fractures of the self
by Douglas Messerli
David Antin Radical Coherency: Selected
Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2011)
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 an artist
was the idea of the exhaustion, experimental and aesthetic, of 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 specter 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, a 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 he 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.
Reprinted from Jacket 2, May 24, 2011
