GERALD
BRUNS
FRANCIS PONGE ON THE RUE DE LA CHAUSSÉE D'ANTIN
.ARTSPACE. WHAT BECOMES of things in art? This is still the question of questions in aesthetic theory, which has understood from the beginning of modernism that the terms "non-representational," "non-mimetic," or "abstract," however much they may capture something of what the experience of non-traditional works of art is like, have little application to twentieth-century art and literature. Modern art is filled with things. A Cubist collage is made of real newspaper clippings, and so is a poem by William Carlos Williams. The method of modern poetry is, manifestly, "quotation, commentary, pastische," as if the poem had become a space for language rather than a use of it. What kind of space? When Marcel Duchamp exhibited an ordinary snow shovel as his most recent composition, he altered the relation between works of art and real things in remarkably conservative fashion, as if to argue that the function of the modern work of art is neither to duplicate nor eradicate the world but to find somewhere else for it, which is perhaps all that Mallarmé had in mind when he said that the world was made to exist in a splendid book.
Think about what becomes of words in a poem—for example, a
poem by David Antin, who says
i don't want to be
considered a poet if a poet is someone
who adds art
to
talking A poem by David Antin poem is made of talk, and is, on a
certain view, artless (made of improvisations, lots of drift from topic to
topic, indifference to triviality, that sort of thing). Unfortunately talk is a
species of discourse that has always fallen below thresholds of formal
description, so we haven’t got a theory of it; but basically what David Antin
does is stand up in front of an audience and talk. And since the social space in
which he often does such a thing is that of a poetry reading, what one
experiences is a sort of category mistake—an estranie-effect produced
not so much by defamiliarization as by a reversal (or reversion) of the
aesthetic into the familiar or everyday. What is it to "talk a poem," as against (as one
supposes) composing it on a keyboard or whatever and then reciting it? If I
understand, Antin would respond to a question of this sort by urging something
like an analogy between words in a poem and furniture on a stage, where art is
not a work of something (a construction or an artifact) but rather, as he
says, "the act of putting it there"—an event rather than (strictly)
an object, which is what characterizes so much of the American artworld since
the 1950s, where, in the spirit of Duchamp and John Cage, performance trumps
composition: