The following article is the third installment in an ongoing
series of artworks which investigate the relationship between
author and reader, artist and viewer. These works also question
the very notion of the author; if truth is determined by
the subjective, infinitely variable experience of the reader,
then can objective truth even exist? Such concerns, at the
heart of post-structuralist theory and conceptual art, pose
writing as text, visual arts as site. Within these spaces
meaning is dialectical, fluctuating in a system of social,
historical and political factors. The artist merely provides
an opening into this environment and his interpretation
of the work is as relative as any spectator's. In this spirit,
I have constructed this essay through the words of others,
as a (loosely) coherent site of the dialectic. While many
of these sources are deeply entrenched in literary theory,
a number are taken completely out of context. Even in contradiction,
the ideas of others can be adapted and re-contextualised.
An extensive endnotes section opens up the dialectic further,
directing the reader to continue beyond the text. For the
sake of cohesiveness, capitalization and punctuation have
been altered to fit the text.
II.
We only ever speak one language... (yes, but) we never
speak only one language 1.
I, too, hide in language, within this book 2.
I use words in a sense that makes them meaningless, and
of course the only way you can make something meaningless
is to present it in all of its possible meanings 3.
'An author is the only person who has written his or her
own words'- the assumed definition of identity is questionable.
For instance, I do not write out of nothing, or from nothing,
for I must write with the help of other texts, be these
texts written ones, oral ones, those of memory, those of
dream, etc. 4.
One might even describe the concept of the unique individual
and the theoretical basis of individualism as ideological
5. All art,
from the crassest mass-media production to the most esoteric
art-world practice, has a political existence, or, more
accurately, an ideological existence. It either challenges
or supports (tacitly, perhaps) the dominant myths a culture
calls truth 6. The individual
is an effect of power, and at the same time 7
we are more than individuals, we are the whole
chain as well 8.
Both he who is writing these lines and the reader who reads
them are themselves subjects, and therefore ideological
subjects 9.
I am also an artist- if that means anything at all in this
post-Derridean context 10.
I am led by my ideas, but where do these ideas come from
11?
A sharing of the void, a pooling of lack which is today
the rule in individual and social relations 12.
The sudden multiplication of 'points of view' 13.
A veritable revolution in our conception of the relations
between power, desire, identity, political practice 14.
An universe of borders, seesaws, fragile and mingled identities,
wanderings of the subject and its objects 15...
the tempting traps of structuralism and formalism and the
obsession with modernity 16.
A vast amalgam of disparate signs, styles and structures
culled indiscriminately from world cultures, past and present
17. A quality
of anarchic freedom and explosive creativity in the exotic
hybrids produced 18.
Art's declaration of independence is thus the beginning
of the end of art 19.
What does it mean to have property 20?
I think that the meanings change 21...
we can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never
original 22.
A dialectical text, rather than presenting an opinion as
if it were truth, challenges the reader to discover truths
on their own 23.
A text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological'
meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional
space in which a variety of writings, none of them original,
blend and clash 24.
Meanings shift and change their reference like shifting
perceptions of perspective from an optical illusion 25
;not a picture of living reality, but merely
an arrangement of dead signs 26.
There are just as many objective principles of taste as
there are aesthetic judgements 27...the
maximization of opportunities for individual variation 28.
In seeing an object, I can construe (translate) that object
within many seemingly complete 'languages' of perception.
Another person seeing the same object may construe a similar
number of languages, none of which need necessarily coincide
with mine 29.
Suppose the library has two copies of Tolstoy's War and
Peace, Peter takes out one, and John the other. Did Peter
and John take out the same book, or different books 30?
Preoccupied as I was with my notes and the ever-widening
and contracting circles of my thoughts, I became enveloped
by a sense of utter emptiness 31.
I had to go to the records 32.
On a piece of paper in the wastebasket is the following
text, scribbled in pencil 33:
There will appear orthodox publications, something like
our encyclopaedic dictionaries, in which everything will
be so accurately calculated and plotted that there will
no longer be any individual texts or adventures left in
the world 34.
I find myself digging deeper 35...
words slip away from me; the 'I' sounds false 36.
It occurred to me that my thoughts were becoming incoherent,
which wasn't unusual. Sustained for a phrase or two, they
splintered 37
(anonymous yet differentiated crowds swept up in an endless,
seemingly haphazard pattern of movement 38).
An empty shell. Those were the first words that sprang
to mind 39.
This work existed already before it was made 40...
exists in the instant it comes into being and is simultaneously
received 41.
The demise of the author as transcendent self or bearer
of meaning has borne along a rejection of the text as discrete
or self-contained object; attention has been focused, instead,
on a model that poses meaning as constructed in the discourses
that articulate it, in an interactive context of reader
and text 42.
The existence of all these meanings indicates that that
the communication involved here is not solely or essentially
one between individuals- between author and spectator 43.
In order to reflect the thing as it is, the spectator must
return to it more than he receives from it 44.
Each self harbors unsuspected, and undetectable, dimensions
that identity may prove to be far more baroque than we had
imagined 45...
we see our own image multiplied in its facetted reflections
46.
Art 'lives' through influencing other art, not by existing
as the physical residue of an artist's ideas. The reason
that different artists from the past are 'brought alive'
again is because some aspect of their work becomes 'usable'
by living artists. That there is no 'truth' as to what art
is seems quite unrealized 47.
The philosopher can no longer pretend to provide privileged
access to truth 48.
Language is a reality that is not about truth 49.
Within postmodernity, when one opens up spaces within spaces
one often finds more images, more sounds 50.
We receive the 'world' as fragmented, shattered, hence differentiated
51. The text
is informed by discursive operations at the level of its
conception, production and reception 52.
An artist might advance specifically to get lost, and to
intoxicate himself in dizzying syntaxes, seeking odd intersections
of meaning, strange corridors of history, unexpected echoes,
unknown humors or voids of knowledge 53.
Neither randomness, heterogeneity of content, nor indeterminacy
are sources of confusion for this mode 54.
It depends for its effect on the context of ideas it changes
and joins 55,
depends on the beholder, is incomplete without him
56. New meanings and values, new practices,
new relationships and kinds of relationships are continually
being created 57...
no pre-established harmony or order, no certainty 58.
Everything exists within the world; nothing can exist independently
59.
This shift in practice entails a shift in position; the
artist becomes a manipulator of signs more than a producer
of art objects, and the viewer an active reader of messages
rather than a passive contemplator of the aesthetic or consumer
of the spectacular 60.
As with allegorical fragments, the viewer must fill in,
add to, build upon suggestive elements in the text supplying
extraneous historical, personal and social references, rather
than, as in modernism, transporting himself to the special
world and time of the artist's original production 61.
The concept of an 'ideal' receiver is detrimental in the
theoretical consideration of art 62.
Individuated texts have become filaments of infinitely
tangled webs 63.
Each piece segues into the next like chapters in an evocative
but fragmentary novel, weaving non-narrative stories that
buzz with human presence but in which no human appears 64.
Everywhere there are surprises and sensations, yet nowhere
is there any outcome 65.
A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher:
the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle
governed by pre-established rules, and they cannot be judged
according to a determining judgement, by applying familiar
categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories
are what the work of art itself is looking for 66.
Chris Clarke is a Newfoundland artist and writer
based in England.
