Writing Scripto-Visual Costumes and Columns of Air
Redell Olsen
It is a ‘work’, if it may be so called, named Frameworks. It is a lengthy, fragmented, and difficult set of speculations, arguments and assertions as to how a column of air could be identified and defended as a work of art or not. But a column of air could be described in many ways. You couldn’t easily point to it. Immediately the problem of the ‘metaphysi- cal’ location of the work of art was encountered. Was it a column of air or was it a sort of fictional entity? Was it the argument, the ‘theory’ and speculation or the text? The object was being made by the text. Its independence as an art object was being eroded. Many of the dematerialised clichés of post-minimalism are present but the art object risks the condition of mere ‘as if’ insofar as the object—turns into text and the conventional powers of the artist are transformed into those of a participant in discursive talk. Mel Ramsden discussing Frameworks (1966–1967). (Art & Language, Tate Papers, 2004).
In “The Trouble with Writing” Charles Harrison describes the work of Art and Language with an avowed sense of suspicion for the literary:
Much of the work of Art & Language is written. Some of this writing has been hung on walls or stuck on walls, some painted on walls, or printed on paintings, or stuck to paintings. Some of it has been published in books and catalogs and journals. But none of it wears the costume of literature. It is artists’ writing.1
I wonder if Frameworks (Art & Language, 1966–1967) with its famously “identified and defended” column of air is as unliterary as Harrison suggests? Much as I admire Harrison’s critical writing, I can’t help
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Redell Olsen - 9783846763339 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:00:55PM via free access Writing Scripto-Visual Costumes 65 and criticism in this mode ALAMODE : thick silk (1692) usually reveals a bias against APYKED : embroidered (Chaucer) fashion as an art form ARMAZINE : strong corded alongside the consumer of silk (16th century) fashion who is often a woman. CHEMISETTE : lace frill to fill Of course, Harrison’s focus is neckline (1505) not fashion or gender, and this FOREPART : stomacher imposed diversion into FRISETTE : band of artificial costume raises a set of curls on forehead concerns that are not the focus INCARNADINE SATIN : of Art & Language. crimson in shadows, Nevertheless, it is a significant pink in highlights th phrase as it captures some of (16 century) the difficulties that I want to LAPPEMANTLE : apron dress here in relation to MARRY-MUFFE : coarse cloth conceptual art and writing. In PURFLE : embroidered edge of the same essay, Harrison garments RASH : inferior stuff describes three (and only WEEPER : mourning hat band or three) categories of writing widow’s white cap available to artists: “writing ZONE : girdle conceived as documentary - OED accompaniment to artistic practice, writing conceived as literature, and writing conceived as art.”2 It is the last of these possibilities that he is This column of AIR principally concerned with. FLICKERS with very There is, of course, no mention different COSTUMES of poetics or a writing that of art forms
begin to look away from seeing and reading the dematerialised artwork; there emerges a new possibility, a poetics of flickers that crosses through the categories and hierarchies imposed by others or
Redell Olsen - 9783846763339 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:00:55PM via free access 66 Redell Olsen blurs the distinction between any In “The Response As Such: number of these categories. It is Words in Visibility” (1991), worth asking whether certain Charles Bernstein criticises strains of conceptualism depend on the assumption of such contemporary artists for categories in order to maintain the their bland use of text and assertion that writing could be a accuses many visual artists replacement for the messy of “seem[ing to be] hostile complexities of painting? If or ignorant of the literary language is approached as a painter might approach the or poetic traditions that possibilities of paint, then such are relevant to their categories would soon dissolve. language use.”3 Harrison’s description of this suspicion of literary costume is published over thirty years after Frameworks was conceived, and Of Course, This One is For so cannot be said to be part of the You Language and Art initial “costume” of expectations surrounding the first wave of Arrive at the place conceptual art at the end of the on the WHITE CARD 1960s and early 1970s. It is with walls at least written from a position of the writing seems insured. reflection, one that is nearly ten years after what many feminist This column is hair critics, such as Nina Felshin, writing in the mid-1990s, identified writhing reads itself as a continuation of the work of THIS WAY the feminist artists from the 1970s time can be said to recognise and incorporate “traditionally feminine materials” and I am saying it as such as fabric, sewing and
Redell Olsen - 9783846763339 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:00:55PM via free access Writing Scripto-Visual Costumes 67 clothing as “viable subject I AM NOT OUT OF THE matter and formal means for WORDS YET art.”4 In her article Felshin draws attention to the then Worried enough “recent tendency among about being contemporary [female] artists a mere costume to represent clothing as abstracted from the human of letters, body . . . .”5 These artists were I forgot you pursuing the possibilities of were wearing costume not as extraneous and ornamental but as both a dress form and content of their work. or is that Art In the same issue of Art Journal Emily Apter highlights & Language the long line of feminist critics: My writing Joan Riviere, Lucy Irigaray, smock? Michele Montrelay, Mary Ann Doane, Judith Butler, Joan Copjec who have taken up the Overheard, possibilities of costume and really, so masquerade as an important they hate philosophical and conceptual that literary space through which to stuff. consider the constructed nature of the feminine. WHAT FANNY A previous generation of Feminist artists of the 1970s had already incorporated the I, a-pool-of-cheese discourse of philosophy into their practice and moved towards an often unstable and flickering
Redell Olsen - 9783846763339 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:00:55PM via free access 68 Redell Olsen surface of scripto-visual possibility. This term was used by the artist Mary Kelly in the 1970s to describe an emerging hybrid funny practice that combined writing, sort of image making, and the incorporation of objects, including clothes, into her work. Her Post AS I SUSPECT Partum Document (1973–1978), an installation which traces the he quotes development of the mother/son Horace and relationship from birth until the infant’s acquisition of speech, expects people exemplifies the practice of the to come scripto-visual as one that refuses back smiling the boundaries of existing disciplines. The text is comprised with Ut Pictura Poesis of a variety of textual materials, is Her Name including soiled nappies, feeding charts, stains, folded vests, EVEN diagrams, a mother’s diary entries, and her son’s first attempts at which it rarely mark-making. Through Post is but could be Partum Document Kelly engages FAIRLY RADICAL with the personal, social, and artistic constraints which shaped as a tattoo her as both a mother and as an artist. It is these constraints which if I didn’t have to shape the process of her watch her slip investigation into discourses as down the bill diverse as drawing, science, autobiography, and theory or into towards a new literary and artistic the middle possibility for the consideration of the necessary costume of the age.
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As Lucy Lippard points out, Kelly’s age of hybridity in this early work entails never-heard-of-her the disruption of customary oblivion. feminist biological/ autobiographical approaches that It is true are usually associated with the Seventies archetypal representations of the have never been mother and child.6 Instead, the more fashionable. text poses the problem of how to represent what has been omitted Whose for market? from the traditional discourses of motherhood. Kelly overturns the The problem of us stereotypical representation of the all mistakes itself mother as cultural object by as dress-up. producing a scripto-visual record of process. Her work asserts that It is true the type of subjectivity explored the Seventies by the scripto-visual is multilayered have never and various as it emerges from been more the points at which stain, mark, Sexist. word, image, and utterance overlap in an articulation of the dif- You couldn’t ference between the “unified easily point transcendental subject of to that autobiography” and the with no hands “decentered, socially constituted subject of mutual discourse.”7 LOOKCRAFTY
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Kelly further genders this gap; no medium she claims that the scripto- specific recursive visual allows her to “show the structures here. difficulty of the symbolic order for women” to stress how the All Flies on YOKO. production of the subject “is primarily a question of positionality in language.”8 Well, except that In a piece from Kelly’s I’m feeling this Documentation I (the first part deep inside of Post-Partum Document’s six from my language installations) several pairs of stained nappies are displayed with a timetable of foods LOOKNOLYRE ingested by the baby. The type-written words about perspective. Stop eating are faint to the point of being like a nearly CUT your quota illegible stain. my disciplinary norms aren’t faking it terribly convincing as nothing doing so much black ink or afterall that only the imprint
of a Xerox scanned
Redell Olsen - 9783846763339 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:00:55PM via free access Writing Scripto-Visual Costumes 71 defecatioevidence of feeding. Neither text is legible in the nconventional – the sense, but both can be read or seen as a type of writing in revolt at conventional forms. A child’s costume is offered as an invitation to consider other possibilities at the selvedge of meaning where lines might and do cross. no harm done Mira Schor’s ‘Dress Book’ (1977) in the web explicitly connects the representation of ghostly of femininity with costume. In her notes to the piece, she writes: “It is tradition a role and costume that women are was all I had as allowed, indeed encouraged, to put on proof. and take off, to ‘change’ throughout their lives. The dress as an image in You mean that itself in art, separate from costume existentially in figurative painting, emerged from I presume? permission given by the feminist art movement to explore female Someone says experiences as subject matter for high looking for art. The dress is a second skin, and in an argument, many contemporary artworks skin it- self becomes another veil of costume.”9 ‘Not especially,’ I say, like it might be time to go home as the uncanny This was before
I noticed that Joan Riviere, author of ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’
Redell Olsen - 9783846763339 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:00:55PM via free access 72 Redell Olsen was a court dressmaker before the whole field she became a writer and was speculative psychoanalyst. as gold was Schor emerged onto the West Coast arts once now all scene during the 1970’s. Schor’s parents out in the bins were Jewish immigrants from Poland, and Schor links her family history to her on the hunt interest in language, pointing out that “[t]he child of an immigrant is traditionally the family interpreter.”10 How this role of for the lost “interpreter” manifests itself in relation to bite at art’s practice is an important the ephemera characteristic of Schor’s work, who cherry reinterprets her own personal relationship to make to language through an exploration of its sense of our burst visual forms. Interpreting her work shelves. becomes as much about seeing as about reading: “The writing as image was as much a metaphor of language-based thought as it was text to be read.”11 Its all about Schor’s “Dress Book” (1977), consists of talk now. body size translucent layers of rice-paper You said. which were covered in writing. According to Schor the “elegant indecipherability” of her handwriting could be read as “an image and You and me, metaphor of female thought.”12 At first talking it glance, this assertion raises problems up, you know suggesting, as it does, an equation of the murky, the opaque with writing by this one women. If, however, we consider Schor’s is for assertion in the light of the practice itself, you it becomes evident that what she is let’s participate actually stressing a little
Redell Olsen - 9783846763339 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:00:55PM via free access Writing Scripto-Visual Costumes 73 is the relationship between the In an essay on the filmmaker scripto-visual elements of the Chris Marker, the poet work—i.e. the marks and Susan Howe describes handwriting on the translucent the close similarities paper, elements that, in terms of between her practice as a poet and that of the signification, place the work in a filmmaker who uses “split territory that must be negotiated sequences, ‘disruptive- by both “reading” and “seeing,” associative montage’” and practices which are usually places “emphasis on the reserved for apparently distinct mysterious patternment disciplines. Important to Schor and subliminal structures 13 was the interaction between this of images (icons).” For piece and the viewer: “[Y]ou could Howe Marker’s film Sans Soleil is about editing and go up to the ‘woman’ / artwork, 14 quotation. Howe recognises turn its pages, trying to read her her working methods in the text (which was personal and practice of Marker, who she autobiographical).”15 The reader/ describes as recording the viewer is asked to respond both to “sensitivity to the sound the work’s physical and material shape (even in silent film) characteristics as well as to its of each pictured event” and semantic properties. shows an “awareness of the Schor’s work also has time-mystery of simultaneous phenomena (co-occurrence and affinities with the hybrid practice of deployment).”16 the late Nancy Spero. Spero’s 1967 works of gouache on paper, “Love to Hanoi” and “Bomb and Vic- tims to Individual Shelters” take on forms that are reminiscent of both bomb clouds and full-length dresses. Benjamin Buchloch reads Spero’s From 1969 Spero’s work “duality of painting as writing and combined image and text in of writing as painting” in ways that painting and type-writer collages, are relevant for the consideration of which extend on long scrolls of Howe’s own work. He describes how paper, and she produced Spero’s methods are crucial
Redell Olsen - 9783846763339 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:00:55PM via free access 74 Redell Olsen scripto-visual installations that have for a redefinition of the hierarchies been screen-printed directly onto the and boundaries of discourses be- gallery wall. The scripto-visual is for tween the visual and the verbal: Spero a way of representing the effect of pain on language. Pain Not only are the literary which not only resists language but dimensions of culture destroys it. In “The Codex Artaud,” invoked in a gesture that the illegible “stutter” of visual marks mourns the hermetic and traces becomes a vehicle for inaccessibility of those cultura expressing the corporeal pain of the legacies, but the literary incarcerated writer. This relationship dimension is also between the scripto-visual and an reinscribed as an investigation of the corporeal body is aggressive challenge to the also evident in Spero’s “Notes in myopic definitions of the Time” (1976–1979) series, which pictorial in the modernist collages together witness accounts framework and of the linguistic gathered by Amnesty International of in conceptual art.17 torture, brutality, and missing persons in the dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, and El Salvador. In this sequence, Spero uses a mix of handprint and typewriter collage. The illegibility of words and phrases that have been wiped out, printed over, and smudged into one another, seems to suggest an attempt to document the lives of the disappeared through a practice which foregrounds the material effacement The scripto-visual is not only a visual of letters and phrases. category; it is also a mode of writing.
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Not the poem as idea as I’ll Drown My Book: idea but ideas in words Conceptual Writing by Women as words. Not that the (2011) was conceived by its poem does not think editors as a riposte and an extension to the remit that words are not made of the Anthology Against of materials. Not the Expression (2011). dematerialisation of the For many writers, poem but the intermittent particularly female re-materialisation of writers, this anthology— the word as object. Not while widely taken up an assumption of in the very contexts of language as transparent possible overlap between but an exploration of visual arts practice and its densities. Not that poetics— seemed to miss what is the matter with some of the scripto- visual connections and poetry matters to art conversations between much anyway. Not that philosophy, poetics, it sells anything. Not feminism, and art that had that the poem can even been underway for some time call itself a work. Not across the poetry and the that it wants to work visual arts. The editors of I’ll Drown My Book even. Not that poetry brought is not thinking matter. together writing by female Not that poetry is not writers working out of and a matter of thinking. alongside the conceptual approaches to writing made Not that the idea or possible by modernism, concept is the most Conceptual Art, Language important aspect of the Writing, and a previous poem. Not that poems generation’s feminist are without materials articulation of a scripto- called words, called visual practice across many concepts sometimes. Not different media.
Redell Olsen - 9783846763339 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:00:55PM via free access 76 Redell Olsen that poems are without In her introduction these. Not that these do Laynie Browne points out not call into question the limitations of the concepts and make them prevalent use of the term happen, or not. Not that conceptual writing: conceptual is the only “The fact is, that the way of calling thinking term ‘conceptual in art that. Not that the writing,’ for better poem does not think for and for worse, has itself already before it thus far often been gets called one. Not that employed to describe a it does not already set of writing consider language as a practices which conceptual figure. Not seem, nonsensically, that the poem is not to preclude particular aware of traditional content.”18 verse forms. Not that it does not know how to be The section headings of one of them. Not that it I’ll Drown My Book is not one ever. Not that (process, structure, this is anything new in event, matter) reveal as poetry and not a differing attitude to necessarily conceptual in form from Goldsmith and the least. Not that all Dworkin’s anthology. The of the planning and writing in I’ll Drown My decisions need to be made Book approaches language beforehand. Not that not as a transparent whose hand is writing is medium but as a material not mattering. Not that site of discovery, out this poem could not be of which ideas can be found already existing shaped. The investigations elsewhere as a roadside and explorations of the sign. Not that poetry can material properties of proceed further without language—which often
Redell Olsen - 9783846763339 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:00:55PM via free access Writing Scripto-Visual Costumes 77 an exploration into the includes overlaps with materials necessary. Not mark and image making— that the execution of the are foregrounded in poem is a perfunctory relation to its social and affair that does not care contextual tensions and associations of words. if it is one. Not that Not that art is anxious the form becomes a machine about what poetry thinks. that makes the poem by Not that art is always forgetting what it was made thinking. Not that art of. Not that it is not thinks much about what natural. Not that the poem poetry is thinking. does not question nature. Not that the poem could be anything more than itself.
Not that the poem knows what is understood as poetry but is questionable as that. Not that the poem knows everything including what it might be. Not that the poem could be just that. Not that the poem could be one necessitates it being one. Not that the literary is anxious about what art thinks. Not that writing is always thinking. Not that the writing could be anything more than two columns of air flicker- ing with a poetics of the scripto-visual, some half-glimpsed possibilities, costumes still to be cut writing across boundary seams.
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Endnotes
1 Charles Harrison, “The Trouble with Writing,” in: Conceptual Art and Painting: Further Essays on Art & Language. Cambridge, MA, London: MIT Press, 2001, pp. 3–34: here p. 3. 2 Ibid. 3 Charles Bernstein, “The Response as Such: Words in Visibility,” in: M/E/A/N/I/ N/G 9 (1991), pp. 3–8: here: p. 6. 4 Nina Felshin et al., “Women’s Work: A Lineage, 1966–1994,” in: Art Journal, 54:1 (1995), pp. 71–85: here p. 71. 5 Ibid. 6 Lucy Lippard, “Foreword,” in: Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999 [1983], pp. xi–xvi: here p. xiv. 7 Mary Kelly, Imaging Desire. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996, p. 23. 8 Ibid. 9 Mira Schor, “Women’s Work: A Lineage, 1966–1994.” Art Journal 54:1 (1995), p. 76. 10 Mira Schor, Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture. Durham, NC: Duke Uni- versity Press, 1997, p. 210. 11 Schor (1997), Wet, p. 211. 12 Schor (1997), Wet, p. 210. 13 Susan Howe, “Sorting Facts; or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker,” in: Charles Warren, ed., Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film. Hanover, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996, pp. 295–343: here p. 300. 14 Cf. Lynn Keller, “An Interview with Susan Howe,” in: Contemporary Literature 36:1 (1995), pp. 1–34: here p. 27. 15 Schor (1997), Wet, p. 210. 16 Howe (1996), Sorting Facts, p. 300. 17 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Spero’s Other Traditions,” in: Catherine de Zegher, ed., Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995, pp. 239–244: here p. 243. 18 Laynie Browne, “A Conceptual Assemblage. An Introduction,” in: Laynie Browne et al., eds., I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. Los Angeles, CA: Les Figues Press, 2011, pp. 14–17: here p. 15.
Bibliography
Apter, Emily, “Out of the Closet: Mary Kelly’s Corpus (1984–1985),” in: Art Journal 54:1 (1995), pp. 66–70. Art & Language (Mel Ramsden, Charles Harrison, Michael Baldwin), “On Painting,” in: Tate Papers 1 (2004), http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/01/ on-painting, date of access: 17 Sept. 2018. Bernstein, Charles, “The Response as Such: Words in Visibility,” in: M/E/A/N/I/N/G 9 (1991), pp. 3–8.
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Browne, Laynie, “A Conceptual Assemblage. An Introduction,” in: Laynie Browne et al., eds., I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. Los Angeles, ca: Les Figues Press, 2011, pp. 14–17. Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., “Spero’s Other Traditions,” in: Catherine de Zegher, ed., In- side the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art. Cambridge, ma: MIT Press, 1995, pp. 239–244. Felshin, Nina, et al., “Women’s Work: A Lineage, 1966–1994,” in: Art Journal, 54:1 (1995), pp. 71–85. Goldsmith, Kenny/Craig Dworkin, Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011. Harrison, Charles, “The Trouble with Writing,” in: Conceptual Art and Painting: Further Essays on Art & Language. Cambridge, ma, London: MIT Press, 2001, pp. 3–34. Howe, Susan, “Sorting Facts; or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker,” in: Charles War- ren, ed., Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film. Hanover, ct: Wesleyan Uni- versity Press, 1996, pp. 295–343. Keller, Lynn, “An Interview with Susan Howe,” in: Contemporary Literature 36:1 (1995), pp. 1–34. Kelly, Mary, Imaging Desire. Cambridge, ma: MIT Press, 1996. Kelly, Mary, Post-Partum Document. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1999 [1983]. Lippard, Lucy, “Foreword,” in: Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document. Berkeley, ca: Univer- sity of California Press, 1999 [1983], pp. xi–xvi. Olsen, Redell, ‘This One is For You’ and ‘Not, A Conceptual Poetics’ are quoted in this essay. ‘Not, A Conceptual Poetics’ was first published in I’ll Drown My Book: Concep- tual Writing by Women. Los Angeles, ca: Les Figues Press, 2011. Schor, Mira, “Women’s Work: A Lineage, 1966–1994,” in: Art Journal 54:1 (1995), p. 76. Schor, Mira, Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1997.
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