The Essay As Art Form

The Essay as Art Form Emily LaBarge A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Royal College of Art for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy March 2016 Royal College of Art 2 Copyright This text represents the submission for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Royal College of Art. This copy has been supplied for the purpose of research for private study, on the understanding that it is copyright material, and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgment. 3 Abstract Beginning with Montaigne’s essayistic dictum Que sais je? — ‘What do I know?’ — this PhD thesis examines the literary history, formal qualities, and theoretical underpinnings of the personal essay to both investigate and to practice its relevance as an approach to writing about art. The thesis proposes the essay as intrinsically linked to research, critical writing, and art making; it is a literary method that embodies the real experience of attempting to answer a question. The essay is a processual and reflexive mode of enquiry: a form that conveys not just the essayist’s thought, but the sense and texture of its movement as it attempts to understand its object. It is often invoked, across disciplines, in reference to the possibility of a more liberal sense of creative practice — one that conceptually and stylistically privileges collage, fragmentation, hybridity, chance, open-endedness, and the meander. Within this question of the essay as form, the thesis contains two distinct and parallel strands of analysis — subject matter and essay writing as research. At the core of the study lie two close-readings: Ana Mendieta’s Labyrinth of Venus (1982) and Le Couvent de la Tourette (1959) by Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis. In each case, the writing draws, in its tone and texture, on a range of literary influences, weaving together different voices, discussions, and approaches to enquiry. The practice of essay writing is presented alongside, part and party to, research: a method of interrogation that embraces risk and uncertainty, and simultaneously enacts its own findings as a critical-creative mode of study-via-form, and form-via-study. The thesis is presented as a book-length essay, in which the art in question is equal and intimately connected to the writing used to address it. Method and form are designed to respond to the oft-cited challenge of the essay as fundamentally unmethodical, ranging, and diverse. Research, critical study, writerly description, and storytelling are combined to elucidate and expose each other based not on surface continuity, but on a deep interconnection among ideas that, through language, cohere and become related — imbued with an affinity for one another. The consummate product is the argument, as it works across genres, disciplines, descriptive and critical models, to challenge the narrative structure and language used within contemporary writing about art. 4 Contents Copyright Abstract Contents Acknowledgments Author’s declaration PREFACE 7 ANA MENDIETA, LABYRINTH OF VENUS, 1982 23 LE CORBUSIER + IANNIS XENAKIS, LE COUVENT DE LA TOURETTE, 1959 149 Bibliography 282 5 Acknowledgments Many thanks are due to Brian Dillon and Jeremy Millar for their keen supervision, understanding, colloquy, and friendship. And to David Crowley, for much sage advice and for giving me so many opportunities to grow during my time at the RCA. Thanks to Chantal Faust, Helen Kearney, and Nina Trivedi, who are invaluable peers and colleagues and without whom I would not have made many vital first steps. Thanks to Martina Margetts, whose consistent interest in and support of my research always buoyed and reassured. I owe a great deal to my friends, who have provided rich emotional and intellectual sustenance. Most of all, endless thanks to my parents — for everything. 6 Author’s declaration During the period of study in which this thesis was prepared the author has not been registered for any other academic award or qualification. The material in this thesis has not been submitted wholly or in part for any academic award or qualification other than that for which it is now submitted. Signature: Date: 7 Preface: An Essay on The Essay as Art Form Essaying will destroy you; it will break your heart. Well — who knows if this is really true. What is true? For three months, during the final stages of the body of work you read here, I woke every day with this phrase running through my mind. It’s not entirely mine: a slight modification of Charles Shulz’s oft-quoted statement, ‘cartooning will destroy you; it will break your heart’.1 But the essay — ‘essaying’ — seemed to slip in seamlessly, as it had already done within so many other parts of my life. I had recently moved house, and in my flat, the bed was on a small mezzanine above the kitchen. On my first morning, the advent of this new refrain, I noticed that there was a small hole in the ceiling right above me. Without thinking, I extended my leg into the air and stuck my toe in, pushing gently to see how deep it was. Small pieces of white paint and plaster flaked down onto the bedcovers. I reminded myself not to do it again — don’t trash the place — you just moved in — but every morning, unfailingly, as I thought about essaying, destruction, and heartbreak, I would find my toe in that hole, digging away, pressing on what felt like a hard, metal stud at its centre, somewhere in the floor above. It was comforting in a way. I imagined the hole was an eye, watching me as I slept, reminding me as I waked to continue the essay, the essaying. Nudge nudge, wink wink. Why this phrase, I would wonder, and what does it mean? The hole got deeper and deeper. I encountered Schulz’s words long ago, and they had touched me deeply: what was it about cartooning — of all things in life — that caused the break, the shatter, the skitter scatter? What perhaps most distinguishes a ‘cartoon’ from a ‘drawing’ is its avowed absence of facsimile. The import of a cartoon is, in fact, negotiated in the space between the subject and the interpretation — close, far, simple, exaggerated — these choices tell us what the cartoonist is trying to say. Not so unlike the decisions made in most creative 1 Charles M. Schulz, as cited in The Comics Journal, Issues 265-268 (Seattle: Fantographics Books), p.174. 8 undertakings. For instance, I have no skill as a draughtswoman, but I imagine that cartooning is like essaying, in a sense — arranging lines and symbols on a page in order to form a representation, wondering how a subject might be animated in order to cohere, to paint a picture, come to life. In Fine Art, a ‘cartoon’ is a preparatory design, drawing, or painting: a sketch, a rough, an outline — an impression. A cartoon is and will always be, by definition, unfinished. Was it this impossibility of completion, I wondered, that cracked the cracks, dug the hole, broke the solid, beating things into pieces? Maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe it was how often things are both funny and sad at the same time. For instance: A little boy perpetually surrounded by a cloud of dirt; a child piano prodigy who executes perfect renditions of Beethoven on a toy-sized piano; a bald four-year-old who wears the same shirt and doesn’t age for five decades; adults who can only be seen from the ankles down, and whose voices resemble unintelligible honking noises. A dog with a typewriter: he’s working on a masterpiece — it was a dark and stormy night. In other words, childhood, from the perspective of an adult. In other words, adulthood, and life in general, from the perspective of a human being: things are incongruous — it’s funny! — but also sad, and sometimes humiliating — we have moments of greatness and moments of crippling defeat — it is often the small things that seem to mean the most. Maybe what my daily mantra had seized upon was the manner in which cartooning, like essaying, is a reckoning with a fundamental infinitude — the notion that we cannot grasp the whole of anything, that every subject and experience contains incommensurable qualities, rendering it impossible to contain within a single representation. And so to choose each day to sketch a sketch, to cartoon, to essay, is to participate in a form that embraces this fact. It is to draw lines around an empty space, to stroke the contours softly, sweetly, in the hopes that a form will emerge, the embodiment of a work forever in progress. An essay is, after all, an essay — a test, a trial, an experiment. 9 The essay must let the totality light in one of its chosen or haphazard features but without the assertion that the whole is present.2 And who would ever claim that the swell of the heart — the rise and rise — before it bursts and breaks isn’t intoxicating, each and every time. No matter the end, everything, everyone needs to begin somewhere. That single point on the page, nib to paper, black to white, from which the line stretches and curls and circles around and in on itself to shape forms and structures. Sometimes the trajectory is carefully planned and executed, but sometimes it makes no sense at all. Sometimes you can’t tell whether you are drawing the line, or the line is drawing you. Sometimes, you don’t care; at least you know you’re going somewhere. How funny your name would be if you could follow it back to where the first person thought of saying it…It would be like following a river to its source, which would be impossible.

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