FRACTURES
OF SELF
by
Douglas Messerli
David
Antin Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)
One
of the first things anyone approaching David Antin's marvelous new collection
of essays on art and literature will notice is the striking image on the book's
cover, a photograph that depicts David Antin, looking perhaps a bit more
Buddha-like than he does in real-life, walking toward another image of himself,
this from the back side of the face. There is something arresting about this
image, even a bit eerie, but I made little of it when I first saw it, except to
register that it represented an image of the author, symbolically speaking, of
1966 coming towards his current being. A few friends, however, found that image
quite disturbing, one suggesting he had to keep the book face down on his
coffee table. Perhaps it was just the oddity of having a photograph, which we
associate with the real world, representing something that we know cannot truly
happen, one aspect of the self meeting up with the other.
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Yet, if we read on in Antin's book,
particularly in his essay "The Beggar and the King," we recognize
that this transaction between two aspects of the self is precisely what the
author projects as being behind the narrative genre he has created in the
"talk poem." Speaking of his early work, generated by a kind of
collage sensibility, Antin observes:
...I
started out in the 1950s like many young experimental artists
with
a strong commitment to most of the received ideas of early-
twentieth-century
modernism, the most important of which for a
artist
was the idea of the exhaustion, experimental and aesthetic, of
the
representation in all its forms. For a language artist this mostly
meant
the uselessness of narrative.
Antin goes on to suggest that over the
years, as he recognized the exhaustion "of nearly all the modes of
experimental communication," that he began to reexamine narrative,
exploring worlds of folklorists and ethnographers (the Grimm brothers,
Afansiev, etc.) as well as V. Propp's structural study The Morphology of the
Folktale, and others as far-reaching as Zuni Tales and Bernardino de Sahagun's
definitions compiled from survivors of the Aztec culture. What Antin finally
determined is that some narratives are not stories, and some stories have no
narrative, coming eventually to articulate a definition of narrative:
a
narrative requires a sense of something at stake for somebody in
some
particular subject position, which is what characterizes the stake.
It
is this sense of stake that should be taken as the center of narrative.
Like dreams, Antin argues, narratives
build bridges across change.
The
act of reconnecting subject positions across the gulf of
change
is what constitutes the formation of self. All self is built
over
the threat of change. There can be no self until there is an
awareness
of one's subject position, which can only be created
by
the threat of change or the memory of change. Every change
creates
a fracture between successive subject states, that narrative
attempts
and fails to heal. The self is formed over these cracks.
Every
self is multiply fractured, and narrative traversal of these
fracture
planes defines the self. Narrative is the traditional and
indispensable
instrument of self creation.
It
is this definition of narrative and Antin's own exploration of that genre in
his "talk poems" that came eventually to define his art. One must
understand the picture on the cover, accordingly, not just as an encounter of
an older Antin with a newer one, but one kind of self facing the spectre of
another and redefining that vision of self in the process. And in that sense,
the image on the cover is a slightly disturbing vision of these two selves
coming together almost to duke it out over the changes that have obviously
occurred in the writer's own life, one might say, another kind of "radical
coherency."
Yet I was struck in these revelatory
essays, at how much continuity Antin demonstrates in a writing that bridges 39
years. There are only four works that actually fit the format of what the
author describes as "talk poems" here ("the existential allegory
of the rothko chapel," the title piece, "radical coherency,"
"the death of the hired man," and "john cage uncaged is still
cagey," although Antin tells me that "Fine Furs" was originally
written in the form, but later transformed into an essay), but I would argue
that all of the pieces in this volume have the same Antin inflections of voice
and structural patterns as his later works. Antin's is a voice filled with pauses,
not always at the place one might suspect, but as in Stein, always there as
part of the syntax itself. These caesuras are a product of Antin's whole
process, which is so different from most critical writing that it is sometimes
difficult to think of Antin setting out to write an "essay." For
Antin does not "answer" anything, but poses of each artist, poet or
groups of these, questions which he then ponders and pauses over in sentence
after sentence, wandering and wondering aloud in astoundingly profound ways,
how and why certain things are being said or done. Occasionally, for Antin is a
true wit, these can be somewhat whimsical—in "Warhol: The Silver
Tenement," for example, Antin's major summary is that in order for
Warhol's beautiful creations to succeed, they must necessarily develop
"scuffs," transforming his paintings, films, novels, soap operas, and
even his planned "silver tenement" into a kind of "precisely
pinpointed defectiveness," a kind of tawdry version of glamour—but by and
large, no matter what his own position about the quality or purposefulness of
the various art and poetic endeavors upon which he focuses, Antin asks serious
questions, challenges set notions, and makes us rethink our assumptions.
In order to cover a large range of territory,
Antin has clearly winnowed down what was to have been a far bigger book with
numerous other essays (sometimes on the same artist at different periods in his
or her career) into a whole that explores various aspects of the art scene from
the mid-1960s through today. From Pop art, Antin moves on to the new
representational work of artists like Alex Katz, taking out time in a
wonderfully, slightly daffy piece to consider the work of machine-builders such
as Jean Tinguely, before turning his attention to a "Pollution Show"
in Oakland, California, consisting of photographs, drawings, kinetic junk
sculpture, funk, discreet piles of rubbish, and even a dead seagull.
From these "earthwork" pieces,
the author turns his attention to different kinds and traditions of
constructivism and the issues of flatness in contemporary art, moving through
Sol Lewitt, Robert Irwin, Michael Asher, Carl Andre and others. This is
followed by a bruising criticism of the famed "Art and Technology,"
show, organized by Maurice Tuchman at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in
1971. Later essays include discussions of video art, an hilarious
consideration—using the example of artist Robert Morris—of how one might
comprehend the "proprietary rights" of an artist, followed by a
sensitive evaluation of the color fields of Rothko's art in Houston's Rothko
Chapel, often viewed under the light of clouded skies, and ending with a
reevaluation of performance artist Allan Kaprow. In short, Antin's writing
serves almost as a textbook, without textbook-like presentations and
conclusions, of what art meant throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
I should add that not only can I hear
Antin's voice in all these pieces but I perceive his various viewpoints as
splendidly personal appreciations or disparagements. Reading Antin on art is as
if one were accompanying a lively friend or uncle on trips to the museums and
galleries throughout the country over a period of several years, the only way
one can truly come to know and appreciate art.
Miraculously Antin does the same thing for
literature, beginning with a substantial essay exploring issues of modernism
and postmodernism in American poetry long before, 1972, anyone else had
thoroughly considered these issues in depth. I remember sitting in Marjorie
Perloff's class—Marjorie being one of Antin's first major critical
supporters—four years later, where we still hadn't accepted the idea of there
being a "postmodern" poetry. Antin was there first! His "Some
Questions about Modernism" bravely explores, again long before it had been
done by others, notions of different kinds of modernism, opening up all kinds
of literary texts that move away from the Pound-Williams-Eliot-Stevens kind of
poetic genealogy.
"Radical Coherency" humorously
discusses the concept through a visit to a large shopping mall store where he
attempts to help his elderly mother pick out some undergarments, priced at the
amount she has been used to paying for years. That metaphor, of bargain shops
within large clothing sections, striated by aisles and aisles of other
ready-to-purchase goods, probably does more to explain what we might mean by a
coherent thing that has radically exploded to contain all sorts of strange
categories and subdivisions to meet the needs of contemporary culture.
Essays like "The Stranger at the
Door," the already-discussed "The Beggar and the King," and
"Fine Furs," open up the whole notion of what a poem is or might be
understood to be. In one of the funniest works of the entire book, "the
death of the hired hand," Antin deconstructs some of the poetry of Robert
Frost (and incidentally, of my artist acquaintance, Siah Armajani's poetry
room, in which Antin speaks). Antin's discussion of the kind of dishonesty—a
"wearing of hats" as he terms it—of Frost's diction and poetic positioning
will forever change, I can assure you, the way you see this plain carpenter of
imitative New England poetic dialogues.
The penultimate essay is a brilliant
reconsideration of Wittgenstein's work in the context of some critics'
contention that his philosophical studies are also works of poetry. Antin dares
to ask and attempts to explain just what that poetry might consist of, and how,
sometimes rather strangely, it functions as such. In the last essay, "john
cage uncaged is still cagey," Antin takes on work that has perhaps been
very influential to his own writing, suggesting how the performances of this
"cagey" composer, collector of mushrooms, and sometimes unofficial
manager of Merce Cunningham's dance company, function as poetic events.
There are a few minor quibbles with
Antin's book, namely concerning the lack of information the author provides
about some of the artists and events on which writes. It would be useful to
know the names and places of the shows he reviewed, in one case in particular,
Antin, a close friend of the artist, does not ever mention Allan (Kaprow's)
last name! It occurs only in a footnote. But these are small matters that might
have been ameliorated by more editorial involvement.
The book as a whole is a stunning summary
(although there are dozens of other works by Antin remaining to be republished)
of one of our most engaging and challenging intellects. Radical Coherency is
filled with the goods you can enjoy again and again.
Los
Angeles, May 17, 2011
Reprinted
from Charles Bernstein Blog (Jacket 2)
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