[-empyre-] "appropriation prohibited": iconoclash

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

Dear Hideki, Millie and everyone,

Thanks for starting out with this fascinating dichotomy between two
situations:  Hideki's method, and Millie's dilemma.

This moment is a fine instance of "iconoclash"  (Regarding this term,  see
the reference to the show, symposium and book by the same name from ZKM
Karlsruhe and MIT Press)

> http://hosting.zkm.de/icon/stories/storyReader$3

The impulse to create a concrete, phenomenologically autonomous entity,
which is both copyright protected and anonymous, which may (?) an aesthetic
of violence, the 'birth of a violent poem':  that wants a strict notation,
perhaps a 'perfect' language- all these things remind me of Italian Futurism
and equally, Antonin Artaud, in the first half of the last century.
The following is from the Q and A email bulletin at
http://aloalo.co.jp/nakazawa/method/method015_e.html> :

> Editor's notes:
> Poetry is a bomb.  Poetry has to be terrorism which harms your life.  I
> would like to announce what I have been thinking for a long time.  In
> view of the present international poetry movement, poetry should not be
> the notation to pursue one's pleasure, because if so, there will be no
> future for poetry.  We have to find the strictly adhering notation for
> poetry.  There are still many things that a method poet has to work on.
> (SM)

"Corruption and appropriation are prohibited"
> 
> Although you can send on this bulletin freely, each writer still holds
> the copyright.  Corruption and appropriation are prohibited.  Your sound
> judgement is required in forwarding this bulletin to others.

So there is a moral action here:  sound judgment.  Is this discrimination at
the core of the Method?  Is the Method a moral position? Is there a Right
Action, in a Buddhist sense, involved in the making of a Method work?
Is there an individual acting at the core of the Method?  Does that
individual have anything to 'express' that could be copyrighted as being an
individual expression?  Is the Method iconoclastic?

Looks like a really interesting counterpoint to Millie's dilemma, which
seems to be about the problem of weaving so many different threads of visual
and sound content, created by individuals like herself,  from net-based
sources that it is impossible to give credit or secure copyright permissions
for everything.  Millie's method is collage, another great Modernist
convention.  The Cornell box, the Schwitters drawing. Millie's method
presumes that the individual artist makes objects or processes that engage
in aesthetic pleasures, which might include, but do not exclusively commit,
to a violence.  Millie's moral action involves the desire to "do the right
thing" (to borrow from Spike Lee).  But, try as she might, she finds she
can't (kind of an Augustinian problem). Is Millie's work iconophilic?


Millie's artistic motifs are protean, Rabelaisian, perhaps Epicurean,
linking things, echoing and reflecting.  Perhaps they respond to a metaphor
of biologic processes. Hideki's are pure, discrete, mathematical, Stoic, and
seem to involve metaphors of quantum mechanics.

Surely, however, neither one can really prevent "appropriation" .

Is there any way these two positions intersect?  Is MEZ  and mezangelle
providing an intermediate term? Hello MEZ or any of your avatars, any
comment??.....

These questions are intriguing...

Christina