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 © WILHELM FINK VERLAG, 2019 | doi:10.30965/9783846763339_007 Redell Olsen - 9783846763339 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the prevailingDownloaded cc-by-nc-nd from Brill.com09/30/2021 License. 01:00:55PM via free access <UN> 64 Redell Olsen wondering if his ideas of the literary are somewhat lost in an idea of literature more relevant to the 19th- century novel. The phrase “costume of literature” is a troubling one that captures the long-standing distrust of art and artists for Costume and fashion the literary even as the use of have a long history of language has become, since the being derided by serious 1970s, relatively commonplace in intellectuals: the domain of artistic practice. The term “costume” carries with it the “Nothing else is now rather rare if not obsolete garish apparraile, sense of “costume” as linked to the but Prydes ulcer style of an artwork in relation to the broken forth.” expectations of its historical and – Thomas Nashe, The Anatomie of cultural context. On a basic level, Absurditie Harrison’s turn of phrase probably (1589) alludes to the modes of writing and language use more commonly “Fashion is the found in literature than art of the abortive issue of time such as: narrative, description, vain ostentation and and figurative language. This exclusive egotism: interpretation would soften his it is haughty, apparent disavowal of the literary trifling, affected, servile, despotic, into a simple acknowledgement of mean and ambitious, the different historical and social precise and domains of these two artistic fields fantastical, all in of research and practice. These a breath – tied to prohibitions are less adhered to in no rule, and bound recent work, but the suspicion to conform to every between disciplines remains. The whim of the minute.” term “costume” also carries with it – William Hazlitt, the weight of a long history of On Fashion (1818) intellectual snobbery 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.