© John Rinpest 2017 © ßwaf books 2017
poetry as art as poetry
a visual essay
john rindpest
waf books
Poetry as art as poetry There is something stupid in art to always be questioning and questioning its limits, like someone who scratches a wound, narcissistically. I accept this questioning as a literary farce whose results are sometimes interesting, useful, recyclable. I do not mind participating in part in this (post) paradoxical work of questioning, but there is something that makes me want to distance myself. The promiscuity between texts and art has long been great. In modernism there were a lot of people moving away from the art of literature, especially the narrative. A fun caricature of this process is literally recorded in Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word. Conceptual and post-conceptual art used texts (and typography) as art, in objects or immaterially. Some poets have become artists. The most explicit case was that of Marcel Broodthaers who quickly realized that the great difference is that art, even the most immaterial and politically radical, is always a commodity. The kind of business one can do with poetry, is alongside art, completely ridiculous. I think that in the case of Duchamp, the appropriation factor is overestimated in comparison with the poetic factor, of which it is inseparable. From my point of view the act of appropriation (and of pseudo-provocation) is subsidiary to the poetic act (which is essentially an experience of language). Hence the insistence on non-optical aspects. There is a side of dissembling and comedy in Duchamp that is to underline.
The first Conceptual Art reacts to the extreme formalism and serialism of American culture, but maintains it, even in the use of language. The concept, the idea & the process are proper terms of capitalism. The poetic tradition, which did not exclude them, considers the experience of language far beyond any intentionality, form or concepts. Poetry is not paraphraseable, and its reduction to whatever it is is imbecile. From MallarmÊ to this day much has happened in poetry. On the one hand, poetry exploded: in typography, in syntax, in sound, in rhythms, in the semantic field, in the visual aspect, in the processes, in the techniques, in the supports, etc. But most poets continue to stare at these experiences (some of them quite dull and irritating), which are tools that can bear extraordinary fruit. The triumph of versilibrism is a long stalemate that is increasingly lived and written mora & more with self-irony. If the taste of mortality entered into poetry in Baudelaire, mortality has now become an electronic-digital affair. Poetry can appropriate both its experimental heritage and the methods of the most recent art, as did, but only in a small part, Conceptual Writting, from a perspective of the great poetic lode that excludes nothing. There is a great lack of visual culture in most of the poets, which is surprising, since poetry today is distinguished from literary prose more by the visual display on the page than by rhythm or sound effects. On the other hand there has always been a relationship between art (and in particular painting) and poetry — art is silent poetry and poetry image (or art) that speaks. But since art today also speaks (and talks enough that way!) and poetry shows a lot, the difference between poetry and art can perfectly disappear. And since the boundaries of art are so extensive, what we now call poetry would only gain from it.
Experiences have already existed, both on one side and the other, but the field of art and poetry continue to talk only for themselves (art world is not the literary world). Although the theorisation of art has always tried to distance itself from poetics, and in some cases even from the practice of art, it is a necessity for me to make poetry and art theory (if possible poetics) a poetic-art. That is, to make of the Art of Poetry (Ars Poetica), poetical art works. Just take it to the literal. In this sense the creation of a Museum of Art Theory and Poetics is under way, as well as taking the placement of exhibitions as “Books” (see: Art Exhibitions as Books, by John Rindpest), in the tradition of Mallarmée. Taking up the Barthesian lode — it is not the intentionality or the idea that bothers, because they are obvious, explicit, and even when ambivalent, they are still easily codified — I prefer the old idea of indeterminate, of floating signifier, of extreme joy inherent in the signs that compose poetry-art, and that is something you can’t really trade, however much it may appear as the circunstancial ornment of any kind of power.
this book was conceived, written & published in this special occasion of pure creative euphoria by John Rindpest
beware the book