#schwabsky.barry

[aamjp]

“In order to count as an artwork, an object must be endowed with a title, a date, and an enumeration of materials.

...And of course, above all, it must have the name of an artist associated with it. [...] These minimal attributes of the artwork are so indispensable precisely because they are requisite to any attempt to understand the work’s relation to the project that generated it. (73;75)

Re: “The date associated with an artwork is typically one of authentication, inscribed, perhaps, alongside the artist’s signature in the corner of the canvas or on the rear of the support, and (parenthetically) relayed alongside its title, medium and any other such descriptive metadata.”

It has been similarly possible for artists to play with the dating of works, though happarentelt it takes more daring – or perhaps desperation – on an artist’s part to avail oneself of those possibilities. The fact that McDermott and McGough would date paintings and photographs produced in the 1980s and ‘90s back to the 1890s is perhaps the clearest example.

[aamjp]

prized instead of prised — Schwabsky, p 70

[aamjp]

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

I've been contemplating suicide, but it really doesn’t suit my style

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. (1)

The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between the absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which suicide is a solution to the absurd. (5)

By the mere activity of consciousness [...] I refuse suicide. (62)

One must imagine Sisyphus happy. (119)

“The absurd...

is born of [a] confrontation between the human need [for a coherent meaning to the life that we lead] and the unreasonable silence of the world. (26)

lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation. (28-9; it is “essentially a divorce”)

is not in man [...] nor in the world, but in their presence together. (29)

is lucid reason noting its limits. (47)

does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. ‘Everything is permitted’ does not mean that nothing is forbidden. The absurd merely confers an equivalence on the consequences of those actions. (65)

Black and white and red all over

In certain situations, replying ‘nothing’ when asked what one is thinking about may be pretense in a man. [...] But if that reply is sincere, if it symbolizes that odd state of soul in which the void becomes eloquent, in which the chain of daily gestures is broken, in which the heart vainly seeks the link that will connect it again, then it is as it were the first sign of absurdity.” (11)

He recognizes the struggle, does not absolutely scorn reason, and admits the irrational. Thus he again embraces in a single glance all the data of experience and he is little inclined to leap before knowing. (35; re: the “confrontation” (28-9) between word and image in my paintings)

Consciousness illuminates it by paying attention to it. Consciousness does not form the object of its understanding, it merely focuses, it is the act of attention (41; cf. Brecht?)

[The work of art] marks both the death of an experience and its multiplication (92; cf. Barthes in Camera Lucida)

A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape, likewise, a man’s sole creation is strengthened in its successive and multiple aspects: his works. One after another, they complement one another, correct or overtake one another, contradict one another too. (111; cf. Foucault in Photogenic Painting and Schwabsky Object or Project)

History

“If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences. (17)

“Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them” (116; cf. Barthes, “Perhaps we have an invincible resistance to believing in the past, in History, except in the form of myth”

A mitigated narrative authority

Antinomy: A contradiction between principles or conclusions that seem equally necessary and reasonable; a paradox.

All things are not explained by one thing but by all things. [...] There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects (43)

Of whom and of what indeed can I say: ‘I know that!’ This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. (17)

Kafka

Merely to announce to us that uncommon fate is scarcely horrible, because it is improbable. But if its necessity is demonstrated to us in the framework of everyday life, society, state, familiar emotion, then the horror is hallowed. In that revolt that shakes man and makes him say: ‘That is not possible,’ there is an element of desperate certainty that ‘that’ can be (124; cf. Melancholia’s opening scene)

“These perpetual oscillations between the natural and the extraordinary, the individual and the universal, the tragic and the everyday, the absurd and the logical, are found throughout his work and give it both its resonance and its meaning. These are the paradoxes that must be enumerated, the contradictions that must be strengthened, in order to understand the absurd work. (122)

This needs to be my aim, too:

“His secret consists in being able to find the exact point where they meet in their greatest disproportion.” (133)

[aamjp]

“It has begun to seem to me that many of today’s best writers are writing fiction in which almost quite literally nothing happens” (¶3)

Re: Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station – “What event there is [...] happens to him or near him, not because of him.” [His agency] is limited by narrative design, clearing maximal novelistic space for his thought process, a process that includes lengthy ruminations on his lack of agency.” (¶4-5)

WHY? O’Fallon Price reckons the internet: “In moving our consumption of news and media from top-down to an a la carte model [...] information of all variety spreads now across a series of nodes on a relatively flat plane of authority” (¶10). Prior to this, “in an era of vertical information [...] novelists predictably wrote vertically [and] there remained an essential confidence in the role of the author as someone bringing the news.” (¶11-12).

“[…] we now occupy individuated worlds of curated art, opinion, reality. There may still be objective truth, but it isn’t clear that we can reach consensus on what it is, and we accept as consensus fewer and fewer people as authorities. Of course, the word “authority” derives from the word “author,” and the act of writing itself is inherently an act of authority, of assuming the right to create and order words and thereby create sense. But there are degrees of order and sense in narrative, and writers like Lerner, Cole, Cusk, Knausgaard, and many others, it seems to me, are responding to this mood of uncertainty—if I may be grand, this weakening of cultural epistemic authority—by mitigating the authority they exert in their narratives; in general, by moving from the objective to the subjective.

“This manifests in [1] a preponderance of first person narrative. Third-person assumes the right to speak for, to inhabit, other characters than oneself, and to manipulate these characters, imbuing the text with a unitary consciousness; first-person, no matter the degree of artifice, implies a bounded consciousness, the disconnection between people. And disconnected first-person narratives — from blog posts to reality show confessional to the infantile tweets of our deranged president — are essentially the narratives of our time.”

And this mitigated fictional authority also manifests in [2] a tendency toward plotlessness and mundanity. The act of making up a story is an act of control, an exertion of order over entropy.  The more carefully narrative is created, the more meticulously ‘event’ is arranged for ‘effect’, the greater the implied presence of authorial control in the traditional sense. [...] Reproducing life 'as it happens' in this type of quasi-memoiristic fiction, implies a position of authorial neutrality, with no presumption of ordering event for narrative effect or explanatory power: This is what happened to me, and who can say why? (¶13-15)

This is an articulation of what I’m doing (and justifies me having kept authors such as Lerner and Javier Marías around). JF said that my hand is present in the crossword paintings and that it reads autobiographically; the use of the first-person within memoir- and roman a clef-ish fiction to communicate an individuated subjectivity through a ‘static’ narrative, is, I think, a kind of permission for me to paint these pictures in which nothing really happens.

In terms of aesthetic experience, it is also a respite—I suspect many readers find themselves pleasantly lulled by the snowdrifts of Knausgaard’s youth, the quiet calm of the novel’s glacial inaction. (¶17)

I think I agree with this. And I think it’s why I enjoy such writing... Maybe that why I’m still uncertain about the black and why I still keep thinking they’re perhaps more paranoid than poetic.

[aamjp]

Schwabsky, 'Object or Project? A Critic's Reflections on the Ontology of Painting'

One and Three Chairs

concern re: the terms ‘ontology’ and ‘painting’ not a matter of which emphasise, but whether there is contradiction between the two > i.e. maybe there “is no ‘ontology of painting’

for there to be an “ontology of painting”, “painting would have to be a particularly category of being > evokes Plato’s theory of forms as “ontological rankings”: “ideas have an ontological status [which is] fully vested; whereas objects such as chairs, being at one remove from ideas, possess an ontological status that is subordinate; and then images, at two removes from the fully-fledged reality of the ideas, possess an even lesser ontological status than objects” (70)

Schwabsky’s argument is that although Plato used chairs and paintings as examples, he doesn’t offer an otology of chairs or paintings; instead, he offers “distinctive ontologies of ideas, objects, and images” (70) > suggesting an “ontology of art” (71)  


Four Needful Things

for an object to considered an artwork it needs four things: a title, a date, an enumeration of materials, and the name of the artist. (71-2)

descriptions of materials may “[alert] us to the fact that our materialism will have to go deeper than usual if we are to engage with [some] work most attentively and rewardingly” and to “learn something about […] the work’s ontological location” (72)

Joseph Marioni – not “acrylic on canvas” but “acrylic on canvas on stretcher”

Lawrence Weiner –  not “vinyl lettering on wall” but “language and the materials referred to”

Michealangelo Pistoletto –  “anonymous materials”

Scenes within scenes 

these “four needful things” are “indispensable precisely because they are requisite to any attempt tp understand the work’s relation to the project that generated it” (73)

“What look like paintings”

quotes three critics discussing Michel Krebber’s work as being “representative […] of certainly commonly […] held values” (76) // agreement that “the objects he produces systematically evade definition [… and that] Kreber himself embodies the role of painter by evading identification as such” and that reception of his work “consists of a constant swerve away from an attention to the character of the things he produces as an artist to his his manner of behaviourally manifesting an idea of the artist” (76)

MORAL: “It is not necessarily by looking at the object itself that we are going to learn very much about its ontology”

Arthur Danto, ‘Works of Art and Mere Real Things’

“the object is not considered the ultimate ground of its own justification. Instead the real point of the artistic enterprise, the thing that one really wants pinpoint and to construe, is what might be called the artistic project” (77)

the propositional ontological problem stems from that “whenever we look at a painting we think we are looking at an object. And if the unit of artistic evaluation and analysis is the project rather than the object, then we might feel that in this painting/object we are facing something of lesser status, like a Platnoist looking at a mere chair when what he really wants to do is contemplate an idea” (77)

BUT there is no Form, as the nature of a project is to be in progress. Instead, the painting/object can only provide a glimpse of the project. “What can I learn about [the artist’s project] from this particular work?”

“The intention to produce”

cites Borges, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’

the narrator declares that while “‘The Cervantes text and the Menard text are verbally identical…the second’ – that is, Menard’s – ‘is almost infinitely richter’. Of course, it is the nature of Menard’s project, not the ‘visible’ features of his text, which makes it so.” (79)

“the distinction lies in the act and not in the copy –  in the project, not the object” (80)