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In Kenneth Goldsmith's 73 Poems both of the mainstreams of
word-into-art migration in this century are synthesized: there are
elements of Copy, where graphics plus a pop sensibility bring in visual
impact to overrule (or overdetermine) the message, and also traces of
classic conceptualist textuality. From this point of view, Goldsmith's
work "reads" ("looks") like a pleasing even nostalgic revery on all the
pyrrhic yearnings of writing to regain a greater voice in a visually
dominated culture--a kind of fin de siecle summation of a major
struggle in culture (literary vs. visual) in this century. Seen this
way, echoes of Appolinaire, Tzara, Stein, O'Hara, Twombly, Cage,
Weiner, Barry, Holzer, and Prince echo thorough the cadences. But the
text-copy polarity is perpendicularly counterbalanced by another
polarity of word usage: logos-nomos. Logos is the law of the Father: it
is the metaphysical signified, the maker of meaning in all its
presence, the basis, that is, of (male) Western rationalism and
Judaeo-Christian written culture. Logos is the word of the citadel, the
fort, the court, the boss, the suits. "Nomos" (my formulation loosely
derived from Deleuze and Guattari's parole-oriented response to
"langue"--fixed structuralism) is the diametrical opposite of Logos: it
is the word of the street, it comes from below. Nomos exists in mass
form, or in extremely individual form, either way in a groundless
state, it wanders (it is "nomad"), it also wavers. At several times in
this century, the fairly progressive text-copy teeter-totter has tilted
round to a much more polarized logos-nomos orientation (I think the
latest shift of this sort occurred in 1989, it may be closing up
again). In Goldsmith's work, while text is represented by associated
links, and Copy by graphic features, Logos elements are hinted at in
the authority of presentation, and nomoslike leanings in the fade out
and nonsequitur eruptions of "low" material. In art, of course, in
particularly in art that deals with all the echoes of text-copy
importation into the visual as mentioned, pure logos or nomos are hard
to find: power trips dissemble, anti-logos power usurpations are
disguised as nomos: true nomos, raw nomos is rare. Articulation is too
much with us: overarticulation has cost art the power surge incumbent
in less articulated more twisted forms (like tattoos). And yet subtle
unsettlings of former power arrangements are a help. The only tool able
to contemplate all the power relations imbedded in words is the open
mind. The open mind in fact bumps like a pinball from node to node:
text, copy, logos, nomos. A sequence of mind-as-pinball meandering
around all the possibilities of word-visual interaction will come out
in a diagram as: touch node, weigh options, roll back again, obtain
equilibrium: then, TILT, the change to the perpendicular polarity, and
repeat the sequence of rolling, rocking (weighing), and resting. The
mind sifting out the power imprint of words (based on a distinction of
wordtypes) creates an elaborate trace. This rather poststructuralist
slide is, because concerned with power, more structured than Barthes'
pleasure text, or Cixous' textual feminism, it is more related to
structuralist poetic theory, for example: "Every literary text is made
up of a number of 'systems' (lexical, graphic, metrical, phonological
and so on), and gains its effects through constant clashes and tensions
between these systems. Each of the systems comes to represent a 'norm'
from which the others deviate, setting up a code of expectations which
they transgress. Metre, for example, creates a certain pattern which
the poem's syntax may cut across and violate. In this way, each system
in the text 'defamiliarizes' the others, breaking up their regularity
and throwing them into more vivid relief ... A poetic text is thus a
'system of systems,' a relation of relations." (102 Literary Theory,
Terry Eagleton)
Kenneth Goldsmith's
73 Poems unexpectedly fulfills exactly this kind
of meandering order within disorder (or "chaos"). Its vocabulary of
text-visual hybrid gambits is rich: "justification" (spacing) plays
against text; text steps over text to create a constant fadeout effect,
a visual metaphor for aural transiency (reminiscent of Robert Barry);
some words float, other repeated letters pile up like picked up sticks;
secret meanings are encoded in sequences, and evidence of sign slide
(meaning slipping away as soon as set; the continuous "deferral" of
meaning beloved of the poststructuralists) is everywhere. Reading and
looking battle it out like two eyes in one split head blinkering at the
same unsteady target. When there is at last a Tilt, after a still point
as "I", the resumption of text, flipped on its side, accentuates visual
disorientation, perhaps signifying the victory of looking over reading.
As in Copy, later in the Poems, you see before you read and the meaning
that starts up on first sight often reverses the conventionally
signified meaning of what is finally read. The struggle keeps on: copy
accelerates into metaphor-shaped visual chainings: vertical texts
strain the eye: letters loosen into pure graphics: the continuation of
the end game is nothing but a stubborn refusal to end, a Beckettian
utterance against the corner that a game has boxed one into (but, of
course, our era is too sophisticated for silence). Finally, it starts
up all over finneagain. All of these impromptu stratagems pinball
across eye and mind, indeed, toss back and forth, from both the zones
of looking and reading, through the imaginary space which the
deconstruction of each category of signifying power has left behind. In
its meanderings the 73 Poems present us with a good game in which all
the tensions and struggles of text, copy logos, and nomos are played
out in a realpolitik and Hamletlike art whose only immediate function
is to loosen one up from a hardened defense of some polar position. By,
quite literally, talking out of all sides of his mouth, and seeing out
of every corner of his eye, by, at some points, nearing impasse, simply
keeping the two sides of every issue talking, Goldsmith in 73 Poems
has created a unified theory eye chart to educate one in all the peaks
and valleys of thinking things out for oneself.
Robert Mahoney is an art critic who lives and works in New York
City.
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