RE: [-empyre-] re: poets? (arteroids and conceptual concussions)

["Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com>]

> anyway, just a note or two of hello,
>
> re: poets?
>
> jenny holzer: http://adaweb.walkerart.org/context/artists/holzer/holzer1.html
> joseph kosuth: http://members.ozemail.com.au/~barberr/gems3.html
>
> basically, defining thru inclusion or negation on categories of poet or
> not doesn't seem to reflect the reality of how the data swirls....
> (but is something we all do i suppose....)
> so in that way i submit this : poem ?
> http://www.starvingx.com/eJot/index.php?mid=281

That's kinda cool the way it encourages open associativity, isn't it. and it seems like there's
a small amount of new stuff being added for quite some time.

holzer and kosuth were/are exploring dimensions of language that 'poetry' does not often admit.
kosuth says in that interview that

"[There's] Absolutely no relationship at all [between his work and poetry]. It's simply one of
things superficially resembling one another. A poet wants to say the unsayable. That's the
reason the concrete poets have begun doing 'street work' projects because of the fact that they
don't feel in many ways that language is adequate to make the kind of statements they want to
make. And so they've been doing a lot of performance pieces as well. But the typical concrete
poem makes the worst sort of superficial connections to work like mine because it's a kind of
formalism of typography--it's cute with words, but dumb about language. It's becoming a
simplistic and pseudoavant-garde gimmick, like a new kind of paint."

As though it's the being "dumb about language" that causes him to reject any relationship
between his work and poetry, as though he uses the concrete poets merely as an example of being
"dumb about language".

If poetry is to remain the art in which the most intense and contemporary engagements with
language are played through, then our notions of poetry should be capacious enough to admit the
work of people such as kosuth and holzer. poetry extends through all the dimensions of language.

concerning your question of whether http://www.starvingx.com/eJot/index.php?mid=281 is a poem,
jhave, if i answer 'no' then i seem to have diminished myself, just as though the question were
whether it was art. so it seems that one should not answer 'no'. but if 'yes', then unprovably
'yes'. each new poem is something like an 'undecidable proposition'. i have heard it said before
that each new poem is kinda the basis of a new poetics.

> in response to the interview with joseph kosuth, ( i recognize him as an
> individual whose conceptual velocity exceeds my own) yet, I disagree
> with him here and there and wanted to say that hedonism and
> pleasure-instinct-calibrated beauty in art is not alway apolitical or
> stupid ("pander to show-biz" was his dismissive phrase for work that is
> physically viscerally beautiful). ....

yes, i don't agree with everything kosuth has to say either, but i read his book called 'Art
after Philosophy and After' collected writings 1966-90, and found it exciting in its synthesis
of art and language. he is a strong and passionate artist-intellectual-writer. fiercely marxist
also, one might note. His essay 'Art after Philosophy' is in there of course (hence the title of
the book).

>just another case of opinion
> tectonics, which made me chuckle as i read thru holzer's list belief
> which seems to ironically deconstruct any clinging we might have to
> right or wrong....as a tangent, i have often thought that artists are
> only exploring the farthest reaches of conceptualism since commercials
> are often so technically brilliant (or at least well-funded enough to
> emulate brilliance),

hehe. i saw a 'five alive' commercial that was pretty darn fruity and colorful the other day on
tv. and geometric. and just bloody awful, you know. but fruity. neon sweet. perhaps that
commercial will do us a flavour favour and blot out similar aspirations of so many flash artists
on the web. or help them take it beyond the commercial in various ways, one of those being
conceptually.

there's "physically viscerally beautiful"--which ya gotta love--and then there's five alive
commercials.

> ok enuff of that,
>
> jim, the word for wierdos input mode of arteroids opens it up in a
> delightful way
> and that mp3 is suggestive of really great glitch muzik....i really like it

thanks jhave. i'd like to turn it into an email client of sorts.

ja