C104
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Aspen
5 + 6 in the original mail packaging, 1967;
photo Cian McCann; courtesy the author
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A labyrinth
in a box: ASPEN 5+6
Mary Ruth
Walsh describes a radical tour-de-force at the word/image
interface.
In
retrospect, it [Aspen 5+6] summed up the sensibility of
that decade and foretold much of what was to influence
artists subsequently.
-Irving Sandler
In 1967,
Aspen 5+6, a magazine in a box, was edited, or more properly
compiled by Brian O'Doherty. Aspen 5+6 is the first self-contained,
portable conceptual exhibition in a box that dispenses
with the gallery. The gallery is the box itself. The box
and its contents, while it is a work of art itself, questions
the role of its impresario. Is O'Doherty the author, the
curator, or the artist - or all three? His presence is
sometimes masked and indirect. The text that introduces
the exhibition is from a book called Language as Placement
(1928) by one Sigmond Bode. Bode, however, is one of O'Doherty's
aliases, also used in a poem published ten years before
in Dublin. The extract from the fictitious book provides
a rationale for the 'exhibition' in a box. "It should
be possible to construe a situation in which persons,
things, abstractions, become simple nouns and are thus
potentially objectified...conjugated in such a way that
their positions imply 'verbs' in the spaces (silences)
between them." We are advised that this 'invisible grammar'
of the box's contents "can be read within and between
categories." The box, as we shall see, has six categories
or 'movements'. "To identify such a grammar, to read such
a language," Sigmond Bode forewarns, "constitutes a test
for the reader."
O'Doherty's
Aspen, his one-man show for that year, is a pristine
white box measuring eight by eight by two inches, bisected
mid-section so that the box when opened forms two identical
halves which the recipient can arrange in several ways
- longitudinally, symmetrically or asymmetrically, or
vertically as miniature monoliths reminiscent of Tony
Smith's (whose work the box also contains). The modules
allow the recipient to ad lib his or her own combinations.
The small
scale of the box is paradoxical in relation to the vast
and complex exhibition it contains. The design is, however,
reserved and pared down. The box contains four 8mm films,
five records, a sculpture model, and printed matter. The
printed matter is presented on eight-by-eight-inch square
sheets and booklets. This arrangement has unmistakable
echoes of the grid which Rosalind Krauss relates closely
to the conceptual art of the sixties. The grid can be
read many ways. Patrick Ireland (the identity O'Doherty
took for his artwork in 1972 following the Derry massacre)
describes the grid in all its contradictions as
grandchild
of perspective and the Renaissance. It's supposed to
be indexical of all that is rational, but I think it's
as mad as many logical things turn out to be - artificial,
hysterical, subsuming its own version of chaos. It's
rigid but flexible, a measure of scale but scaleless,
it's flat with imitations of depth, democratic about
space but really absolutist, stamped with rigidity but
alert with permutational virtuosity. It's a container
that contains itself, that is both form and content.
(Ireland, 1998).
Pulling the
conceptual grid of Aspen's contents together forms a quasi-chessboard
of 8 by 8 squares, exactly echoing the box's measurements.
This analogy may prove helpful in exploring Aspen 5+6,
since its conceptual 'moves' are complex and, like the
black and white colours of chess, its operations are conducted
through a dialogue of opposites. The box - if we call
it a thinking box, as well we may - presents six 'movements'
as categories. They are placed on the contents page, the
key to the box, in two registers: 'constructivism', 'structuralism',
'conceptualism', 'tradition of paradoxical thinking' (presumably
referring to Dada), 'objects' and 'between categories'
(a title the composer Morton Feldman - also an inhabitant
of the box - immediately borrowed for one of his compositions).
Below, these are refined into three 'themes': 'time (in
art and 'history')', 'silence and reduction' and 'language'.
These three may be used as tools to decipher the hidden
language of the box,
The repeated
references to language point to the dedication of the
box to Stephane Mallarmé, which may well set a certain
tone for the reading of Aspen 5+6. While Mallarmé suppresses
the author for the sake of the writing, Roland Barthes
went much further in his immensely influential essay for
Aspen 5+6, The Death of the Author. Indeed the thirty-two-page
pamphlet of essays commissioned by O'Doherty from Barthes,
Kubler and Sontag are in exact symmetry with the box's
three themes - language, time and silence. Barthes' inclusion
is a key work within the context of the box. In his essay
he does away with the myth of the author's autonomy and
reinstates the status of the reader:
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Top
left: Aspen 5 + 6, randomised view of the
contents;
photo Cian McCann; courtesy the author
Top right: Sol Le Witt: Serial Project
1, Aspen 5 + 6;
photo Cian McCann; courtesy the author
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Once
the Author is gone, the claim to "decipher" a text becomes
quite useless. To give an Author to a text is to impose
upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final
signification, to close the writing. This conception
perfectly suits criticism, which can than take as its
major task the discovery of the Author (or his hypostases:
society, history, the psyche, freedom) beneath the work:
once the Author is discovered, the text is "explained,"
the critic has conquered; hence it is scarcely surprising
not only that, historically, the reign of the Author
should also have been that of the Critic...in a multiple
writing, indeed, everything is to be distinguished,
but nothing deciphered; structure can be followed, "threaded"
(like a stocking that has run) in all its recurrences
and all its stages, but there is no underlying ground;
the space of the writing is to be traversed, not penetrated.
(Aspen 5+6, Section 3)
Barthes'
notion of the work's reception rhymes in several ways
with other components of Aspen 5+6, particularly with
Duchamp's emphasis on the viewer who completes the artwork
in his Creative Act (1957), and Feldman's listeners who
occupy what Feldman called "a plane of attention" in such
a work as his King of Denmark, both specially recorded
for Aspen 5+6. Barthes, whose spatial metaphors for reading
are invigorating, projects a text into dimensions where
the reading will be as varied as the reader's immediate
experience. "There is no other time than that of the utterance,
and every text is eternally written here and now" - two
of the three words, it will be remembered, Patrick Ireland
translated into ogham, and to which he devoted some thirty
years of drawings and paintings. Other commentators (Ashton
in 1968 and Alberro in 2001) have emphasised Barthes'
comment "everything is to be distinguished, but nothing
deciphered" and the image of the "stocking that has run"
as helpful in tracking the analogical runs and cross-references
with which Aspen 5+6 abounds. Among the books that were
being read in 1967 by artists and art historians (and
by O'Doherty and his friends) was George Kubler's The
Shape of Time (1962), in which Kubler argues (convincingly)
the need to see art and its changes in terms of very long
durations, thereby undercutting the formal art history
then still current, with its lists, schools, and styles.
"Many have thought that to make the inventory would lead
towards such an enlarged understanding" (Harrison, 1992).
Kubler observes
our dependence on the object with a focus on the idea
of series. Series, an important early conceptual idea,
describes a stretching across time, frustrating a linear
historical reading. "Like crustaceans we depend for survival
upon an outer skeleton, upon a shell of historic cities
and houses filled with things belonging to definable portions
of the past... The oldest things made by men are stone
tools. A continuous series runs from them to the things
of today." (Harrison, 1992)
The essay
O'Doherty commissioned for Aspen 5+6, Style and the representation
of historical time, signals Kubler's wit and humour in
a cautionary epigraph:
Humans
surely are not unique in their capacity for identifying
different events as being recurrent. Other animals also
project their organic needs under the same guise of
identity among successive stimuli. G.A. Brecher showed
in 1932 that the snails read space into succession.
As an art historian, I am overly familiar with the notion
of style, which is another way of imposing space upon
time and of denying duration under the illusion that
successive events are similar events. To spatialize
time is a faculty shared both by snails and by historians.
(Aspen 5+6, Section 3)
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Top
left: Brian O'Doherty: Structural Play # 3,
Aspen 5+6;
photo Cian McCann; courtesy the author
Top right: Mel Bochner: Seven Translucent
Tiers, Aspen 5 + 6;
photo Cian McCann; courtesy the author
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The third
in this remarkable trinity of essays, also commissioned
by O'Doherty, is Susan Sontag's The Aesthetics of silence.
She articulates, unavoidably using language, which she
describes as "something shared and something corrupted"
(Aspen 5+6, Section 3), the idea of reduction and the
silence, the zero that lies beyond language. She parses
the variety and valences of silence: satisfied silence,
silence as renunciation, superior silence, provoking silence,
punishing silence, permanent silence, loaded silence (with
aggression or comfort), metaphoric silence, but goes far
beyond such taxonomy, quoting two of her colleagues 'in
the box': Cage ("there is no such thing as silence"),
who points out that in a soundless chamber he still hears
his heartbeat and the coursing of the blood in his head;
and Beckett, whose entropic desire is for an art consisting
of "the expression that there is nothing to express, no
power to express, no desire to express, together with
the obligation to express" (Aspen 5+6, Section 3). From
where, Sontag asks, does this obligation derive? "The
very aesthetics of the death wish seem to make of that
wish something incorrigibly lively" (Aspen 5+6, Section
3).
The artist
creating silence, she suggests, inevitably produces something
dialectical and she postulates "a full void, an enriching
emptiness." Closely aligning her idea of silence and perception,
she "sketches out new prescriptions for looking, hearing
etc., - specifically, either for having a more immediate,
sensuous experience of art or for confronting the art
work in a more conscious, conceptual way." Sontag senses
an urgency and spiritual restlessness in art, that "through
its advocacy of silence, reduction, etc...art commits
an act of violence upon itself, turning art into a species
of auto-manipulation, of conjuring - trying to help bring
new ways of thinking to birth." "As the prestige of language
falls, that of silence rises" (Aspen 5+6, Section 3).
The revolt against language is a search for a revision
or a new language and Sontag cites the (mainly French)
examples of Mallarmé, Alain Robbe-Grillet, William Burroughs,
Beckett and Duchamp (all of whom, in one medium or another,
share with her the space of the white box).
Sontag's rich
discourse, which continually tests the ideas it generates,
is of course conducted in the medium of her inquiry, language
itself. The self-consciousness that this necessarily invokes
(as words mirror and obscure themselves in the labyrinths
of past usage) becomes one of the most stirring parts
of her inquiry. "...speech," she says, "provokes further
speech. But speech can silence too." A circular progression
through silence and language can be identified with arresting
time, inducing varieties of awareness, of consciousness
- and self-consciousness. Most frequently, Sontag views
these matters from the perspective of the artist whose
"art thus transmits in full the alienation produced by
historical consciousness. Whatever the artist does is
in (usually conscious) alignment with something else already
done producing a compulsion to continually re-check his
situation, his own stance with those of his predecessors
and contemporaries. Compensating for this ignominious
enslavement to history, the artist dreams of a wholly
ahistorical and therefore unalienated art." (Aspen 5+6,
Section 3)
Do the three
texts elucidate the art proffered in Aspen 5+6, or does
the art illustrate the texts? The relationship is, of
course, as with many other dialogues in the box, reciprocal.
The artworks and commentaries included in Aspen 5+6 exhibit
distinct polarities. O'Doherty has frequently spoken of
the dialectical spine on which he hung movements and themes,
an armature of opposites that can be summarised as excess
and reduction. These opposites run through the box's many
media and artforms: the novel (Burroughs and Robbe-Grillet);
music (Cage and Feldman); film (Richter/Morris and Moholy-Nagy/Rauschenberg);
poetry (Butor and Graham). The box's cross-references
prompt numerous other readings: What relationship does
Burrough's collaging in Nova Express have to Rauschenberg's
practice? Does the theory of dance advanced by Cunningham
have anything in common with the text and motion of O'Doherty's
structural play? And to what degree does the psychological
identity of opposites dissolve the polarities set up within
the box, which ultimately become a shifting mindscape
of contingent relationships? To take one example, why,
we may ask, are Richter's Rhythm 21 and Morris' performance,
Site (recorded by the avant-garde filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek),
on the same 8mm reel?
What of Gabo
and Pevsner's manifesto space and time are reborn to us
today? (Aspen 5+6, Section 4). O'Doherty, one can assume
from his choices - what he called his "election of ancestors"
(Ireland, 1993) - was concerned to establish a paternity
of ideas that would build a bridge between European and
American avant-gardes. And who were to be the children
of such ancestors?
O'Doherty's
answer lies in his selection of his immediate colleagues,
most of them at that time (1967) not widely known. Morris's
film can be said to relate to O'Doherty's Structural Play
(both, by the way, are examples of the very few performance
works in the vicinity of minimalism). Morris' Site can
be used to illustrate one aspect of the LeWitt and Bochner
contributions. The time in the Morris piece is real time.
Both LeWitt and Bochner construct time through building
(Bochner's Seven translucent tiers) and through exhaustive
permutations (LeWitt's Serial Project 1). To these influential,
pioneering ventures, Graham's 'poem' adds an appropriate
linguistic coda.
The ingenuity
of the box is such that to fasten or isolate one artwork
or project is to rearrange the system of relationships
within its components. Perspectives shift, analogies touch,
chimeras appear and disappear. The dense, provocative
networks of overlayed systems in the box are so rich and
complex that they are self-supporting. A quotation from
one of O'Doherty's notebooks (Patrick Ireland, La Jolla
Museum, catalogue) goes "To look in the mirror and see
no reflection." O'Doherty, as if on cue from Barthes'
essay The death of the author, seems finally to absent
himself from his own creation. Derrida might be speaking
of the spaces within the box when he says:
Let
us space. The art of this text is the air it causes
to circulate between its screens. The chainings are
invisible, everything seems improvised or juxtaposed.
This text induces by agglutinating rather than by demonstrating,
by coupling and uncoupling, gluing and ungluing rather
than by exhibiting the continuous, and analogical, instructive,
suffocating necessity of a discursive rhetoric.
(Kamuf, 1991).
The release
from discursive rhetoric enables the work to open into
a medley of views using the conceptual tools of time,
silence and language. The breadth and richness of material
from these multi-perspectives, created in Aspen 5+6, opens
up the notion of art history.
Regrouping
all the people in Aspen 5+6 into the 'movements' as outlined
in O'Doherty's contents produces another set of opposites,
ahistorical time via the 'themes' and historical time
via the 'movements'. Both views of history are valid,
even when viewed from these opposite perspectives. The
dialectic in Aspen 5+6 is the medium in which time, silence
and language are suspended. These three 'themes' have
been the main concerns of twentieth-century art practices
and continue to be so. A view through the ahistorical
'themes' has the effect of melting chronological links
and perhaps comes closer to the artists' intentions as
opposed to the view of stylistic similarities. This new
multi-view frees the spectator from a single linear historical
reading and opens the past and future into a kaleidoscope
of ideas.
Mary Ruth
Walsh is an artist and writer, currently designing
a Fine Art Diploma for Wexford/Carlow I.T. and Gorey School
of Art.
Article reproduced
from CIRCA 104, Summer 2003,
pp. 42-46.
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