Not too long ago, I woke up with a sentence in my head:
“Where is Art Going and Where has it Been?”
As a very conventionally educated poet and literary type, I had been ‘raised up’ to believe that artistic creation started and ended with the artist. What was in the classical period referred to as ‘the Muse’ was transformed in the Renaissance to ‘Genius’, the special property of an extraspecial individual. The invididual Genius owned his Genius. He was a master; he created masterpieces; he was surely not visited by lady spectres who planted ideas in itself. Genius was a sort of tautological current; it was God-given but thereafter was the personal property of the Genius.
Well, ok. But somewhere in my 20s I realized that this personal-property-genius model was actually a way to set up an artistic 1% and conserve resources there. That is, if we allow that only individuals of Genius possess Genius, and there is naturally a limited amount of Genius in the world, and all the awards, lucky breaks, publictions, etc are awarded by merit, then they should go to those Geniuses, and too bad for the rest of us. Genius and native ‘Merit’ began to seem like codewords to me, or like a forcefield—if you subscribed to them, those notions blocked you from seeing the fact that the literary and art worlds are like any other insitutions, based on certain people holding on to certain powers while hiding behind such supposedly great watchwords as ‘Tradition’, ‘Standards’, ‘Genius’. Words like ‘Genius’, which themselves suggested private ownership of the indelible property of Art, actually were a way to controll who controlled Art’s resources.
That’s why it’s been very important to me to discover artists like Hannah Weiner. I think Hannah Weiner was amazingly great in all respects. I love her voice (both on the page, in video, and in audio). I love her bonkers early work with its corny puns and its loopy generosity. In the early performance pieces she made herself a host for Art—she would host both the Coast Guard and the down town arty types to perform her Code Poems, or she would invite the public to her place of business (designing underwear) or sell hotdogs as an edible pun on her name. She would also host forms and genres and media—codes, flags, horns, lights, invitation cards, underwear, a vaccuum, police tape, etc. At such events, her own person became a site where all these different groups and media made contact and relayed energies and transformed each other—dots and bars became light, words became hotdogs, concept became performance, charisma (her own) became conviviality (of the group). And she never took these events too seriously, even though what she hosted was the most vital Art process of all-- she channeled the eternal force of Art into material and into human temporality, made Art arrive and perform. Art comes to a human address.
After she became ‘clairvoyant’, these processes and vectors intensified and contracted. Unexpectedly, she saw words everywhere—on bodies, lampchains, walls, etc. What’s interesting to me about this is that the first part of her career, as a medium for media and as a host for Art, served as a kind of training to be able to cope with becoming a medium in the spiritual sense. Hannah Weiner is a hero to me because she developed the technology for her new radical occult mediumicity. As she says in 'Mostly about the Sentence",
I bought a new electric typewriter in January 74 and said quite clearly, perhaps aloud, to the words ( I talked to them as if they were separate from me, as indeed the part of my mind they come from is not known to me) I have this new typewriter and can only type lower case, capitals, or underlines (somehow I forgot, ignored, or couldn’t cope with in the speed I was seeing things, a fourth voice, underlined capitals) so you will have to settle yourself into three different prints. Thereafter I typed the large printed words I saw in CAPITALS the words that appeared on the typewriter or the paper I was typing on in underlines (italics) and wrote the part of the journal that was unseen, my own words in regular upper and lower case.
Thus while the amount of time and labor she spent with her Spirit Teachers must have been a lonely and exhausting and exacting endeavor, she remarkably transferred their presence into a variety of other media—the Clairvoyant Journals and other texts, small books and letters and advertisements and pamphlets, as well as tape recordings and live and recorded performances and interview. In other words, while the experience of mediumship may have been radically isolating in its pragmatic demands, it was also an amplification of the process of ‘hosting’ and mediumicity she developed in her early practice. When the spirit teachers (sonically) appeared, Hannah Weiner was gloriously up to the challenge.
One matter of intense interest to me is the specific technology of her mediumicity, the synesthesia (and anasthesia?) of moving from one medium to another, in both her pre-Clairvoyant and post-clairvoyant work. I’d like to ask you, what is it like to ‘meet’ Hannah Weiner in each of these medium? What was the difference between ‘reading’ the Clairvoyant Journal excerpts, listening to the tape, and watching the video? Why do you think Hannah Weiner was continually reiterating the specific technology of her mediumicity at the beginning of her performances and texts (i.e. everything is prefaced with some version of her ‘I see words’ speech )? What was her interest in making this process of mediumicity so apparent to others—even going so far as to refer to the ‘words’ as ‘voices’ and translate them from a lexical to an audial version?
Finally, to return to my early theme of Genius: I suppose we could describe Hannah Weiner as a ‘Genius’ if we wanted to stuff her back into the niches our literary training make available to us but it’s much more exciting for me to do the opposite, to redefine my understanding of Art and Writing using Hannah Weiner as a starting point, to see Art as a series of incomplete or oversaturated transmissions that moves from media to media, that differs and sometimes coincides with itself, that writes its name on my body, world and forehead and rips me out into the streets to see my friends. This insight also allows me to see all my favorite artists (Claude Cahun, Andy Warhol, Joey Arias, Antonin Artaud, Jack Smith, Blatny, Erocelik, Blake, Ito, Kim Hyesoon, you guys) as spectres of radiant and radical conveyance:
Well, what do you think?
joyelle, i love what you said about the idea of genius. tradition, standard, genius, 'greatness' are all systems of control, ways to control the flow of capital and designed to allow those inside the club to exclude those they deem unworthy (read: people they just don't really give a shit about). just like anyone with a little power, they need to create ways to keep and strengthen that power. 'tradition' is one of those ways.
ReplyDelete(by the way, i always hesitate to write things like this because 'they' is really really meaningless, but i'll narrow what i'm thinking down a bit: directors of MFA programs, those that hire potential professors, basically the gatekeepers, the judgers of merit/potential [prize judges, those that give out awards, etc]. also also, i greatly hope to one day become one of these people, and to wield lots of power, and to set 'standards' and 'traditions' but couch those ideas in brand new rhetoric designed to keep my brand shiny and in-demand)
so anyway, about hannah weiner, i liked what i read/watched/heard. it seems, right off the bat, that she is not nearly as crazy/weird/silly as i expected her to be. in fact, she outright says that the words she views and transcribes are all entirely in her mind, or at least created in her head, and that they don't actually exist apart from her (though that part of her that manifests the words is not accessible through her conscious mind). she mentioned smoking marijuana, but doesn't seem to smoke it often or really even think that the drug has anything to do with the visions apart from making them harder to remember. she think of herself as clairvoyant, and maybe that is the best way to think of it. somehow she has developed this sixth sense which manifested entirely in language.
in a sense, her entire visual field became the medium for her art. everything she transcribed is only a portion of what she actually experienced. these words and phrases were originally seen on something, and their existence and relation to objects in space was/is as much a part of the words as the meanings/language itself. so what we get is just a bastardization of the art that actually existed for her. that's not to say that the clairvoyant journals are by any means bad, they're just not all she experienced.
so, ok. she experiences objects with this sixth sense, which is somehow language made carnate. looking closely at the journals themselves, it references the structure of language a lot. on the third page, the big words comment her to quote poems, to rewrite them, to not talk, and it even calls her a pronoun, says 'DON'T FINISH THIS SENTENCE STRUCTURE'. this sixth sense is made of language and somehow concerned with language itself, with the mechanics of language. it uses these mechanics to explains/describe/create another dimension in weiner's lived world, it creates another sense. even her essay on theory meditates on the structure of the language/essay itself. things like 'last sentence' and 'that's the belief introduction' appear, breaking into the traditional essay form to point out directly what each individual part is meant to enact.
i think, then, that in order to give us a better idea of what it was like to exist with a sense outside our lives experience she needed to employ many different mediums. she prefaces these performances with the bit about seeing words in order to give us a little context for these seemingly bizarre moments. whether, read out loud, read silently (to one's self), or whatever, the fact of living with an extra language-carnate sense is the thing central to her work, and through these various mediums she can hope to express what it was/is like to live with and experience this thing. we have a limited number of senses available to us to try to understand something which is impossible for us to understand, so she needs to spread it out across all our senses the best she can (though of course, ultimately, she fails).
i'm debating on whether or not i could fit weiner into the muse/genius model of artistic merit even if i wanted to. there seems to be something so incredibly out of control about what she does which runs opposite to how i perceive much of the work created by the 'genius'. the muse, i guess, makes a little more sense, as being struck by the muse is essentially a divine possession, where some god/creation being pops into your little brain pan to create some art or whatever. so weiner could have been touched by a muse[angel]. still, i don't know, there's something controlled about 'tradition' and 'genius,' and weiner just wouldn't exactly fit into this (flawed) format.
Delete(and the man is tryin to keep me down by imposing his totally fascist character limit on my thought)
I went into this whole Hannah Weiner thing as a total skeptic. I don't subscribe to the "genius" artist theory (how could I, wanting to be an artist but not having any genius-y qualities), but I also have a very Midwestern suspicion of anything that comes off as "precious" in its artsiness. Seeing and transcribing words found on benign surfaces seems pretty damn precious. But as I read her words, and then in particular when I heard/saw her and her friends read them, I realized that Weiner is doing something kind of amazing. Do I still think it's weird and suspect? Maybe, but she wasn't deconstructing language and turning it into absurdity the way I feared such a project might. Instead, if anything, she's re-constructing it. She's putting meaning into a lack of meaning, if that makes sense.
ReplyDeleteStory: So a few years ago, during an appointment to get his bad hearing checked, my younger brother was diagnosed as having auditory dyslexia. Like regular dyslexia, this means words and phrases shifted for him to a point of semi-confusion. He can read just fine and visually construct things just fine, but when spoken/sung words come at him quickly or with background noise, he gets a little jumbled. The example the doctor gave was that he might hear simple phrases like "cat sat" as "cat's at." It hasn't effected his life too negatively; after all, he was 20 years old before he got this diagnosis and none of us had any idea anything was wrong (other than that he could never tell present voices apart from voices on the TV when it was on, and that he mumbles pretty badly). But over time, we've learned that all those years he just coped with what he heard. When listening to music, he always hears lyrics wrong. When watching a movie with a heavy score, he sometimes has no idea what's being said. And foreign languages are completely beyond him. Instead, he lives very contendedly in his own world, with his favorite misheard lyrics and dialogue. He's created some kind of creatively vibrant world within the absence of the textual communication. (And, like Weiner in some ways, he's taken that world he's had to create out of misheard/transcribed information and he's turned it into a passion for visual media and film. Also, he has a major talent for writing commercial copy, which is strange. Despite not being a reader and not enjoying school and unable to hear words correctly, he actually might have a better vocab than me and is better at foisting easy-to-understand text on people).
I had no idea what the world inside my brother's ears might sound like until this Weiner reading came along. Weiner mentions that she likes the way the words in the Clairvoyant Journal are smashed together so that it becomes harder for an audience to separate the words. Listening to those pieces, I got an actual inside look at what the world of auditory dyslexia is like. And you know what? It's kind of fun. It's not turning language into meaninglessness. It's turning language into something new again. Which is the point of any good poetry, right?
And I got rejected, too, Drew. Here's the rest:
DeleteThe code poems are a great example of this, too. There's that amazing quote from Wiener in that Durgan intro which says, "Exploring the things that keep us from communication. A sharing of experience often leads to an increased awareness...An assignment for any student absent from class: for the period he should be in class, to be aware of what he is doing and to think of class also - to discuss his feelings and experience at the next class. This always brings out valuable information." I love this idea that art can do these things, that it can communicate across absences because the absences themselves have some kind of meaning to them that should be shared. Joyelle mentioned the kind of community in the art Weiner participates in, which I think is what our goals as writers should be: not to become geniuses but to become the kind of artists who can create bridges inside those terrible/wonderful/lonely/fruitful absences.
Sorry if it got a little cheesy there at the end. But that's how I feel.
Man, Beth...be cheesy more often! I love what you said. It's very true, and I'm with you.
DeleteAnd by the way, I didn't realize you had posted before I posted my response, so thanks for your thoughts too. :)
DeleteGreat thoughts, Joyelle and Drew. I particularly love the idea of art as a “radiant conveyance."
ReplyDeleteWhat immediately struck me about Weiner is her view of the whole of life and the world as art--or creation. It seems like she tries to get the whole world into her everything she does—every thought and perception, every word that she sees, all the simultaneous events going on in a single moment that she can possibly perceive—everything. Not only that, but she’s also concerned with art’s ability to interact with the world-at-large, changing its contours, redirecting its forces, raising awareness that the world isn’t a static “thing” at all, but an endlessly propulsive creative process that one’s own creative force can be a part of. I loved the 2nd part of World Works in particular: “I vacuumed the street. The world works with a little help from us all.”
I knit together Weiner’s work in various media (text, street art, performance, fashion, etc.) as demonstrating the basic principal that if you simply let yourself become open to and aware of inner and outer experience, you suddenly notice that everything is art, i.e. the creative force in action. Her written work shows this--and I’m particularly drawn to her written work, especially the pages from her Clairvoyant Journal, just because they’re so visually arresting and seem to convey in a really immediate way what I’m talking about. I liked the video and audio performances with her friends too, because the play and overlap of voices, the dynamic exchange of phrases, and the simple music of the performances dramatize Weiner’s experiences for me in really sensuous way and playful way.
Whenever Weiner describes her experience of seeing words written in the air, on foreheads, etc., it strikes me that she always does so in a really direct, unselfconscious, and rather humble way. Her unique experience is exciting and interesting, and she simply wants to share it and investigate it in her artwork. I think, too, that while her mind is particularly interesting, she’s also passionate about letting people know that everyone has a mind in which all sorts of interesting things happen all the time. That’s the main reason she seems to dislike the linearity of sentence structure—it doesn’t really reflect the activity of mind (or the world, for that matter). She writes in Mostly About the Sentence: “Many things happen at once…Linear writing must leave out many simultaneous thoughts and events. I am trying to show the mind.”
In this way, Weiner’s work actually reminds me a lot of the work of John Cage, who was first and foremost a musician, but also a graphic artist, a writer, and a whole host of other things. He was also really interested in Zen, which Weiner mentions a few times, and nurtured the same basic openness to inner/outer experience that Weiner seems to. Cage has an infamous piece of “music” entitled 4’33”—it’s basically a piece that’s performed by not being performed at all. Performers and audience just sit in silence for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, becoming aware of all the simultaneous “events” going on around them. (At least they're supposed to; some people just get really angry.) It’s a piece that both encourages people to become aware of the world and their own minds as art, and also deconstructs the artist as a special font of creativity, i.e. the “Genius.”
I’ve always loved the idea of art as a dynamic process that converges and interacts with the creative force of the world itself. In opposition to the ways in which the powers-that-be try to appropriate creativity and limit it to a certain sphere, I think artists like Weiner (and Cage too) show that Art is always going on all around us, all the time, and the only thing that we really have to do is pay attention to the creative activity of both the external and internal worlds to know that no one owns, or can own, the creative force. Everyone, in one way or another, is a medium of creative energy, the world itself is a medium, and Hannah Weiner is a medium in a really unique way.
Experiencing Hannah Weiner’s poetry for me was a series of anxiety attacks. Seriously, it’s taken me a long time to try and get through the video and audio clips. The written word was easier for me to manage. After reading Joyelle’s post (which was totally insightful, thanks) I wondered what about the written was easier for me to manage? And why were the audio clips of the Clairvoyant Journals the most difficult thing for me to get through?
ReplyDeleteWeiner’s work links back to last week, with the ideas of containment. Weiner’s poetry isn’t contained in a traditional way, like Joyelle was talking about with this artist/genius centered model. Seeing words outside of her is quite literally crossing a boundary that defines art or artist as an internal reflection or imagination. This might be one reason for the unnerving effect.
The visual representations of her poems (book and video) seemed for me to provide a frame or reference point to organize the information around, even the audio clips of her reading alone were easier for me to organize. It was the journals read with others that messed with my internal stability. Hearing the voices layered into each other left me with the sense of being out of control, which again undermines the idea of the artist possessing or mastering her craft. The journals show us that Hannah gives herself and her voice completely over to the external.
I also feel that the content of the her work is so chuck full of commands that I felt I was being pulled and ordered into 20 different directions at one time. It reminded me of the discussion we had in workshop this week on how people react to commands in a poem, seems my instinct was to withdraw, at least with the vast multitude and variety of commands, like stop or shut up stupid, or go to ave a, or be a pronoun.
Her work drew my attention to the magnitude of the commanded life, in which we all participate. Even the use of language or especially the use of language is a ruled, commanded containment. I love the idea that we are all trapped in a sentence: Aug 15: I CAN’T WRITE ANYTHING ELSE/ EXCEPT SENTENCES.
And on that note, I’m not sure I can write anything else about Hannah Weiner with the possible exception that she or the words she transcribes subvert the few remaining ideas I have about autonomy.
The stage of Genius is an interesting one, and reminded me of a book the CEO of the company I used to work for made us read, Colvin’s Talent is Overrated, and promptly give a book-report via Word over the intraweb. I’ll spare you all the details of the book, with the overarching theme being that genius isn’t something one is born into, but something that one can achieve through getting out of your damn comfort zone (I have multiple overlapping/negating/subsuming thoughts on this particular argument, but I’m not taking up this particular piece of cyberspace to give another report on Colvin).
ReplyDeleteThe reason I bring this up is that Hannah Weiner seems to do just that, doesn’t she? She gets out of the societal “comfort zone” and does her own jam (as Joyelle states, to “redefine [the] understanding of Art and Writing using Hannah Weiner as a starting point, to see art as a series of incomplete or oversaturated transmissions…”) which was more evident in her YouTube reading than textual reading, to view her as both a medium of audio and textual transmission: the voices are multiple, the behaviors odd and commanding (which makes me think she plays in the schizopoetics pool, or perhaps created it). I think she kept repeating her “sometimes I hear voices/sometimes I see words” to further reify the synesthesia of superfluidity, of superimposition— that these are tools by which all art flows + is deposited + is subsumed + decays + echoes &etc. For Ms Weiner, I feel, she wanted to make the vibrations and manifestations of medium as accessible as possible.
In “Mostly About the Sentence” she states “Before seeing words I always completed my sentence.” She goes on to state the capitals, the interruptions, the many voices, the italics— these are all the ways in which she saw these words perched on concrete and non-concrete places. She says “The CAPITALS gave me orders, and the underlines or italics made comments. This is not 100% true, but mostly so” (127). I’m fascinated by this seeming code, and the synthesis of forehead-words translating to non-surface words; she insists these are all of one voice, though they have their own personalities and names (which gets me to wonder if they really are of one voice if such is true; however, the idea they stem from the same place and have branched off to take their own control in a sort of robot manifesto forgetting such roots can be entirely acceptable as well— but I’ve learned not to dissect Weiner so closely as to the why, her what’s are far more interesting).
I’ll close with the idea of Genius, since this blog was centered around such and the notion of societal definitions will always amaze me. I believe the meat of the matter is that Hannah Weiner is moving through a space all her own, viewing + hearing the world in a transmission of superimpositions, like crossed phone lines or one weak radio wave worming its way into a stronger one. She is a poet of layers which cannot always be translated as such on paper, the background provided seems to add to the poetics rather than detract (this is an odd thing to think about, but true, as some poetry is enlightened by the poet’s stance, and other’s clouded). She is, to me, more of a what poet than a why one.
Hi everyone for your thoughts. I am a little late, I spaced out.
ReplyDeleteThade I like the idea of 4’33 music/performace. I will submit a poem like that next week
I have to confess that I was really excited to read Weiner particularly because as Joyelle articulated so well her medium—the material with which she build her poems—is a material that even though is only accessible to her during those rare moments of clairvoyance, it is still accessed from a communal mine/well. Sure she is the only that can “see” these words and put them in to poems but still, they come to her from the surrounding world around her in a way that the “genius/muse” aspect is none-existent from her work and also brings into question whether we can all be artists if only we work hard? Can we? Or do you have to have it in you? I don’t know sometimes I go back and forth on this question. And I think that it is neither one. i think what creates memorable artists are those who can build communities around them that allows them to build collaborations and to “grow” those artistic tendencies (that i think all of us have). That is one aspect of her work that resonates very strongly with me: IT IS A COLLABORATION. Weiner makes herself the tool by which she hammers into shape these communal-medieum that she has access to in moments of clairvoyance. Even though the act of seeing the words is a very personal one—“I am my object;” she says—she could not become her art unless she had that community.
As an artist I can appreciate her work because I do agree that it does away with ivory-tower of the art world. I dig that. But I think—and I question this of all performance; and avant-guard or whatever kinds of arts that do this are called—in an ironic way this type of art creates its own audiences that is composed mostly of other artist and rarely appreciated outside those circles. We may do away with this ivory-tower but we are still writing/performing and being heard by mostly other writers and artists.
I could be wrong about this and this complain might betray my convictions rather than a well defined argument. This art , while it may not be part of the ivory-tower/academia or whatever is still very exclusive and in a way creates is one micro version of the muse/genius world in that it is only those that are “in” that really “understand.” I often think that art is a very narcissist undertaking because we like to believe or we might want to live through other ppl we might influence but the sad truth is most of our art will die with us when we die—ah but nvm i think i am getting side-tracked.
DeleteBack to her work: I felt very much like trish in that i was frustrated by the audio. while i was not frustrated by the video and which actually helped me understand, the text was confusing. Now to touch on another subject brought up by joyelle and that was the prose which i saw as a performance as well and which was just beautiful and which I assume she really did for example where she stood on a corner as if she were “soliciting” and describes a “not nice feeling at all” followed by the text: “I ALSO SPRINKLED STARS ON THE STREET” which made wonder if she actually did that or if it was sentence she saw on that street. Either away it was again a doing away with the genius/muse thing and really making something as painful and ugly as hooking into material that is poetry itself, the stars and hookers being the same, the hookers are not “like” starts but they incarnate each other: that is beautiful poetry not as organized language but as language that is “lived out” a poetics of the flesh .