I feel about conceptual writing the way I feel about dessert: I like it. Sometimes I like it a lot. Sometimes, it's all I want to eat. I get a sugar high. It's awesome. Mmmm, fruits or nuts rolled in honey. I could drink this hot chocolate and eat raspberry cheesecake all day. Throw some chocolate chip/M&M cookies in there too. Sure, why not a pixie stick. Okay, I'll have some more angel food cake. Ice cream? Yes please!
But it isn't sustainable. And I get a stomach ache. And I feel like crap.
Okay, food isn't writing. But writing also isn't visual art, which is the problem with Kenneth Goldsmith's animating analogy in the introduction to Against Expression, an anthology of cakes, cookies, pastries, ice cream, pie, candies, and other forms of conceptual writing.
In the intro, Goldsmith argues that the internet has created a sea change moment for writing comparable to the effect that the invention of photography had on painting, divorcing painting from its supposedly mimetic ambitions and sending it waddling down the path to abstraction. Of course, if you talk to most contemporary artists, they'll chuckle at this archaic & simplistic narrative of modern art (Chuck Close anyone?).
Flawed analogy aside, Goldsmith's assessment seems dead-on: the digital age is fundamentally changing the way we use language--the processes of appropriation, collage, erasure, doctoring, splicing, mashing, control+c, control+v, etc, are probably almost second nature to poets of my generation & younger. But the inevitability of the self-assured, "grand narrative" avant-garde logic rubs me wrong. Collage does not necessarily lead to conceptualism.
Oh yeah, and another thing: concepts are boring.
1 comment:
Louise Glück, in her preface to "The Cuckoo" by YYP winner Peter Streckfus: "The case for nonsense is not the same as the case against meaning."
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