Text and Work
Part 1
There are clear precedents for exploring the
territories which are overlapping in the not so simple play-off between
"Text" and "Art". It has been well documented and argued
elsewhere that U.S. and U.K. ‘conceptual art’ was wrestling with the philosophical
and aesthetic relationships between art and text, art as text, text as art,
word and image, word as idea, the literary versus non-literary etc. from the
outset. Within the context of the ‘contemporary’ (by which I mean here
the post-conceptual and/or even post-historical) Text in art is as much a
ubiquitous a means of production as any other a medium within the realm of what
we might commonly understand as, ‘contemporary art’.
So why then am I working with ‘text’ in the context of
‘art’? By working with text what I am I really doing? Indeed, why do I
concern myself with it as a question at all?
I’m asking these questions because I’m working on a
paper for a conference entitled, ‘Text Versus a piece of Art’ in Łódź next
week. As usual I’m still pretty clueless, but as I’ve written before, this
cluelessness may be a valuable commodity (albeit a fragile one) in the over
purposive territory of the ‘artademy’(© Dutton) . What I’m initially trying to
focus on, or better, the place I’d like to work within, is a territory which is
implied by the application of the proposition, 'Versus' which is set between
the nouns 'Text' and 'Art' in the conference title, 'Text versus a piece of Art'.
Versus can be understood
to signify a turn toward or against. In other words it can be suggestive of an
antagonism, ‘against’, or as a comparison, ‘with’. Either way, the
proposition is used to declare a necessarily pre-existing sense of some
classificatory difference between two ‘concept-things’, with the difference
which is presupposed (or summoned) by the versus being the central
distinction between those two ‘concept-things’ at that given moment of
co-habitation. However, although versus presupposes and summons
difference and distinction, it must also assume some sense of familial
similarity within which to identify the distinctions (race horse versus race
horse, octopus versus squid, not race horse versus squid).[1]
In any case, the antagonism suggested by the
conference title doesn’t stop at the level of ‘between Text and Art’ because
the actual conference title is of course ‘Text versus a piece of art’
(my italics).
So here, does the ‘piece of Art’ refer to an ‘object’,
an ‘Artefact’ or an ‘idea’, a framed something-or-other (framed in the broadest
sense) which exists as ‘piece of Art’ in the context of all the other ‘pieces
of Art’ which are both being produced, have been produced and are yet to be
produced? Is the ‘piece of Art’ more or less than Art as a totality because it
is merely a piece? Or is the ‘piece’ a fragment of the chaos of the totality
made safe[2].
Certainly one might presume that to be a ‘piece of art’ at all, there must be
larger corpus of which to be a piece of.
Is art then a ‘piece’ of this meta-‘art’? Does Art call upon this Art-as-totality
by invoking it in fragments because the fragment is the only way to understand
the whole? Is this a way of slowly immunising ourselves to chaos, to preparing
for it, or to fall in love with it?
And yet, and yet.. again the title of the conference
is ‘Text versus a piece of Art’.
Not, ‘A Text versus a piece of Art’, nor
‘Text versus Art’, but categorically, as if to underline the fact, a
transcendental whole (TEXT). So whole it needs no definite article (like GOD), versus some form of a
fragment, a sliver, or a slice ( A PIECE OF ART ) of that which also commands
no THE.
What a titanic struggle this is turning out to be.
I suspect that what is at stake then, in the phrase
‘Text versus a piece of Art’ is going to have some theological undertones. That
it is not so much a fight for territory or meaning of each term, as much as an
enquiry and even an evocation of a form of oppositional irresolution, a lens
though which we might try to understand the terms as existing within a singular
and dynamic whole, and if this is the case, a question of what this whole might
be.
Here, the proposition versus is already first placing
‘text’ and ‘a piece of art’ into a familial field in order then to subdivide once more them into more precise categories from
which to retrieve them in new formations, producing a new ‘sense’ of Text and
versus a piece of Art. Both Text and Art are checking each other out, are about
to be transformed by their mutual re-assessment and love-in during the
discursive course of the conference paper.
It is precisely this contradictory territory, between
the whole and the fragment, the general and the particular, the image and the
text which is conjured up by the conference title that I want to try to explore
as a means towards understanding what might be possible in and through the work
of art which approaches itself through text, or the text which approaches
itself through art, with a longer view on what thinking and seeing within these
oppositions might mean for ‘experience’ or ‘world’ and in particular what this
might mean in respect of ‘time’.
As a maker, I recognise a ‘value’(a quality perhaps)
of evolving criteria from within the ‘work’ of art (in the spirit
of immanence ) so, in the spirit of this work, I can only begin here by
recognising the proposition of two differing and seemingly mutually exclusive
totalities which are also entirely
intertwined as they are being presented to me in the conference title alone. My
criteria for this paper must originate then from within here and here alone, from
this stand off of two totalities; on the one hand the totality of Text, the
über Text which enmeshes all texts which come before after and within, and on
the other the totality of the thing (Art) of which we can only make sense by
making reference to a fragment (a piece), a totality which is so unknowable and
Chaotic we must access it via an agent (a piece of art), the cipher or the
fragment, all of which elements are subsumed under the generic classification
of what ever this new work thing is yet
to be called .
So, I’m approaching this division (the versus
of art and text) as a spatial, conceptual and temporal territory which I might
inhabit, or in the spirit of my recent work, temporarily occupy. This
territory, which orientates around that which may or may not be considered a
piece of art, that which may or may not be considered Text (and as a
consequence what may or may not be considered an image?), is key not
because I’m too concerned with defining what is or isn’t anything else, (I’m
happy with Reinhardt on this one) but because that territory of
inconclusiveness might also be as of itself, a means, a movement
of occupation towards an affective realm within a practice/life/world
in which the ontological flickering between states of being emerges as a form
of aesthetic affect ( by which I mean here what Peter Osbourne describes
as being ‘felt by the mind’[3]).
In short, the production of an interior reflexive zone within which what is
proposed to happen is also felt in the process of it happening. Or
to be more precise, to suggest that the proposition itself is ‘felt by the
mind’ AS a proposition as it becomes, not merely understood as one after
the fact, not a spatial zone but territory of time experienced and felt by the
mind.
