conceptual poetics
Conceptual poetics raises a number of fascinating questions about poetry which are well worth tackling. The first few for a lot of readers being, 'What the hell is this?', 'Why is it so horrible?', and 'Why should I care?'.
Taking the last question first, you should care because conceptual poetics is one of the vital areas in contemporary poetry. You should care because you're sick of writers intruding on their work waving their tedious personalities and even more tedious writing abilities in your face. You should care because you actually do care, because asking, 'What the hell is this?', and 'Why is it so horrible?' demonstrates how much you care. You should care because most of the time when you read new poetry you feel an overpowering, almost physically painful sense of ennui.
As for, 'What the hell is this?', you could do worse than start with this capsule description. Conceptual poetics is an uncreative writing that effaces the self and the ego from writing, it is a writing where the concept is more important than the work. It may often be, perhaps always should be, completely unreadable. Conceptual poetics is probably the most direct and most effective challenge to the Romantic legacy. Placing the poet and their subjective impressions at the heart of poetry was an important thing to do just over 200 years ago. But in 200 years any creative strategy is going to get a little worn. Conceptual poetics doesn't mean that you have to stop liking your favourite writers from the last couple of centuries, it just means there are new things happening now that you might be interested in.
'Why is it so horrible?' is a trickier question. Some conceptual poetry isn't very horrible, in which case the answer may just be that you're unfamiliar with it, you haven't attuned to it yet. The solution then is to either try and ignore it and hope it goes away, or to try and engage with it. Some conceptual poetry is quite horrible, in which case the answer might well be that it's horrible by conscious effort. The writer (or plagiarist, generative process etc) intends this work to be difficult/painful/impossible to read. As a reader you can again choose to ignore or engage
with the work. If you've read this far you probably want to engage with the work. You want to understand why you feel the way you do, and you want to formulate a reaction in your own mind that's more than a visceral 'Urgh!', even if it's still negative. There is no single key that will help you with this, but some of the notes below, resulting from a process of attempting to figure out a coherent response, may help.
Here are three works that seem in some way to relate to conceptual poetics, and which will be referred to in the following discussion: Christian Bök's Xenotext experiment, Derek Beaulieu's Flatland, and Tom Phillips' A Humument. Two questions they all raise are, 1) Who is the author of the text?, and 2) What is more important, the text or the concept behind the text? The first question at least should be familiar to most reasonably alert readers, so nothing that follows should be intimidating or difficult.
Xenotext does not seem to exist as a 'finished' piece yet, inasmuch as a short verse encoded in the DNA of a living organism and 'expressed' in the form of a benign protein could ever be described as finished. Perhaps better to say the text doesn't yet exist or has not yet been donated to a host organism. So who is or who will be the author of Xenotext? The author of the concept would seem to be Christian Bök, who it would appear is also likely to be the author of the short text that will be encoded within the DNA of a living organism. But then the laboratory which carries out the work will also become the author, and after that the organism in which the text is encoded will become its own author. In this sense perhaps Xenotext is a very conventionally authored piece. Drawing from contemporary ideas an individual brings together a group of people to create a text collaboratively, albeit a text that writes and rewrites itself thereafter.
The question of authorship in Flatland and A Humument is both simpler and more complex. Simpler in that both Derek Beaulieu and Tom Phillips have 'treated' existing texts, so to that extent they're collaborations. More complex in that the texts 'found' within the original texts were never conceived of by the original authors. It may be easier here to separate the two texts.
A Humument is perhaps as distinctly authored (or even more so) by Tom Phillips as the source text, A Human Document was by W H Mallock. Although Phillips' text would not exist in the form it does without the original novel (including the layout and typesetting), it is very much the work of an artist creating a new text from the materials at hand. It could be said to fit neatly into a post-Romantic, expressive tradition. Phillips creates images from scratch and superimposes them on the original text. While Phillips' and Mallock's texts interact, A Humument is probably not really a conceptual text in the sense defined by Kenneth Goldsmith.
Flatland is much more clearly a conceptual text. Beaulieu has defined a set of rules to generate his text using an existing work, and has not deviated from that. He has only authored the concept. The original author can be said to have generated both the original text, and the new text indirectly. Beaulieu is the author of the new text only insofar as he has defined the process for creating that. A process which could have been applied by anyone to any text. A process that could equally well be executed by a computer programme.
What then is more important, the resultant text or the concept behind the text? The question is probably unanswerable. The resultant text has an existance of its own independent of any concept once it has been created. The concept remains the abstract work of one person until it's applied to an existing text. The existing text remains separate from both the concept and the text resulting from the application of that concept. Unless of course the new text wholly effaces every existing version of the original text, but that's a matter for another time.
Probably none is more important than the other, or their relative importance depends on your point of view. If part of your aim is to call into question the idea of an author, and of texts being expressive of ego, then the text resulting from the concept is most important. The reason being that the process could have been carried out in the same way by anyone with broadly the
same results. And the process could be carried out again to another text. The result is not another trawl through someone's psyche. If the concept were not to be applied to a text then it remains just another text, and the potential for it to be the ego-waving of a single author returns. It is qualitatively different to publish a couple of dozen unexecuted 'concepts', than it is to actually put them in to practice. In the first instance they remain abstract, perhaps just a way of say 'look at how clever I am.' In the second instance a new text has been generated which sheds light on itself, on the process, and on the original text, without needing to draw attention to
any author.
To put it another way a concept not yet executed is in a sense a kind of work of fiction. When it is executed that work of fiction ceases to exist and the author of that fiction becomes less important.
These are provisional thoughts, and your thoughts on this subject are more than welcome.
Taking the last question first, you should care because conceptual poetics is one of the vital areas in contemporary poetry. You should care because you're sick of writers intruding on their work waving their tedious personalities and even more tedious writing abilities in your face. You should care because you actually do care, because asking, 'What the hell is this?', and 'Why is it so horrible?' demonstrates how much you care. You should care because most of the time when you read new poetry you feel an overpowering, almost physically painful sense of ennui.
As for, 'What the hell is this?', you could do worse than start with this capsule description. Conceptual poetics is an uncreative writing that effaces the self and the ego from writing, it is a writing where the concept is more important than the work. It may often be, perhaps always should be, completely unreadable. Conceptual poetics is probably the most direct and most effective challenge to the Romantic legacy. Placing the poet and their subjective impressions at the heart of poetry was an important thing to do just over 200 years ago. But in 200 years any creative strategy is going to get a little worn. Conceptual poetics doesn't mean that you have to stop liking your favourite writers from the last couple of centuries, it just means there are new things happening now that you might be interested in.
'Why is it so horrible?' is a trickier question. Some conceptual poetry isn't very horrible, in which case the answer may just be that you're unfamiliar with it, you haven't attuned to it yet. The solution then is to either try and ignore it and hope it goes away, or to try and engage with it. Some conceptual poetry is quite horrible, in which case the answer might well be that it's horrible by conscious effort. The writer (or plagiarist, generative process etc) intends this work to be difficult/painful/impossible to read. As a reader you can again choose to ignore or engage
with the work. If you've read this far you probably want to engage with the work. You want to understand why you feel the way you do, and you want to formulate a reaction in your own mind that's more than a visceral 'Urgh!', even if it's still negative. There is no single key that will help you with this, but some of the notes below, resulting from a process of attempting to figure out a coherent response, may help.
Here are three works that seem in some way to relate to conceptual poetics, and which will be referred to in the following discussion: Christian Bök's Xenotext experiment, Derek Beaulieu's Flatland, and Tom Phillips' A Humument. Two questions they all raise are, 1) Who is the author of the text?, and 2) What is more important, the text or the concept behind the text? The first question at least should be familiar to most reasonably alert readers, so nothing that follows should be intimidating or difficult.
Xenotext does not seem to exist as a 'finished' piece yet, inasmuch as a short verse encoded in the DNA of a living organism and 'expressed' in the form of a benign protein could ever be described as finished. Perhaps better to say the text doesn't yet exist or has not yet been donated to a host organism. So who is or who will be the author of Xenotext? The author of the concept would seem to be Christian Bök, who it would appear is also likely to be the author of the short text that will be encoded within the DNA of a living organism. But then the laboratory which carries out the work will also become the author, and after that the organism in which the text is encoded will become its own author. In this sense perhaps Xenotext is a very conventionally authored piece. Drawing from contemporary ideas an individual brings together a group of people to create a text collaboratively, albeit a text that writes and rewrites itself thereafter.
The question of authorship in Flatland and A Humument is both simpler and more complex. Simpler in that both Derek Beaulieu and Tom Phillips have 'treated' existing texts, so to that extent they're collaborations. More complex in that the texts 'found' within the original texts were never conceived of by the original authors. It may be easier here to separate the two texts.
A Humument is perhaps as distinctly authored (or even more so) by Tom Phillips as the source text, A Human Document was by W H Mallock. Although Phillips' text would not exist in the form it does without the original novel (including the layout and typesetting), it is very much the work of an artist creating a new text from the materials at hand. It could be said to fit neatly into a post-Romantic, expressive tradition. Phillips creates images from scratch and superimposes them on the original text. While Phillips' and Mallock's texts interact, A Humument is probably not really a conceptual text in the sense defined by Kenneth Goldsmith.
Flatland is much more clearly a conceptual text. Beaulieu has defined a set of rules to generate his text using an existing work, and has not deviated from that. He has only authored the concept. The original author can be said to have generated both the original text, and the new text indirectly. Beaulieu is the author of the new text only insofar as he has defined the process for creating that. A process which could have been applied by anyone to any text. A process that could equally well be executed by a computer programme.
What then is more important, the resultant text or the concept behind the text? The question is probably unanswerable. The resultant text has an existance of its own independent of any concept once it has been created. The concept remains the abstract work of one person until it's applied to an existing text. The existing text remains separate from both the concept and the text resulting from the application of that concept. Unless of course the new text wholly effaces every existing version of the original text, but that's a matter for another time.
Probably none is more important than the other, or their relative importance depends on your point of view. If part of your aim is to call into question the idea of an author, and of texts being expressive of ego, then the text resulting from the concept is most important. The reason being that the process could have been carried out in the same way by anyone with broadly the
same results. And the process could be carried out again to another text. The result is not another trawl through someone's psyche. If the concept were not to be applied to a text then it remains just another text, and the potential for it to be the ego-waving of a single author returns. It is qualitatively different to publish a couple of dozen unexecuted 'concepts', than it is to actually put them in to practice. In the first instance they remain abstract, perhaps just a way of say 'look at how clever I am.' In the second instance a new text has been generated which sheds light on itself, on the process, and on the original text, without needing to draw attention to
any author.
To put it another way a concept not yet executed is in a sense a kind of work of fiction. When it is executed that work of fiction ceases to exist and the author of that fiction becomes less important.
These are provisional thoughts, and your thoughts on this subject are more than welcome.
Comments
The death of the author is certainly a interesting concept in post-modernism in general
Partly I just want to understand my own reaction, and see if anything can be learned from it
i'm glad to see a resurgence in conceptual practice being prominently incorporated into "big poetics", i think indeed itsan apt reflection of our post-info navigations & sign-makings within the myriad myriad manifestations of what humans call "communication"
as Niels Bohr sed: "We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down." --- most folks read to gain info or emotional stimulus,when presented w/ a blockage of "meaning" w/thin the arena of communication, the reader becomes the dominant constructor of authorial intentions & if so inclined, will create the construct in "semiosic comportment" to be incorporated to ones "knowledge of nonknowledge".
once the urinoir had been thrown, the fountain of conceptualism poured forth to dominate postmodded practices of encountering the world thru 'art' & 'language' -- as Joseph Kosuth has sed: "All art after Duchamp is conceptual in nature because art only exists conceptually."
also applicable is Ad Reinhardt:
"Art-as-Art is a creation that revolutionizes creation and judges itself by it's destruction.Artists-as-Artists value themselves for what they have gotten rid of and for what they refuse to do."
i'm glad to see the work of the major conceptualists of the 60's/70's has not been ignored, as i consider it to be the most historically relevant strain of 'art practice' in our recent histories, and with that note i'll leave it to Sol Lewitt :
"Sentences on Conceptual Art"
1. Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.
2. Rational judgements repeat rational judgements.
3. Irrational judgements lead to new experience.
4. Formal art is essentially rational.
5. Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.
6. If the artist changes his mind midway through the execution of the piece he compromises the result and repeats past results.
7. The artist's will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion. His wilfulness may only be ego.
8. When words such as painting and sculpture are used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent acceptance of this tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist who would be reluctant to make art that goes beyond the limitations.
9. The concept and idea are different. The former implies a general direction while the latter is the component. Ideas implement the concept.
10. Ideas can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.
11. Ideas do not necessarily proceed in logical order. They may set one off in unexpected directions, but an idea must necessarily be completed in the mind before the next one is formed.
12. For each work of art that becomes physical there are many variations that do not.
13. A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist's mind to the viewer's. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist's mind.
14. The words of one artist to another may induce an idea chain, if they share the same concept.
15. Since no form is intrinsically superior to another, the artist may use any form, from an expression of words (written or spoken) to physical reality, equally.
16. If words are used, and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature; numbers are not mathematics.
17. All ideas are art if they are concerned with art and fall within the conventions of art.
18. One usually understands the art of the past by applying the convention of the present, thus misunderstanding the art of the past.
19. The conventions of art are altered by works of art.
20. Successful art changes our understanding of the conventions by altering our perceptions.
21. Perception of ideas leads to new ideas.
22. The artist cannot imagine his art, and cannot perceive it until it is complete.
23. The artist may misperceive (understand it differently from the artist) a work of art but still be set off in his own chain of thought by that misconstrual.
24. Perception is subjective.
25. The artist may not necessarily understand his own art. His perception is neither better nor worse than that of others.
26. An artist may perceive the art of others better than his own.
27. The concept of a work of art may involve the matter of the piece or the process in which it is made.
28. Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist's mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly. There are many side effects that the artist cannot imagine. These may be used as ideas for new works.
29. The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course.
30. There are many elements involved in a work of art. The most important are the most obvious.
31. If an artist uses the same form in a group of works, and changes the material, one would assume the artist's concept involved the material.
32. Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution.
33. It is difficult to bungle a good idea.
34. When an artist learns his craft too well he makes slick art.
35. These sentences comment on art, but are not art.
(First published in 0-9 (New York), 1969, and Art-Language (England), May 1969)
Hoc opus hic labor est.
(Only the Overcoming of difficulties makes a work significant)
of use to the discussion at hand =
UBU anthology
Art & Language
more Art & Language
a sign is just a sign
http://www.ubu.com/concept/
Some of the thoughts inspired by that have come out as part of the post 'fun fun fun', specifically regarding the limitations of tradition.
One of the things I should have mentioned in 'fun fun fun', and may add as an... er, addendum, is that another good thing about the last few months is that I'm finally discovering contemporary writers about whom I can be excited and with whose work I can engage, even if I don't much like it. I can enthuse about genuinely stimulating writers, rather than moaning about the awful bilge in the bookstores.