“(The trope of being freed from a burden should not obscure the fact that pictorial representation goes on happily ever after in painting; the point is that the meaning of images changes in painting because their use value changes.)”

 For my own purposes I am not so much interested in the analogy that he made earlier and is referring to here of the effects of photography on painting but once again I would apply perhaps digital narratives, television and movies with the written narrative.  There was a period of time there after the printing press was invented and mass literacy was enacted that narratives were shifting from being oral to being written, and written far more complexly because the author was able to truly dig through human experience and put it down and not have to worry about remembering, nearly as much. This gave us all of those great novels by Dickinson, Melville, Hemmingway, Hesse, Woolfe, Eyre ……and so on and so forth.  And those same great novels are still being written today except that now there is such a swamp of them that it takes some amount of effort to get through.

However.

There also exists this form of narration in television and video.  And these are both powerful and popular modes that have the benefit of audio and visual.  To make a long and bumbling point shorter… could it be that these modes of narration take various responsibilities off the chest of written narratives.  What these thing may be i am not sure.  

In writing and thinking about this I am reminded of my own recent irritations with contemporary novels.  I can’t even begin to count how many I have recently picked up forced my way through half of it only to put it back down again.  This is not because they are bad.  One that comes to mind is Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty”.  This is not a bad novel.  It is written beautifully and it is full, intelligent, and brilliant.  And yet it irritated me to the point of having to put it down half way through.  

It wasn’t that the characters weren’t believable or flat

The setting wasn’t ill-conceived or redundant.

And the plot itself was fresh and flush  

It is more the principal of the thing that irritated me.  It was a typical narrative.  With a typical narrative structure.  Text book stuff.  It didn’t excite me in the least bit.  It could be, and probably will, end up being a movie or even a series for television.  On one hand why can’t the movie industry come up with their own material, why must they continuously pluck from the trees of literature but then again is this necessarily a bad trend as a good movie deal will feed these authors for some time.  On the other hand, if these novels, these written narratives are so ripe for the audio/ visual world then why don’t we leave that to them and pursue a new direction free from the burden of representing the woes of culture because, so often that is was it feels like these novels are doing.  Sure, there are probably a plethora of facets and planes of cultural identity that have yet to be explored or discovered or voiced through the medium of the novel but for those of us that feel that ship has long since sailed… what ship is it that we are to begin building.  

What knowledge does the release of that ship free us from?  What don’t we have to explore?

Certainly we needn’t much more convincing that print has run into a wall when it has become so vast that the categorizing and ‘genretizing’ of books is practically an art.  Why re-plough what has already hit bedrock.  Or maybe it hasn’t perhaps there are facets to print that are beyond our capacity to reach or outside the limits of our perspective.  How can we expect to reach those corners by taking the same paths when a new path is likely to tear holes in the this grand tarp that is existence that might shine light in those corners.  

Glazier  mentions pushing beyond the narrative.  I would think that the narrative has been around since the dawn of man in whatever shape or form be it cave drawings or oral narrations.  And what has the function of the narrative presumably been other than to make sense of the world around us as well as to serve as a memory system for accumulated knowledge.  So we know that with writing we no longer have the need for oral traditions to act as memory systems and since texts take care of that for us our minds are capable of reaching new heights by employing logic and deducing knowledge from knowledge.  But what of narratives.  What have we been using them for over all these years of literacy?  Do we still need them to make sense of the world.  Surely our narratives have become more complex as our novels construct interwoven themes of culture and the human condition and what it means to exist.  Have we exhausted the limits of the narrative?  Is there nothing left to be extracted from that form?  Have narratives over all this time acted as a representation for our experience of existence?  If they have, are we not ready to push narrative in some different more abstract direction.

And what would that direction be?  

I think the narrative is ready for a new direction.  Or maybe not a new direction.  But whatever it was that the narrative was trying to accomplish through representation then it is ready to try to accomplish it through something else.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/20872/

One, unnamed, by Susan Howe.

and the other “Outward Bound” by Harnish Whyte.

I chose them to compare to one another based on thier visual form.  Both are somewhat sporadic and puzzlelike in the way one has to go about reading them.  Each puzzle is its own challenge.  Howe’s is set up kind of offkilter, like two teeter totters.  It took multiple readings and several dictionary checks before I was even able to approach what she is trying to get at. 

Whyte’s poem is more balanced in its form.  It stands like a pilalr on the page.  It is the letters that are somewhat scrambled and seperated from one another so that the words need to be pieced together and in some cases I wasn’t able to coherently fit them all together, leaving some letters stranded. 

Coincidently, Whyte’s poem is derived from a line written by Emily Dickinson (although I was unable to figure out which line) and from the little background that I mustered up about Howe I found that Dickinson seems to have had quite the influence on her work. 

At any rate. It is clear that both Howe and Whyte have used form as a means with which to control and or manipulate the reader’s experience with the poem.  I think Howe may have used the offbalanced structure to enhance the notion of the underdog “peon” and thier attempt to achieve victory through ”mutiny” and “regicide” with words like “mute”, “fluke” and “squall”  Beneath this teetertotter of mutiny and supression is the pile of words that almost seem stripped from the structure of the teetertotter and left out.  Which would make sense as those words suggest the tendancy of humans and society to revise history. 

Whyte’s poem on the other hand is a trifle harder for me to come up with anthing.  It would have been a little easier if I hadn’t known that the poem is derived from one of Dickinsons.  It’s difficult because I can’t help but thinking that the words came before any sort of point or goal or purpose that Whyte had for the piece.  Which I realize is perhaps the case for most things but here I feel that he has taken her words and could have gone anywhere with them wherease if it had been selfderived it would have come from withinhim.  It’s like adding another step of interpretation.  Which, maybe, is part of his intentions?  I like the last line which is the only line that isn’t completely or partially detached and it reads, “There is no frigate like a book”.  Again I wish I knew if this is Dickinson’s original verse or if it is Whyte’s  because I don’t know if he means Dickinson’s book or his book or all books..I don’t know I struggled with this one.

tricky stuff.

existence  

That is one thing but another thing perhaps creates a mess for those of us who have ever contemplated the meaning of their art.  Does it sit well to think that perhaps we produce art as a function or a necessary social or cultural praxis by which the rest of society can experience their own existence? A tool for experience comparison?  Or do we produce, firstly, to experience our own existence.  Fine tune that method and then get so excited by it that we try in vain to share it with everyone else.  Or someone else.  This harkens back to my earlier blog entry on Guy Debord’s “Situationist International”.

  And then look where the exercise of this cultural function has brought us! Had there been no artists and creators that pushed the realms of expression of their experience with exhistence would we have been capable of carving this far into the plane of existence? How far have we really pushed  How much farther is there?  Heck maybe we can push ourselves onto a plane of pure unmediated experience of existence where a system of referencing in order to compare and contrast isn’t necessary.

and then there it is.. perhaps the Venn diagram has not found its niche but is its own death.  There must be a more eloquent word for that.. . maybe in Latin

There will be a tree compiled of words.  (or maybe not a tree but some object)  

Some word will stand for the trunk and then a word will be attached to each branch as a leaf and perhaps even each branch will be a word (the structure of what ever object I choose will be important but difficult to decide on for now since I do not have the content prepared).  

The words on this tree will make up a story.  A narrative.  A concrete narrative.  

Then a tool will come in and this tool will be like a hedge clippers and it too will be a word ( again not sure what word) and the tool will clip off various word branches or leaves and they will fall to the ground and create a narrative that is more abstract.  Probably something that wouldn’t traditionally fall under the category of narrative.  More poetic.

This will all have something to do with thoughts on narratives and poems.  Loosely.. how narratives, more concrete, are understood or related to by the reader on terms that are much different than that of a poem. hopefully these thoughts are not cut and dried and forced onto the piece

Follow this link to Reiner Strasser’s “in the white darkness”

There aren’t many words in this piece.  A few.  The whole thing is very lucid and dreamy.  The strongest parts are the images that give the illusion that they will fully materialize into something but then they hold back.  Those images capture the nature of memory when it can’t quite grasp something completely.  Then again the clear images capture those memories that are crystal clear.  Aesthetically the whole piece is very appealing, like I said kind of dreamy however I don’t think Mr. Reiner really pushed this piece in any real direction or if he did I am missing it.    In the information section there is a bit about trying to capture the nature of memory related diseases such as alzheimers and parkinsons and the fragility or fluidity of the memory when under the influence of these diseases.  I always grit my teeth when someone tries to artistically work with these diseases because I can never quite understand why they would.  The diseases are intriguing because they tamper with something that is private and precious to everyone: memory.  In that sense they are diseases that anyone can have pity on and can even imagine what it would be like.  But artistically speaking tahts all these things become.. an imagining of what it would be like.  To me it just seems like an artistic cop out.  

One thing that is interesting about Reiner’s piece is that is requires a degree of interactivity.  By running the mouse over the various pulsing white dots the viewer gets to activate various memories or partial memories which in a sense is also part of the disease in that when someone has a conversation with these patients they are responsible for whatever memory bits are triggered.  That is where some of the strength lies in this piece.  The feeling, as a viewer, that you are activating these somewhat eerie fragments whether they are in the mind of a patient or in the mind of someone else or just on the screen.

One of the hardest things about computer and internet based pieces of work is the organization.  The archives are nice because I can enter them with the intention of viewing art and am therefore prepared to do so.  However it gets distracting when I am unsure of what exactly I am looking for but I know it’s experimental and is on the Internet somewhere.  Then of course there are the times you aren’t looking for it but you stumble across it unexpectedly.  In my head the Internet in its broadest, big picture projection is a mess of intertwining neon tubes searching through piles upon piles of neon rubbish.  Perhaps it is really more organized but the fact that I can’t even keep something as small as my silverware drawer organized makes it rather difficult for me to understand organization on a large scale. 

i can’t find it now but at some point the article talks about the potential for a restructuring of how we perceive things.  I take the we to represent both the artist and the audience.  Interestingly, not only do we have to be able to conceptualize where our perceptions need to head we also need to be able to conceptualize where they are presently and perhaps how they got their.  Clearly this is an individual effort as each of us perceives differently.  Perhaps the capabilities of the media are ripe with the opportunity to push individuals to question their perceptions by disorientating them.

www.oneword.com