound with Musical Erratum from the Green Box) and nothing was hidden. On the writing side too, there has been a long tradition of concrete and visual poetry which acknowledges the power of the visual in written language (the ideographic element in writing - hieroglyphics, Chinese characters). ON Perhaps we could consider writing in an artistic sense as akin to drawing: an inscription on a surface, the delineation of a field of action, the actualising of a concept, opening and expanding within a given language (be that written or iconographic) that flows onto and through the whiteness of a blank page or white cube. For both, language does not function as signification that stands in for something else, but is an excess force that eludes common reason and utility. Every inscription can be read as a performance, as a machinery of expression. As for reading and looking, both writing and drawing are about intensifying forces rather than freezing them. Within an expanded concept of writing, text maintains its power of variation and becomes singular rather than interchangeable, carrying with it its own theory, a theory in practice. Rather than speak of a sovereign artist or writer, a creative author of a work, I am proposing an expanded concept of writing as a system of relations (including social, political, philosophical). This involves a collapse of the distinctions between critical theory and creative practice. Such a writing would be close to the "Social Sculpture" idea of Joseph Beuys, that is, how we mould concepts into materials. This also involves reaching areas unattainable by speech or abstract thinking, thus writing becomes not communication of information but stimulation of thought. The following three illustrations by Melbourne writer/artists use different processes, different mediums, even the concepts are different. But how each piece functions is that theoretical concepts (usually written) are actualised as visual art. Each of these writer/artists are playing the same game, bending the rules of the artworld by expanding writing into the visual realm, breaking the limits and bringing with it some of the theory of philosophy and the poetics of literature. On writing art Nicole Tomlinson Nicole Tomlinson's . . .and . . ., an installation at 1st Floor Gallery, consisted of a series of acetate sheets hung by transparent wires each with the word "and" lasercopied onto it. Each "and" was slightly different as each had been taken from a different literary or theoretical text and enlarged via a lasercopier. What Tomlinson is proposing is a new organising and structuring of words as material objects in space while drawing a minute difference from the repetition of words. One of them was from Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of Joyce's Ulysses: ". . . and the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and yellow and blue houses and the rose gardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain . . . "1 Here, Joyce is engaging in a similar additive project where language is escaping its bounds as the "and" stimulates new thoughts. The "and" is a dynamic force that sets things in motion, that forces itself between static nouns and adjectives to keep them moving. Deleuze and Guattari describe their logic of the "and" in the following terms: "...AND is less a conjunction than the atypical expression of all of the possible conjunctions it places in continuous variation."2 For them, "And" is an atypical expression that produces the placing-in-variation of "correct" static forms. The logic of the "and" differs from that of the "a" or "the", it is a dynamic, a mode of extension and production rather than a static naming device. The word itself is both the connection that holds difference together and the connection that generates difference. Tomlinson's ". . . and . . ." is an expansion of a theoretical idea into a generative material form. Rather than the division between written and visual, Tomlinson's frozen poem of "and"s marks another separation of language: the language of science (each term equivalent, interchangeable) and the language of poetry (each term singular, irreplaceable). The floating in-between term underlines the spaces of poetry in its untranslatable nature, an alternative presentation of a theoretical poetic that indicates at once the physical (spatial) nature of written language and the textual component of visual art. The possibilities of heterogeneous connections in Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic sense: a " rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb "to be," but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, "and . . . and . . . and . . ."3 Andrew McQualter Andrew McQualter's"Word Piece is a painting consisting of the words "Gertrude Stein Wittgenstein" spaced in such a way that the two Steins make a rhyme, split into a rhythm of three syllables. Word Piece is a short poem/theory that not only suggests a connection between the two Steins but adds to their theoretical projects. The reasons for bringing together these two figures are many: they were contemporaries, both spent most of their lives in exile from their native country and their native language, both were gay, both were interested in the structure of language and suspect of metalanguages thus both created their theory in practice rather than as a separate (and posterior) act and finally both took advantage of the generative aspect of language to create new spaces. Gertrude Stein's writing is indeterminate, operates without a prior plan, and literally embodies rhythms and repetition. Her writing highlights the failure of "rational" communicative modes and the unreliability of language shown through repetition. In works such as The Making of Americans (published 1925), digression rather than linear narrative foregrounds theoretical processes. Stein's writing embodies a poetic understanding (intimacy, equality) rather than scientific knowledge (separating, mastery). She creates a diagram, or scheme of relations, arrangements that embody difference; a poetics rather than a scientific mastery of the wor(l)d. In a work such as Tender Buttons (published 1914), things are released from classification, the "and" connects, "the difference is spreading". In Steinian spirit, McQualter's Word Piece playfully moves between visual and written languages. Ludwig Wittgenstein on the other hand wrote philosophical epigrams that read almost as poetry, each one building on previous ones creating a philosophy without closure. Like Stein, Wittgenstein's work displays a distrust of grammar (theory over practice): "The meaning of a word is its use in language"4, and language is a rule-bound game that can be adapted in various ways and is dependent on its context. Wittgenstein provided no answers to his aphorisms, just an opening of new spaces. In both of his major works, the Tractus Logicus Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations, philosophy is performed as a process rather than a science, a theoretical process rather than an explanatory model, an unfolding of thought. Like both of the Steins, McQualter pushes theory into practice, offering a connection and extending both writing and theory into the visual space of painting. Ania Walwicz A series of small canvases each painted with a simple iconic images made up Ania Walwicz's installation rebus, exhibited as part of The Palimpsest at RMIT Gallery. Many of the images are repeated and scattered across the wall in what appears to be no particular order. Walwicz wrote of this work in the catalogue as "a picture puzzle. you have to sort this out. a message is told to you via another medium. the telling of the paint. the joining of images now that relate and talk to one another. the talk and the conversation now. the disjointed narrative. the fragmented narrative is formed."5 Rebus was a series of word-images such as a house, a mountain, a girl, a toy, that were scattered, formed and reformed as narratives in the mind of the viewer. Another exponent of writing in the expanded field was Freud who critiqued the notion of writing as a transcription of speech. In his analysis of dreams, Freud wrote, "My procedure is not so convenient as the popular decoding method which translates any given piece of a dream's content by a fixed key. I, on the contrary, am prepared to find that the same piece of content may conceal a different meaning when it occurs in various people or in various contexts."6 Bearing a similarity to both of the Steins discussed above, Freud condemned scientific theories with a preoccupation with content, in favour of an investigation of location, processes, relations and differences. In The Interpretation of Dreams, he explained temporal relations in dreams by examples of pictograms, rebuses and hieroglyphics, circumventing the usual authoritative "voice". By resisting a clear linear narrative, Walwicz's installation requires such a Freudian analysis. Her writing also repeats and makes odd connections, defying rational communication: "... now what do you see now what do you see i make a picture in your head now i paint a picture word picture word picture rebus hieroglyphic statement i trace it now a dream out of a dream a picture puzzle ..."7 As in the two Steins, Walwicz's image-words play with the additive and generative nature of language. She writes of this process in her book red roses: "... the notion of intertextuality i am making a collage montage a composite image a word texture text she has pink cheeks ..."8 Evoking the logic of the "and", Walwicz expands theory on a number of levels into the visual realm. Writing in the expanded field The overflow of writing into visual art has opened into the physical space of the gallery. In different ways, the examples cited above introduce the poetic and the theoretical concepts of writing in practice. The exploration of literary, philosophical and psychoanalytical ideas from a textual point of view are being moulded into materials. Working against the current institutionalisation of writing or art, following the logic of the "and", these writer/artists are opening a new space of writing and art. Endnotes
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Nicole Tomlinson,
Nicole Tomlinson,
Nicole Tomlinson, |
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Andrew McQualter,
Ania Walwicz, rebus, 1996 |
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