i've deliberately tripp'd out examples from NEIN TYPOSorder a copy to see the real thing in all its splendor
:
Gustave Morin ain't no typewriter poet, but he makes typewriter poetry. he hasn't trapp'd himself within any one specific mannerist cul de sac & operates inna broad range of differing procedures; this is a trait i admire, as how i admire artists like Martin Kippenberger & Sigmar Polke, artists who explore altering alternate alterations inna playful creativity -- as opposed to the "serious artist" who finds a "voice", a technique which gains them critical acceptance & then beats it like a dead fuckin' horse, once an artist is well-received for a particular aesthetic, it is usually the case that the artist will cultivate the schtick endlessly, repeat repeat repeat; more often than not, it's because those artists are operating from without themselves, meaning they look toward outside sources (critical reception) to guide their "vision" & actions. of course, the same applies to poets, once a poet "finds their voice" it seems as if they get caught inna dreary loop, snared by their own trap, exploiting their "trademark traits" over & over again like some cluck'd out cuckoo clock parodying themselves w/ perfect polish'd parrot chirps doom'd to remain caged within that particular setting where which the "critics" give 'em creamy crackers. squawk squawk. pollies all polly'd up inna plumage of false feathers, for many of them cannot actually even fly. and i'll be damn'd if Gustave Morin don't just fly, he fuckin' soars! his extensive body of work is like an aviary w/ many diverse species all living together & makin' a crazy racket only abuncha wildwing'd airstormers could make. i'm not denying or denouncing the importance of the critical apparatus, it is quite essential in many instances, esp for preserving works by writing about them & presenting the mechanics inna interpretive dissection, for initiating discussion, "close readings" are always interesting for those whom are concern'd about such intricate analysis of poetics. but i ain't no schoolboy, nor am i a critic : i just dig the shit i dig & when i diggit i diggit deep, like all inspired 'n shit, y'know? and NEIN TYPOS peels my banana in such a fruitful manner, it puts that "hellyeah!" fire under my ass & trips my trigger to bangaway. not since dom Sylvester Houédard has someone made the typewriter dance sucha lovely jig than Gustave has done w/ NEIN TYPOS & i just want'd to bring a little attention to it somehow by doing a review w/o doing a review. if you have any interest whatsoever in concrete poetry, typewriter poetry, or just plain inventive poetry, you owe it to yourself to grab a copy of this publication.
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i think the Live Matter portfolios are one of the best series going, published by Reed Altemus's Tonerworks, itsa great way to present the work, i really like the concept Reed came up with. the portfolio comes inna nice folder w/ 6-10 single signed pages on pleasing archival quality paper inna edition of one hundred copies. at the time i order'd NEIN TYPOS, i also order'd Live Matters by Daniel f. Bradley, steve random, Brandstifter, Luc Fierens & Andrew Topel -- each one of which is mad bananas, total aces, incredibly eyesome -- i'm going to send off for additional editions when i have the funds available, i consider them to be affordable fine art & you won't know how lovely Live Matter is unless you get hold of the physical copies & experience their pages live for yourself. write to Reed Altemus for more info on how to obtain these wonderous things.
:
TONERWORKS
REED ALTEMUS
P.O.BOX 52
PORTLAND,ME
04112 USA
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
raltemus@gwi.net
:
TONERWORKS
REED ALTEMUS
P.O.BOX 52
PORTLAND,ME
04112 USA
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
raltemus@gwi.net
:
15 kommentarer:
yes, Live Matter really is that good.
Troy, i'm really glad you think so and i appreciate the plug and the review. Gus Morin's work is brilliant as is the work of all the other Live Matter contributors. He'll really dig your DSH comment. i'm trying to push LM right now in a few places and your blog is a great place to see a review. Thanks! Let me know when you want those other titles...
cool Reed, thanx for droppin' a commment!
yeah, the DSH reference definitely fits fersure, not until people actually sit down & try to make "typewriter poetry" they just don't know what a difficult & frustrating process it can be, Gustave has surely master'd the machine & makes it sing.
hopefully soon i'll be contacting you about those other titles, thanx for making such great things available!
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be sure to check this out also:
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maybe i should have been more clear in terms of talking about "voice", maybe i came across as a bit muddled.
what i was getting at was primarily aim'd toward predictable poets who remain in stasis & fear a critical backlash from straying too far from their "known & accept'd attributes" -- like many "mainstream" poets who continue hacking out a proper technical formulaic recipe over & over w/ all the standardized hallmarks, "folksy humor",
"colloquialisms for human warmth", "confessional tendencies","epiphany in the everyday" etc etc
i do think of "voice" in other terms tho as well, something to be celebrated. little singularities like G. Morin's i/m & you/re : as well as other examples, replacing the apostrophe w/ a slash in his contractions, a device which works well & adds a certain tactile dimension to the writing; or Daniel f. Bradley's use of repetition, like this poem from A Boy's First Book of Chlamydia :
EARLY AUGUST
you always creep up
and from the noise started down
start down out the hatch
started down
and under a city sleeps or
waking or woke
and a lot of people died
very very dead
and as we fly out of this
and we fly into
a whole new set of
zero's tolerance we didn't even
notice the fire storm
sucking all the oxygen
out of our breath
...or how harry k stammer has developed his wholly unique style, or how Rachel Blau DuPlessis plays & puns or how bpNichol could break apart the word & find myriad new words or how when you read a F.A. Nettelbeck poem you know you are fuckin' reading a F.A. Nettelbeck poem, etc etc
i dunno, it's tricky to write inna critcal manner, that's why i usually avoid it, altho i attempt the possibilities of discovery thru critical process, it seems a bit pompous to "herd the cows into a particular pen", as DfB sez & beyond that it seems a territory for a "critic" to display "dazzling insight" -- i just get frustrated that the arena of critical discourse remains the arena mainly only for academic-types -- there can be alternate sorts of critical discourse & i think these alternate avenues should be cultivated.
. . .
i like this review by Doug Harvey:
Martin Kippenberger's "Problem Perspective" at MOCA: Enter the K-Hole
Doug Harvey
Martin Kippenberger seems to have been a bit of an asshole. I’m not making a judgment, just an observation. Some of my best friends are assholes. I never actually met Kippenberger during his fabled L.A. sojourns in the early ’90s, but, given his epic drinking and insatiable anti-authoritarianism, we probably wouldn’t have found much to argue about. And Kippenberger’s assholism is no secret — in fact, it was central to his oeuvre, as well as being the reason his work hasn’t received as much attention as it merits. When you do stuff like buy a gray monochrome painting by one of your former art heroes, screw legs into its stretcher bars and display it as a coffee table — as Kippenberger did with a Gerhard Richter in 1987’s Modell Interconti — feelings are going to get hurt.
Since his untimely death from liver cancer at the age of 44 just over a decade ago, Kippenberger’s iconoclastic persona has gradually acquired a patina of respectability, culminating in the artist’s first North American retrospective, organized by MOCA’s Ann Goldstein and currently occupying half of each of the museum’s Grand Street and Geffen Contemporary facilities. A truly comprehensive exhibit would be impossible, since Kippenberger churned furiously during his short time among us, spraying the landscape with his archly journalistic, formally devastating effluence. But there’s more than enough effluence to chew on in this wide-ranging sampler.
Kippenberger is most renowned for his seminal role in contemporary “Bad Painting,” his sprawling sculptural installations and such quirky projects as his unfinished fictional global Metro Net system (with “entrances” on the Greek island of Syros, in the Yukon’s Dawson City, and at the MAK Schindler House in Hollywood), but I’m particularly stoked about the emphasis Goldstein places on Kippenberger’s most mundane area of production — his poster, invitation and book designs.
A sleazy trickster version of German multidisciplinary “social sculptor” Joseph Beuys, Kippenberger seems to have been always on, treating all areas of his life as opportunities for creative disturbance — including everything from barroom brawls to, well, graphic design. When painters are annoyed by the deliberately confrontational awkwardness of Kippenberger’s oil paintings, I point out the formal elegance and spontaneity of his design — a formal elegance that underlies all of his work, no matter how superficially repugnant.
This is probably due to graphic design’s relative lack of academic baggage and vastly lower threshold for visual osmosis when compared to the Fine Arts of painting, drawing, sculpture and printmaking — to whose conventions Kippenberger regularly administered vigorous corrective debasement. Recent papal bulls concerning Fred the Frog notwithstanding (in early September, Pope Benedict reportedly condemned Kippenberger’s 1990 statue Feet First, which depicts the artist’s totem amphibian crucified but clinging to his mug of beer, and which is currently on display in the Italian city of Bolzano), it seems unlikely that any young folk are going to see anything more outrageous in the artist’s provocations than a catalog of the dominant experimental strategies of the last decade.
It may be less a question of influence than of prescience — Kippenberger’s relentless skepticism, globetrotting career, impatient and idiosyncratic social/political engagement, and refusal to disavow poetics and beauty (however stripped down or wonky) were all a few years ahead of the curve, but his reputation as a boozy, ridiculously macho troublemaker made him a difficult role model in the go-go ’90s. Many stylistic facets of his all-encompassing Euro-slackerism have since found their way piecemeal into the mainstream of contemporary art in the hands of more compartmentalized (and socially presentable) practitioners. But encountered as a totality, the singular stylistic innovations of his work become secondary to their unifying underlying identity as outbursts of creative insurgency — an example much harder to follow than, say, making funky furniture out of weird shit and calling it art.
Still, getting to that big picture is a lot of fun. After the design ephemera, the most visually generous works are Kippenberger’s hotel-stationery drawings, which range from scribbled engineering notations for larger works and detailed (and frequently bawdy) figurative renderings to carefully composed collages but share a sense of easy playfulness less apparent in his more ambitious projects. Or rather, its equally apparent but shot through with mind-altering doses of charisma and rage.
Kippenberger’s great gift was his instinct for capturing and orchestrating public attention. The unironic advertising posters and intimate hotel drawings stand at opposite, relatively peaceful poles of the spectrum of propaganda. But in between these is a hurricane of virtuosically realized righteous indignation, laced with profound humor and a transcendent sense of self-loathing, which collectively constitute an unassailable critique of the gap between Art and the Art World.
The problem with unassailable critiques of the gap between Art and the Art World is that a lot of the time nobody gets it. How would anyone know that that coffee table was made out of a Richter painting if it didn’t say so in the wall text? And how many people are even going to read that wall text? And how many will know who Richter is and what he represented to an ambitious second-generation post-WWII German artist? Or care? Kippenberger tailored his paintings to get the attention of painters, his sculptures to infuriate sculptors, and his persona to lodge a spanner in the works of the Art World’s star-making machinery. Good try, Martin.
What’s really amazing — in spite of this master-debater hermeticism and Kippenberger’s failure to single-handedly redeem this wicked world — is how great the work looks. His assaults on Painting began with Baldessari-esque subcontracted photorealist reproductions of snapshots, followed by parodies of Pop, Minimalism and Neo-Expressionism (specifically superhyped predecessors like David Salle and Georg Baselitz); parodies of heroes like Picasso and Géricault; parodies of himself. But, as we have learned from Spike Jones, Thomas Pynchon and Quentin Tarantino, parody is often better art than the original. (How do you think the current administration came into power? Republicans are better artists. Correction: Republicans can afford better artists.)
Martin, in the corner, you should be ashamed of yourself (1989)
Disco Bomb (1989)Kippenberger’s sculptural jibes are just as specific — and virtuosic; simultaneously puncturing and reinflating the medium’s sacred cows. His “Street Lamp” series (underrepresented here) consists of loosey-goosey surrealist translations of crispy serialist industrial quotation à la Bernd and Hilla Becher. The “Peter” series — including the Richter coffee table — takes the piss on a half-dozen streams of contemporary three-dimensional praxis. But his most epic satirical broadside was his enormous, perversely frustrated social-sculptural resolution of Kafka’s unfinished last novel: an unpopulated job interview meat-market titled The Happy Ending of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika,” laid out in the Geffen space. Amerika transcends its barrage of literal but insular reference (Donald Judd, Jason Rhoades, Charles and Ray Eames ...) to offer an appropriately paranoiac, hilarious and ultimately illuminating vision of the human condition: half interrogator, half supplicant. Half prisoner, half guard. Half artist, half critic.
At this point, Kippenberger’s hermeticism is rendered moot. Or rather, its more pedestrian function — as knowing winks and secret signs in a Machiavellian fraternity of academic profiteers whose reputations are built entirely on the obscurity of their references — is superseded. Regardless of the specific targets of his scorn and ridicule, Kippenberger’s volleys were finally symptomatic of a grand vision of the transformational potential of art, in whose service he was willing to play the jester (and court cirrhosis). Hermeticism has traditionally been a symbolic language for encoding and communicating psychologically powerful and politically liberating philosophies. Due to his unfashionable passion, his irrepressible formal chops and his restless invention, Martin Kippenberger imbued even his most sophomoric pranks with this faith in art as a way to awaken from the nightmare of history. Art is the asshole of the Unconscious. Some people are just born without a cork.
link to the LAWEEKLY text
. . .
i am often guilty of over-enthusiasm, but that's because i'm fuckin' enthused by those whose work i admire!
if i was to go into works i don't really care for, it would kind of deflate me, in the sense i don't feel "validated" enough to pass critical judgement in that manner.
so, in trying to balance it outta bit, i'll say here that i loathe Jackson MacLow's work. i completely understand his position in the historical avantgarde & whatta early figure he is & how the work is interesting in that Cagey chancedelic way to approaching the materiality of language itself, but for me, itsa drag to actually try & read it, akin to looking thru pages of mathematical problems, altho i ain't read mucha his stuff so i can't really sayso much, what i have encountered by him has motivated me not to seek out his work any further, buzzword 'o aleatoric or not, this kinda shit is what turns most folks off about "experimental poetry"...altho, i must say, i do like this liddle tidbit:
All light is relevant to each light
& each light to every light
& each light to each light
& all light to every light
& every light to all light
& each light to all light
& all light to all light.
Is that lucid?
Yes.
Kenneth Goldsmith is a drag for me, altho i dig his UBU site immensely & i like how, as Justin Timberlake brought back sexy, Goldsmith has "brought conceptual back" to storm thru critical poetic circles, i've always liked the FLUXUS stuff 'n such, so i was kind of stoked at first, but jeez, how much credit can the guy take? now he's getting accolades of wreath-giving for his uncreative writing, which no reader should have to ever read, because if they've read the side 'o a cereal box they've pretty much read Goldsmith...altho, i do like his song titles/lyrics thing, it's good, but many of his conceptual operations are re-imaginings from 30-40 years ago, it's not "unboring boring", it's simply "boring boring".
this said, sometimes all it takes is a few small sentences to say it all, like i can totally relate & understand where Daniel f. Bradley is comin' from when he post'd this:
" i have said it numerous times, Peter Ciccariello's work really is not good
its what happened to mc escher after he got put on coffee mugs and ties at barnes & noble
.kevin thurston (howl the third) "
i laugh'd my ass off when i read that, i wish'd i could write something like that, but then realized even if i did, i probably wouldn't have the balls to post it.
there has always been & there will always be infighting amidst the poetic world, what used to be behind closed doors or on letters to the editor pages, are now thriving within the poetics blogosphere, which is a good thing, but in the melee of various point-makings within that broad blogosphere, many folks plain fergit about the poetics aspect & just rant back 'n forth about differing theoretical dispostions & often that's all there is, no poetry, justa buncha nuts blathering on about esoteric interludes or whining about lack of readerships -- this state of affairs (yes, i often do read the various debates, the discussions are educational inna way, but seems the 'ol puppydog tail-chasing routine more often than not), anyway, it makes me appreciate even more those poetry blogs that actually post poetry insteada eleven paragraph criticism w/ massive too-many-to-actually-read comments in the commentstream.
what am i talking about?
i dunno.
go shit inna beartrap.
i hate Jackson MacLow too
he's the visual poet for the visually impaired
dfb
This is a very complex way of working, mainly in the liminal (or tertiary) area, even though there is a certain amount of deliberate choice involved. Oh brother, their own parts in accordance with certain structural rules: each side of the mesostic word. Adhering to certain "fuzzy verse forms" [giving the secondary process a bone to gnaw on], and gathering into them--mainly by liminal-zone processes--materials from what I heard, saw, and spontaneously thought of while writing their first drafts.
In post-Wittgensteinian theory, language becomes a self-referential, self-complicating "code" of arbitrary signs at once determined in a given social system, yet indeterminate in its signification because of the yawning gap between the word as signifier and as signified.
Inan"Afterword"MacLowdescribesthe"diasticchances
electionmethod"bywhichheminedfrom Pound'stext"letter strings""inwhichthelettersofPound'sfirstandlastnamesoc
cupyplacescorrespondingtothosthefillinthenames"Thus,
lookingfortheletter"E"in"Ezra"MacLowtakesupCantoland
runshisfingeralongthetexttillhehitsthefirst"e"andmakesthe
"letterstring"beginningwiththat"e"andcontinuingaswillalwa
ysbetheruletotheendofPoundwordtoconstitutetheinitialstr
ing.Line1providesthenasitssecondwordandsoEnbecome
sthefirstelementofMacLowversion.Runninghisfingeralong
hedoesnotfinda"z"thesecondletterinEzratillline32inbronze
andsinceZmustbeinthesecondplacenZebecomestheseco
ndelement.Line33almostimmediatelysuppliesRandAinthep
hrasebeaRingyetdreoryArmswhichmeansthatfortheRtobe
thethirdletterandAthefourthinhisseriesofletterstringsMacLo
w hackseaRingoryArmsoutofPoundphrase.Thenline35pro
videsPallorwithPintheinitialplaceandsoonwithO,U,N,D,and
thenbacktoEfromE-Z-R-Aandsoon again and again
throughthelettersofthenametirelesslyrippingoutletterstringsi
nadeterminedbutarbitrarysequencefromthetextsofall120can
tos.Lineendingsaredeterminedbyallpunctuationmarksthatfo
llowtheselectedletterstringsinTheCantoshyphensthatareincl
udedwithinthosestringsandfinallettersthatendlinesinlatercan
toswithoutpunctuationbreaksbetweenstrophesaredetermin
edbyendmarksperiodsquestionmarksexclamationpointsstr
opheendingswithoutpunctuationandpointsof
suspension (...)."
Reframing & Rebranding: Kenny G's Conceptual Writing and Gitmo II
and boredom, valuelessness, and nutritionlessness as its ethos. Language as junk, language as detritus. Nutritionless language, meaningless language, unloved language, entartete sprache, everyday speech, illegibility, unreadability, machinistic repetition.
People as junk, People as detritus. Nutritionless People, meaningless People, unloved People, entartete People, everyday People, illegilible People, unreadable People, machinistic repetition of People.
plan is to find the time to respond to this before it grows too stale to do so...
but this week ain't looking too good. trying to get it together for a gig i've got in chicago on saturday. a reading and exhibit at a place called spudnik with the fellows from house press/string of small machines. shooting more of a work in progress -- psychopho -- tomorrow night, and working here and there in between. life is just too damn fast for me to keep on top of all this stuff, sadly.
but thanks troy, the article (and attendant commentary) has all been pretty neat to see, considering the "limited scope" of the topic -- typewriter poetry. i've got this theory in the works: all the smaller things we do garner far more attention than those that are our larger projects. and your review of nein typos bears this thought out ! why publish 100 page books? no one cares... publish 10 page folios and somehow they figure out a way to draw more attention to themselves... i don't know what it means either, but its one of those curious observations.
got some new mail / new works to apprise you of, just as soon as i can wheedle the bones necessary to send it all out...
meanwhile, chin up, et cetera...
23 skidoo!
gustave m.
yeah man, have a goodtime in Chicago, i needta make it up there one day to see some crazy live freejazz at the Empty Bottle...
(fast),yep,this blogging shit was like jumping onna speeding train, way too much to keep up with...
(typewriter poetry), i was way bumm'd that i cldn't make it to the typewriter TYPEBOUND exhibition they had down in central Florida, it was only 7 hours away, dammit, i was deepress'd for a coupla weeks & my old beater is still broke down, my sister got me a clutch for my birthday & i still ain't put it in...
(mail),looking much forward to mailboxings!
btw,
"79 Little Explosions and Q-Bert Stranded on A Smouldering Mosquitocoil Frozen To A Space Formerly Occupied By Language"
is gotta be the greatest title ever, when i do a blogpost about the greatest titles of alltimes, that'll be numero uno!
the folios are like small highly concentrated charges, i dunno, 'cause A Penny Dreadful was pretty big, but it was also a highly concentrated charge, but yr right, sometimes the smallest things do oddly seem to pop up on radar, i know for me, a little Pataphysical Hardware Co. thing blew my brains out when i read about it : Sealed kraft envelope, rubber stamped. "Grow-Your-Own-Stein". Seeds and a stick enclosed, with rubber stamped instructions on exterior of envelope on how to grow a rose. Rubber stamp portrait of Stein on stick, after Carl Van Vechten....the little stuff seems to crystallize on some strange level...
thanx fer commmenting...
lightningstrikes!
yeah, '79 little explosions and Q-Bert standed on a smouldering mosquitocoil frozen to a space formerly occupied by language' is a fun and playful title; i really hadn't had one of those under my belt yet, so felt it was time ... its 'bad form' and everything, but i've always liked wild titles of the sort the band killdozer spit out ever so effortlessly: 'intellectuals are the shoeshine boys of the ruling elite', or, 'uncompromising war on art under the dictatorship of the proletariat', (sounds like the city i live in !) or, pink floyd's 'several species of small furry animals gathered together in a cave and grooving with a pict', etc. etc. -- endless fun.
one of these beautifully made books (letterpress AND xerox!) is currently earmarked for you. i printed the book up real fast-like, brought it to toronto and buffalo, sold one or two, gave 30 away, and my pockets have since been too short to send it out to folk such as yourself. yet. but its only a month out the press... soon enough then. that's the story.
anyways, my final word on the commentary related to typewriter poetries is that i still think dsh is the best. and if i spend the rest of my life trying, i'm not so sure i'll ever surpass him. he had reserves of patience that i simply don't. an outgrowth of all his religious studies and monkish training, i think. which taught him this degree of g-r-a-c-e, and perhaps beauty?, whereupon he applied these qualities to the typewriter and then INVENTED optical illusions on it, and the like. i'm still a far piece off from all of that. -- g-r-a-c-e ? man, some days i just want to rip the heads off of people with my bare hands... and it takes everything in me to suppress such urges... and by the time i'm in front of the typer, the cucumber cool has shut the final door...
...anyway, that's what 'dirty concrete' is for !
23 skidoo!
gustave m.
yeah, those KILLDOZER titles are great.
i really dig old Pink Floyd, esp. the live bootlegs from Europe, they were a great band back then, they tour'd heavily & influenced others to flip the tripswitch, like Group 1850 & Pärson Sound amongst many more...
...one of my favorite songtitles of all time is the Sun City Girls's " you're never alone with a cigarette ", but they also have long ones like " Reflection Of A Young Boy Eating From A Can Of Dog Food On A Shiny Red X-Mas Ball " & Vibracathedral Orchestra has some winners, zonal drone intha nightskull hum, "I Do Not Spook Easily and Those Who Think I Do Are Wasting Their Time With Surprise Attacks" & TFLU282's "Rampaging Fuckers of Anything on the Crazy Shitting Planet of the Vomit Atmosphere" is pretty good...possibly the LaMonte Young tactic of long song titles may have been one of the first to do such things, like the Theatre of Eternal Music's " The Tortoise Recalling the Drone of the Holy Numbers as they were Revealed in the Dreams of the Whirlwind and the Obsidian Gong "...
sometimes we need g-r-a-c-e & sometimes we need r-a-g-e, and regardless, you got the magic fingers for pressurized platenpounding!
& the last word goes back to you,
"anyways, my final word on the commentary related to typewriter poetries is that i still think dsh is the best. and if i spend the rest of my life trying, i'm not so sure i'll ever surpass him. he had reserves of patience that i simply don't. an outgrowth of all his religious studies and monkish training, i think. which taught him this degree of g-r-a-c-e, and perhaps beauty?, whereupon he applied these qualities to the typewriter and then INVENTED optical illusions on it, and the like. i'm still a far piece off from all of that. -- g-r-a-c-e ? man, some days i just want to rip the heads off of people with my bare hands... and it takes everything in me to suppress such urges... and by the time i'm in front of the typer, the cucumber cool has shut the final door...
...anyway, that's what 'dirty concrete' is for !
23 skidoo!"
"
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