Week 14, Prospective Essay Questions

1.    Detail the socio historical context in which both Dada and Surrealism were birthed.  Namely, if they were reactionary movements or a means of alternative thinking or transgression, what were some of the ways in which they challenged ideologies?  What did they challenge and why did they challenge it?  Were there particular mediums that were more transgressive than others?  Using the earlier texts from the semester, what kinds of strategies or artistic choices are resonate or indicative of these challenges?  Also, consider what ideologies Dada and Surrealism perpetuated. 

     *It is important to understand how literary movements and artists are framed, influenced, motivated, and  constructed by the inter-workings of space and time events and how artists/writers/movements likewise [re]construct.   

2.    In what ways are Oulipo forms indicative of Dada and Surrealism?  In terms of historical lineage, inheritances, and influence, compare Calvino If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller and Perec’s A Void with Roussel’s Locus Solus.  What are some reoccurring or similar themes?  What do these similarities suggest?  Is there a connection between Oulipian constraint and the Surrealist project of the unconscious?   What are those connections, if any, and what do they say or not say about the movement from  modernism to postmodernism? 

     *I feel we did not have ample enough time to delve into these texts within a larger class discussion, so it would be helpful to further explore Dada, Surrealism, and Oulipo through the texts.  Further, making connections between and among texts helps to illustrate cultural consciousness and any theoretical implications.  

3.    Using the idea of scale from the film “Powers of Ten,” explore the role of metafiction in the texts we have read this semester.  What are some of the metanarratives that Dada, Surrealism, Oulipo, and Fluxus addresss?  Further, explore how Craig Saper’s ideas of receivable texts, intimate bureaucracy, fan culture, transactional esthetics, and sociopoetic forms from Networked Art can be understood in relation to the works of John Cage and Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Rex.     

     *Clearly there is a theme here of making connections.  As a way of circling back to move forward (did you see what I did there), a comparison across time and in between forms/ideas might generate some larger implications here about these movements.  And, working through some of the complicated material from Networked Art might need additional exploration.    

Week 13, Ephemera and Performance: A Recipe for Joie de vivre

My intent is to not promote the mercantile aspect through this link;
rather it is the spirit of the marketing message that is apropos.
http://www.joiedevivre.net/

Within the intimate confines of reading Craig Saper’s Networked Art (my reading as an act of intimacy), I was struck most by the idea of intimate bureaucracies, specifically how these “works are about process, contingencies, and group interactions, not lasting truth or eternal beauty” (150) .  Interactions between and among people as the canvas (sociopoetic artworks) and as a means of expression is such a lovely way of seeing community as art and as a means of amplifying not only the infinite possibilities of “exchange” (namely a system of communication), but also a way to understand and value interpersonal and sociopersonal relationships (systems of people).  In this system of collectivity, one where “everyone an artist,” where barter and trade become the means of exchange (a return to a hybrid form of feudalism/tribalism—without the elite—on the coat-tails of capitalist bureaucracy??), there is a sense of hopeful energy around reciprocity. 

Meditation 2 by Seo, Young-Deok
http://youngdeok.com/

It seems tangential, but mail-art networks first reminded me of a potential foil: the dreaded chain letter (of the hoaxes and urban myth variety).  It was not so much because of the content, but because of the system used to circulate such things. The chain part is what interested me, namely how it is really a circuit system full of nodes.  What happens at each of those nodes is the exchange, the moment the sender/receiver relationship prompts an action, meanwhile there is still a continuous energy and flow within the system.  Multiple exchanges can take place and each is different. 

Now I wondered about a type of chain letter and how it seems to capture the spirit of intimate bureaucracy.  Many years ago I received a snail mail chain letter (time seems important here), but it was a prompt and request to send off favorite recipes to a number of people (6 I think) in order to receive a multiple amount in return.  The exponential potential was silly, really.  While the intent was not a means of challenging art processes, it still was in the spirit of engendering community and sharing.  Eating as an intimate encounter was facilitated through a different space: the mail system.  While there was a

http://eatocracy.cnn.com/category/make/family-recipe-index/

pragmatic intent as well, the potential mystery of what recipes you would receive and from where and whom was all in the fun as well.  Normally I was annoyed at such gimmicks, but for whatever reason I actually participated and for a few weeks I received dozens of recipes, some from people I knew but the majority from perfect strangers—some transnational even (a six degrees of separation rule applied, I am sure).  What I enjoyed was not so much the recipes, but instead the letters some people wrote that prefaced why the recipe was a favorite, its familial history and /or roots, as well as funny anecdotes and jokes.  The intimacy of the meal was implied through the recipe and in the dialogue and interaction between the senders and receivers.  It was an imagined, shared meal through the mail system.  

Works Cited

Saper, Craig J.  Networked Art. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.  Print. 

Week 12, Relational Aesthetics: Folds in the Paper

   

     A funny thing happened today.  My daughter came home from school barely able to control her excitement, as she wanted to show me “something special and cool.”  She unzipped her backpack and pulled out a rudimentary origami fortune-teller, made by the hands of a seven-year old, it’s already worn down folds revealing many attempts at folding and hinting of the frustration to get it right.  I immediately recognized what the object was.  The fortune-teller was a means of social status and bragging rights on the playground during my grade school experience since the “reveal flaps” usually entailed who you were going to marry, how many kids you were going to have, what kind of house you were going to live in, and even the locale of that house—be it a mansion or a shack in Paris.  She shared her version of a fortune-teller, prompting me with “pick a number, Mommy,” and after my response she would methodically count out the moves, opening and closing the folded-paper orifice.  “Okay, now pick another one” she said giddily.  At the final turn, my reveal was “you are my B.F.F.”  I admit, the flashback to my youth made me smile, as did the idea that the tradition had persevered into Generation Z (of course her version was much less class and heteronormative bound than what I remembered of my 1980’s framed edition). 

"How the time passes" photo by Faustine Cornette de Saint Cyr

http://whatart33.blogspot.com/2013/01/faustine-god-and-words-visual-oulipo.html

     What the exchange also 

reminded me was just how constrained this fortune-telling device was.  Her version had eight possible outer choices, the outer ring determined the number of moves to the inner ring, and the choice made at that point determined the number of moves to the final reveal.  To her it seemed there were limitless possibilities—an afternoon of fun—and while I did not bother to estimate the total number of combinations, the fact that there were copious combinations to be made struck me as resonant of Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes. Now while the origami fortune-teller would not amount to a hundred thousand billion reveals—although in seven-year old terms it just might—it does hold the promise of infinite outcomes based on a set amount of coordinates.  Such possibility in which “those few pages [folds] already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust” are wholly reminiscent of Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler (254).   What strikes me as also hauntingly Oulipian about the origami fortune-teller is both its playful quality and its attention to alternatives.  Much like for Calvino’s traveler, there are stories that never quite finish (for you can always change the script) and traps of doubling await every turn.  In the origami fortune-teller, a choice of eight on one round leads to a different number, but to choose eight again on the second round leads to a completely different outcome so the eights are always already not the same.  The desire to see what will happen on the next go drives the whole idea of a fortune in the fold.  Such a concept reflects Queneau’s allusion to Heraclitus: “One cannot wash one’s feet twice in the same water” (Arnaud xi).  But, you can still play in the water and, qua Noël Arnaud, you can quench that thirst for the what-ifs, the many iterations of potentielle fortunes. 

"Abstract Comics" by Ibn al Rabin

Works Cited

Arnaud, Noël. “Foreward: Prolegomena to a Fourth Oulipo Manifesto—or Not.”

Calvino, Italo.  If on a a winter's night a traveler.  New York: Harcourt, Inc, 1981.  Print. 

Week 11, Restrictions and Obstructions, Part II: The game is afoot!

The Diana of Versailles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_of_Versailles

     The obvious intersection of Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Perec’s A Void, and von Trier’s The Five Obstructions is the rule-bound structural constraint, but what interested me most is the pursuit to fulfill that constraint, a monomaniacal insistence that wreaks of desire, and the sensory connection to that desire.  In all three, the chase becomes the centralizing feature and driving mechanism (the Reader and Ludmilla in search of the “correct” text; a comical troupe of characters’ drive to solve linked, mysterious deaths; and von Trier’s challenge to Leth to remake A Perfect Human).  The chase is a fetishized experience and, the aim—the constraint—becomes a mythologized fixation.  Dare I say it is reminiscent of The Holy Grail quest?  This also reminds me of the chase of the white stag, pursued by Artemis, the Greek goddess huntress who enjoys the spectacle of the chase, namely the keladeinê, or the resounding noise that goes along with the chase.  

Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner

     I can appreciate Peter Turchi’s analysis in his chapter “A Rigorous Geometry” here because he references the hermeneutics of the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote: “For all their looniness, Road Runner cartoons are not so far removed from the experimental formalism of the Oulipo” (181).  While I really loved this comparison and means of understanding the self-imposed dictates of the action and the many possible results of set “rules,” I am far more inclined to see the beauty in the desire, that “persistence in pursuit” (Turchi 180) that operates within the system.  What stimulates the desire is the noise then, the sensory appeals or psychological triggers that impel the movement towards the constraint.  After all, what drives Wile E. Coyote to perpetually pursue the Road Runner?  There is something gained in that pursuit, something that hearkens to foreplay.   

     In Calvino’s anti-chapter 6, “In a network of lines that enlace”, the sound of the telephone haunts the professor narrator, and the opening line captures the noise and the power of the sensory that is attached to such noise:

The first sensation this book should convey is what I feel when I hear the telephone ring; I say “should” because I doubt that written words can given even a partial idea of it: it is not enough to declare that my reaction is one of refusal, of flight from this aggressive and threatening summons, as it is also a feeling of urgency, intolerableness, coercion that impels me to obey the injunction of that sound, rushing to answer even though I am certain that nothing will come of it save suffering and discomfort.   (Calvino 132)

This section ties together the sound, the keladeinê, with the sensation that comes of the relationship.  The visual image of the sound of the telephone chasing (hunting) the narrator captures the meta action of the overall quest and the driving force, namely the heightened sensitivity that one feels in a state of compulsion.  Further, language cannot possibly capture that feeling.    

Moby Dick
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moby_Dick_final_chase.jpg

     In Perec’s tale absent of e, there are multiple references and hints to Moby Dick, the white whale (stag?), whose essence intensifies the overwhelming drive and longing: “a plunging void drawing you forward, drawing you downward, drawing you dizzily down into a miasma of hallucination, into a Styx as dark as tar, a ghastly livid whirlpool, a Malström !  Moby Dick!” (70). The Ahab complex is one that entails a delirium-like sensory overload, one that could be described as pleasure intermingled with pain: it is jouissance.  The characters in Perec’s A Void end up at the precipice right before solving their respective mysteries, and then they die, which translates as a noise of frustration and amplifies the desire to return to the precipice.  The chase begins yet again (even for the reader as well).  The same could be said of the film The Five Obstructions.  Lars von Trier’s obstacles for Jørgen Leth equate to a similar desire to satisfy those obstacles, but the satisfaction is derived from the game—the hunt.    

Works Cited

"Artemis." Theo Project, 2011. Web. 6 April 2013.  http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/Artemis.html

Calvino, Italo.  If on a a winter's night a traveler.  New York: Harcourt, Inc, 1981.  Print. 

Perec, Georges.  A Void.  Jaffrey, New Hampshire: David R. Godine, 2012.  Print. 

Turchi, Peter.  “A Rigorous Geometry." Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer.

Week 10, Restrictions and Obstructions: Research Project Aim

My discussion from Week 7's blog "Madness and the Margins the Erotic: Sex and Death" was framed as a potential entrance point into Unica Zürn's Dark Spring for additional research/analysis.  Zürn's text struck me as the most intriguing among the works we have read in regard to its depiction of gender and identity, and when I wrote that blog, it felt to be a natural move and fit into an aspect of my ongoing project: to explore the constructions of voices, bodies, and identities that are often relegated to the margins of literature, particularly those marked as aged or culturally unmarketable, and the dysmorphic effect of the societal gaze.  What I find remarkable in Zürn's work is how certain characters are framed as Ideal-I's based on a filmic representations of gendered bodies.  For this project, I aim to to pursue the mise-en-scène-like stagings of bodies--namely the spectacle of the body--and how they inform Zürn's protagonist while simultaneously expose how cultural signifiers serve as signposts for gender.    

My Working Bibliography so far is as follows:

Gerstenberger, Katharina.  “Writing Herself into the Center: Centrality and Marginality in the

            Autobiographical Writing of Nahida Lazarus, Adelheid Popp, and Unica Zürn.”  Diss. 

            Cornell University, 1993.  Print. 

Littler, Margaret.  “Madness, Misogyny and the Feminine in Aesthetic Modernism: Unica Zürn

            and Claire Goll.”  Yvan Goll—Claire Goll: Texts and Contexts.  Eds. Eric Robertson and

            Robert Vilain.  Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997.  Print.  153-173.    

Lusty, Natalya.  “Introduction: Disturbing Subjects: Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis.”

            Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis.  Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Co.,

            2007.  Print.  1-18. 

Plumer, Esra.  “The Luminary Forest: Robert Desnos and Unica Zürn’s Tales of

            (Dis)Enchantment and Transformation.”  Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment.  Eds.

            Catriona McAra and David Calvin.  Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom: Cambridge

            Scholars Publishing, 2011.  Print.  115-129.

Rupprecht, Caroline. “The Violence of Merging: Unica Zürn’s Writing (on) the Body.”  Subject

            to Delusions: Narcissism, Modernism, Gender.  Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern

            University Press, 2006.  Print.  132-164.    

Suleiman, Susan Rubin.  “A Double-Margin: Reflections on Women Writers and the Avant-

            Garde in France.”  Yale French Studies, 75; The Politics of Tradition: Placing Women in

            French Literature (1988): 148-172.  JSTOR.  Web.  12 March 2013.    

Week 8, Aleatory, Algorithm, Constraint: Come Out and Play

Chrysopoea of Cleopatra
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros

     Aleatoric inwardness vs. programmed play seems to be key in positioning the space of difference between the Oulipo and Surrealism.  The randomness and juxtapositions of a Surrealist restorative project, where the unconscious is embraced, explored, and exposed in order to supplant reality, are eviscerated of any rumblings of chance in an Oulipian paradigm.  There is no chance encounter, only prescribed methods that portend unlimited potential (like a video game that is already predicated on existing code, but the routes of play are limitless).  The elegance, then, is in the process, the constraints, and the rule-bound system.  In this sense, perhaps, the Oulipo project has moved itself even further from the residues of Romanticism that haunt the creative spaces of Surrealism.  Nostalgia, passion, the erotic, the mythical, and desire are the impulses for Surrealism, and these drives can be expressed in those chance encounters.  For Surrealism, the beauty of the umbrella contrasted with the sewing machine is to be found in the hybridity of the two—the remix for the sake of transcendence above the two.  On the other hand, for the Oulipo, the process IS the desire and this desire is self-reflexive.  Specifically, I am reminded of an Ouroboros symbol here—the snake or dragon eating itself.  The Oulipian method of creativity entails an awareness of the constant [re]creating process and conceptualizations of the infinite.  For this reason I think the Oulipo is revolutionary in regard to methods while Surrealism is revolutionary in its content.  My binary thinking here proves troubling, but I cannot help but to see a content vs. form issue play out.  The intellectual prompt may need to soak in more. 

   

"Who Ate My Cheese?" by Mykl Travis
http://mykltravisfiberarts.com/2011/02/21/191/

     I for one think there is a satisfaction in constraint.  Self-imposed challenges, once fulfilled, tend to feel more rewarding.  Even when I am offered freedom in creativity the meanderings often turn to a type of limiting, a reigning in for the sake of feeling forward-movement.  Creative constraint can also feel like a gifting experience where there is anticipation in the restrictions given (or as Turchi describes it: “surprise depends on expectation” (182)).  Such a means of creativity even has a ring of ritualism to it, which perhaps explains Arnaud’s explanation of the secluded workshop: “There was a hint of the Masonic temple” (xii).  The sewing circle analogy that Arnaud described particularly resonated for me as a lovely image, one that entails the honing of skills and a reverence for what has come before.  I grew up in a quilting tradition, one where my grandmother would host quilting circles with her fellow Catholic women parishioners and friends.  I fondly remember sitting underneath their large quilt frame, set up in the middle of the living room, and feeling giddy from the phantasmagoric site of colors, fabrics, and threads that were carefully arranged and chosen according to a master plan that I was not privy to.  It was a mystery to me at the time, but having made my own quilts now in adulthood, I appreciate the beauty that comes out of a rule-bound size and mathematical structure (though the math part sometimes frustrates!).  What the frame can contain is truly limitless, or so it appears.  

Works Cited

Arnaud, Noël.  "Foreward: Prolegomena to a Fourth Oulipo Manifesto--or Not."  

Turchi, Peter.  "A Rigorous Geometry." Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer:

Week 7, Madness and the Margins the Erotic: Sex and Death

     As I mentioned in class this past week, I am struck most by what seem to be influences of mise-en-scène in Unica Zürn's Dark Spring, specifically those moments in the text where bodies are framed as actors and staged as signifiers, or as the translator Caroline Rupprecht emphasizes in the preface: "Instead of words, it is the body that comes to act as a site of signification" (4). The influence of cultural images and the power of filmic bodies seem paramount in Dark Spring to the extent that that they serve as agents of psychological centering and totems to draw power from.  The narrator describes the exoticized maid Frieda Splitter as "a movie star" whom the young protagonist watches and is "enraptured by her every move" (Zürn 44-45).  The spectacle-like nature of Frieda's body and all the props that stage her body as uber feminine (the costuming of lingerie, perfume, powders, garters, and such) become a locus for the young girl to the extent that "Frieda [had] become the center of all things marvelous" (45).  

     Frieda's physical body and the extensions of her corporeality become a site of fantasy, a channel and means for the child protagonist to envision a separate reality.  The protagonist "she" seems to use bodies as visual referants of mise-en-scène to not only understand the world around her, but to also create alternate storylines (selves) and to then become lost in such cinematic spaces (perhaps a protective mechanism).  She wishes that "Frieda had a handsome young prince for a husband" (45), but the fantasy is shattered by the appearance of a new maid, a "successor [who] is an ugly hunchback" (46).  Even Frieda's last name (Splitter) suggests doubling and a splitting of the self: beautiful vs. ugly, reality vs. fantasy, idealized vs. realized.  It is further interesting that after both Frieda and her father have left, the then described ten-year-old alludes to Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea where "Captain Nemo is another one of her heroes" (49).  The scene suggests a libidinal desire: "octopus tentacles that force their entry into the submarine, the "Nautilus" (49)...

Hokusai Katsushika's The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tako_to_ama_retouched.jpg

...and it also sets up a movie screen-like influence of male bodies, specifically that of Douglas Fairbanks in Thief of Baghdad.   

Douglas Fairbanks in Thief of Bagdad (1924)
http://www.fandor.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Thief-of-Bagdad.jpg

Actor James Mason as Captain Nemo in 
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)
http://media.comicvine.com/uploads/6/64422/1543537-disneynemo.jpg

Just as there is an appreciation for an exoticized female body, one framed and understood in relation to a staged body, so too is there a desire for an exoticized male body: "She is sorry she has to be a girl.  She wants to be a man, in his prime, with a black beard and flaming eyes" (51). 
Both Douglas Fairbanks and Captain Nemo (at least a filmic version of Prince Dakkar) bear a strong resemblance to the characterization of the young girl's father and ground her sexual musings of racialized others who simultaneously protect and pleasure her.  More is to be said of the other "actors" who make appearances (the school teacher and the foreign-looking swimmer, love interest), but at this point I would offer that the visual impact of these allusions and mise-en-scène-like stagings in Dark Spring suggest not only the power of cultural references to shape social constructions of gender but also how visuality influences the artist, the viewer, and all points of signification in between.      

The uncanniness of Verne's Nautilus and one of Zürn's drawings:  

The Nautilus 
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Nautilus_Neuville.JPG

Unica Zürn's “Hexentexte" (1945)

Of Further Interest:  http://www.brooklynrail.org/2009/06/artseen/poster-boy-brooklynovation_2

Works Cited

Zürn, Unica.  Dark Spring. 1969. Trans. Caroline Rupprecht. Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000.     

     Print.