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.