[R. Nemo Hill]

Re: conceptual art (which I do have a fondness for)...from an article about Yoko Ono, by Lisa Carver, in this week’s Sunday Times Magazine.


“...she is not easy, her paintings aren’t recognizable, her voice is not pretty, her films are without plot and her happenings make no sense. One of her painting you are told to sleep on. One of her paintings you are told to burn. One of her paintings isn’t a painting at all—it’s you going outside and looking at the sky. Most of her stuff is not even there. This is why I love her. This is why we need her. We have too much stuff already. It clutters our view, inward and outward.

We need more impossible in our culture. Go out and capture moonlight on water in a bucket, she commands. Her art is instructions for tasks impossible to complete. We already have a billion lovely things and a million amazing artists who have honed their talent and have lorded it above us. People wearing their roles as artist or writer or filmmaker or spokesman as a suit of armor or as an invisibility cloak or as an intimidatingly, unaquirably tasteful outfit.....

There are two schools of art. One is what is made beautiful by the artist; the other is to make way for the viewer to see or feel what is already beautiful.

The first is to make something ornate and unreachably special with skills. The viewer or listener is awed, their belief regarding the order of things is confirmed and they are reminded by this unachievable beauty of their own powerlessness. And I do love that kind of art, the beautiful kind.

The other way to make art is to tear down what’s between us and nature, us and eternity, us and the realization that everything is already perfect. In this experience of art, the viewer or listener loses respect for the current order or arrangement of civilization and thus becomes powerful, like King Kong, and outside civilization, like God—or simply like the shuffling janitor who is pleased with his own work and sleeps well....

Ono used the negative positively.....It takes an enormous lack of ego to not put your imprint on everything you do, to not employ your learning and position. To stand back, to hold back, to keep your mouth shut. To yell with your silence, when you know you very well could make soothing and welcome sounds at the drop of a hat.....It takes willpower to overpower the will to power....."


Plenty to chew on there, methinks.

Nemo

[Bill Carpenter]

There is a sweetness to this, no doubt enhanced by the presenter, that distinguishes it from merely intellectual cleverness. The poet pretends to imagine a piscine creature's wordless, rhythmic lullaby or paean; that is touching. That said, I would prefer to draw a broad gray line between verbal and non-verbal compositions, and declare that non-verbal compositions are not poems. This is an object of visual art, as Don said, but also an imitation of a musical score (a series of non-verbal notations instructing the reader to make sounds in time) displayed as a visual object. But we don't even know what the sounds are, so it is only an abstract of a score.

From another point of view, when representational painting is abstracted into color, line, and mass, you still have color, line, and mass, with the intellectual and aesthetic suggestions the painter can make them carry. This display is not an abstraction from a poem in the same way. There are no sounds, no letters, no words, no syllables, but only signs used in prosodic analysis that are applied to syllables -- as if you marked a canvas with partial formulae for the chemical compositions of pigments or with partial verbal or mathematical descriptions of the spaces to which the absent pigments could apply.

I would be surprised if I ever saw another non-verbal printed construction I liked half as much!

[Charlotte Innes]

Originally Posted by Charlotte Innes

Is this poetry? The essayist accepts that it is. Do I? Well, OK. But more a trigger for poetry, a prompt, a match to set the imagination on fire, a flintstone to strike the spark of poetry in others. Not such a bad thing, that.

I really liked the little piece you excerpted above, Nemo, on Yoko Ono's "conceptual art." I do think she's describing something akin to a "trigger," which I mentioned in my post (#9) and which Amit also alluded to in his post (#12). He added that "Zen koans are like this. So are certain mantras. Or short poems by Paul Celan..."

The fish poem nudges our preconceptions, makes us think, argue, question, pay attention.... And what Yoko Ono apparently has tried to do is to find more attentive ways of looking IN, and ways of looking further OUT than we are accustomed to--ways of paying attention to what's really there, without worldly clutter, also an attempt to shuck off inner clutter.

But isn't this also is the mark of a good poet? Paying attention is the preparation for a poem, isn't it? So, is the preparation itself a kind of art?

And isn't that kind of attention a matter for the individual? In what way is it accessible to others? Isn't art about sharing with others, or can it be simply in the making, whether it's tangible or not?

How does art include others if it is: "To stand back, to hold back, to keep your mouth shut. To yell with your silence."

Is connecting with others through art always "...the will to power? (See the end of Nemo's excerpt above.)

?????

Charlotte

[Tim Murphy]

I'm too busy hunting my puppy to pay much attention to this affair. Amit, I have written one concrete poem, a fully rhymed tetrameter, Frost in Key West, which the Formalist nominated for a pushcart. It was concrete because it started out on the right margin, and the way I wildly lineated it and spaced it, it trended to the left margin, imitating the map of the Keys as it descended the page. I have also written one Zen koan. I don't object to experimentation, but I expect meter and rhyme of anyone pretending to the title of poet.

[Nigel Mace]

I'm afraid this is nonsense. If poetry means anything, or indeed human art, it requires to be the expression of senient human beings capable of understanding and recognition, at least in some part, by other human beings. This prating about meaningful absences and silent yelling is a pathetic, at best, abnegation of the potential of human experience and, at worst, a fraud on human consciousness. The number of people who buy this is, thank goodness, negligible. The number of 'intellectuals' and artistic critics who do so, is tragically large. Time and survival will tell as it has always done. Meanhwile, let it be plainly stated "The Emperor has no clothes."

(This refers back to the posts praising this work and especially to the Lisa Carver piece quoted above.)

[David Rosenthal]

I have no automatic aversion to conceptual art of any kind. But, while I agree there is something endearing about the poem (I think Bill put it well -- "a sweetness"), I don't find it all that compelling or effective.

David R.

[John Whitworth]

You have to remember that Morgenstern (unlike say Mark Rothko) didn't spend his life doing this sort of thing. I am determined you will like this guy

The Moonsheep
The moonsheep stands upon the clearing.
He waits and waits to get his shearing.
The moonsheep.

The moonsheep plucks himself a blade
returning to his alpine glade.
The moonsheep.

The moonsheep murmurs in his dream:
'I am the cosmos' gloomy scheme.'
The moonsheep.

The moonsheep, in the morn, lies dead.
His flesh is white, the sun is red.
The moonsheep.

-- Christian Morgenstern

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

I like the work of this poem appreciator. He raised the poem/visual thingy value for me, led me to look through versions of Morgenstern's Werewolf poem on the web until I found one I really dug. (Like John said, it is important to put this work alongside the rest of the artist's stuff.)
I have no idea where to divide that which the poet brought and that which the appreciator infused but all I can say is the appreciator made we wish to find all those thrums and nightsongs in those scales and I usually hate concrete poems. Should I ever take to pissing in fountains I should like this appreciator as my PR agent.

[Don Jones]

This prating about meaningful absences and silent yelling is a pathetic, at best, abnegation of the potential of human experience and, at worst, a fraud on human consciousness. The number of people who buy this is, thank goodness, negligible. The number of 'intellectuals' and artistic critics who do so, is tragically large. Time and survival will tell as it has always done.

Oh, please, Nigel! "Meaningful absences?" I for my part pointed out several quantifiable attributes to this piece of visual art. Not that therefore you must agree with me but it is hardly the case that my and others’ appreciation of this work is somehow fraudulent, that it induces, for example, “a fraud on human consciousness.” Or perhaps you mean that those who appreciate this work are being duped but don't know it. Which is a gentlemanly way of saying you think we're idiots. Fair enough, if so.

No doubt you and I radically diverge on some aesthetic, perhaps even moral, fronts. I honestly have no rancor towards you, Nigel. However, I take exception to being, by implication, taken as an "intellectual." Both Orwell and John Lukacs have taught me to hate intellectuals. Fair enough also.

How can you declare that this poem is like an abnegation of the potential of human experience? You certainly had an experience looking (not reading) this work of visual art. No?

This poem, mind you, is as old as a Hardy masterpiece. Though you hate it, intelligent people like you who care about poetry and communication can actually enjoy “this kind of thing.” Can I not have this and Hardy too?

Respectfully,

Don

BTW: Rothko did amazing work.

[William A. Baurle]

I think it's perfectly fine to say you don't see any meaning or value in a work of art, if you really don't see any meaning or value there, but when a bunch of people talk about what meaning and value they find in it, and give lengthy expression to what it is they find, at that point it seems a bit silly to insist that the work has no meaning and no value and that the people who said it does are seeing something that isn't there. If one wants to insist that the emperor is naked, one must show the people who see clothes on him that the clothes they see aren't actually there, or give sound reason to suggest that those people are seeing clothes because they feel compelled to see them because they are worried that other people won't think they're very clever if they say they don't see them.

I see clothes on this emperor, and I've described the clothes in a bit of detail which really isn't much of a stretch at all, and others have pointed out the clothes that they see, and which, once pointed out, I can see also. The job for those who claim the emperor is naked is to explain to those who see clothes on him that those clothes are only illusions, and not really there at all.

This poem has already stood the test of time that 99.999999...% percent of poems, published or not, will not be able to match. How many poems published in the last year all across the world, or posted on the Internet, will still be talked about a century from now? Precious few, I would venture to guess, and with good reason.