Craft Notes
The difference between a concept & a constraint, part 1: What is a concept?
Sol LeWitt: “Wall Drawing #1111: A Circle with Broken Bands of Color” (2003, detail). Photo by Jason Stec.
[Update: Part 2 is here.]
I wrote about this to some extent here, but I wanted to expound on the issue in what I hope is a more coherent form. Because I frequently see concepts confused with constraints, and the Oulipo lumped in with conceptual writing. For instance, this entry at Poets.org, “A Brief Guide to Conceptual Poetry,” states:
One direct predecessor of contemporary conceptual writing is Oulipo (l’Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), a writers’ group interested in experimenting with different forms of literary constraint, represented by writers like Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, and Raymound Queneau. One example of an Oulipean constraint is the N + 7 procedure, in which each word in an original text is replaced with the word which appears seven entries below it in a dictionary. Other key influences cited include John Cage’s and Jackson Mac Low’s chance operations, as well as the Brazilian concrete poetry movement.
I would argue that the Oulipo, historically speaking, are not conceptual writers/artists—although it’s easy to see how that confusion has come about, because the Oulipians have proposed some conceptual techniques, such as N+7 (which I’d argue is not a constraint). (Also, it’s each noun that gets replaced, not each word.)
What, then, distinguishes concepts from constraints? And why does that distinction matter? In this series of posts, I’ll try answering those questions, starting with what we mean when we call art conceptual.
Today’s conceptual writing largely springs from the conceptual art of the late 1960s. When Kenneth Goldsmith says he desires a thinkership, not a readership, or that one of the books he’s written doesn’t have to be read—
The best thing about conceptual poetry is that it doesn’t need to be read. You don’t have to read it. As a matter of fact, you can write books, and you don’t even have to read them. My books, for example, are unreadable. All you need to know is the concept behind them.
—he’s drawing on notions advanced by the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt (1928–2007). LeWitt most clearly defined conceptual art in two seminal essays: “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” (1967) and “Sentences on Conceptual Art” (1969). Nothing should stop you from reading those essays right now. (They’re both very short.)
LeWitt was quite serious when he wrote in “Paragraphs,” “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art,” the line that’s become the mantra of conceptual art. Basically, a conceptual artist comes up with an idea (a concept), which is itself the artwork. The artist (or another person) may then execute the concept. If so, the work produced counts as a demonstration of the originating idea. But it isn’t the artwork per se; it’s more like a record or product of the execution.
Along these lines, LeWitt sold not drawings, but sets of instructions for making drawings. When a museum or gallery purchased one of his pieces, they got a sheet of paper telling them what to do. (Here’s an example of one.) They also got the right to execute those instructions, to display the results, and to eventually stop displaying those results (by destroying the drawing). Here, for instance, is a 2010 blog post about the 2010 installation of LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #1111: A Circle with Broken Bands of Color (2003) at the Art Institute of Chicago. Author Katie R. writes:
For those of you unfamiliar with LeWitt’s work, much of it doesn’t exist like most artworks do, as a tangible painting, drawing, or sculpture. Rather, it is a list of instructions on how to create the artwork. As a conceptual artist, LeWitt believed that it wasn’t the finished work that was the “art”; art instead begins and ends with an idea.
(That post includes photos documenting the wall drawing’s execution, and there’s also an accompanying video. Also, note that LeWitt called these works “drawings” even when they involved paint.)
LeWitt, who died in 2007, of course had nothing to do with the implementation of Wall Drawing #1111. Conceptual art has no problem with this, because one of its tenets is that it doesn’t matter who executes the concept. Since any result produced is not the actual artwork, anyone can therefore execute it—provided they have the right to, and provided they follow the instructions (which should be contained in the original concept).
Without getting too sidetracked here, it’s important to note that conceptual art emerged during a period in art’s history when many considered it important—essential, even—to limit the number of decisions the artist made. As the Poets.org entry claims, John Cage‘s chance operations were influential. As you may know, Cage routinely used chance operations when composing, trying to remove conscious decisions from the art-making process. Why he and other artists thought this so desirable—and why some artists still consider it paramount today—is a complicated argument that I promise to return to later.
LeWitt didn’t use chance operations, but he did devise his own means for removing or limiting conscious decision making. He was adamant on the idea that, once the artist formulated the originating concept, he or she should not to anything to interfere with its execution. As he wrote in “Paragraphs”:
When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. […]
[…] arbitrary or chance decisions would be kept to a minimum, while caprice, taste and others whimsies would be eliminated from the making of the art.
[…] To work with a plan that is preset is one way of avoiding subjectivity.
[…] the fewer decisions made in the course of completing the work, the better. This eliminates the arbitrary, the capricious, and the subjective as much as possible.
To be sure, executing a LeWitt wall drawing will always involve minor unique decisions—for starters, which wall? The implementation of Wall Drawing #1111 at the Art Institute involved that and other choices, as Katie R. author noted:
The general layout and colors to be used are predetermined. Also, there are certain rules within the piece that we have to follow. For example, no one block of color should ever come into contact with another block of the same color, no yellows touching yellows, etc. It seems as if the exact order of the colors in the circular bands can be open for interpretation. However, I know that Takashi, the draftsman from the LeWitt foundation, brought a schematic with him that we’ve been following.
I don’t know the source of that schematic, or how it was devised. But the important point here is how much conscious decision making has been removed from the execution of the instructions. Ideally, the conceptual artist devises a concept so pure and so clear that its execution eliminates the need for any such decisions. Furthermore, the resulting work, if faithfully executed, should clearly communicate the original idea or concept. That is to say, the work produced should not obscure the underlying concept. (Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings are traditionally displayed alongside his page of instructions, as well as some account of who executed the piece, and when.)
LeWitt expounded further on this notion that the author relinquish as much control as possible in “Sentences,” where he wrote:
5. Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.
6. If the artist changes his mind midway through the execution of the piece he compromises the result and repeats past results.
7. The artist’s will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion. His wilfulness may only be ego.
[…]
28. Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist’s mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly. There are many side effects that the artist cannot imagine. These may be used as ideas for new works.
29. The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course.
The conceptual artist, therefore, accepts whatever results occur as a result of implementing his or her concept. This is a very important point that really can’t be overstated. No changing your mind! No interfering! And this is the essential function of the concept, as well as what was so revolutionary about it. Concepts motivate and control the execution of projects and (ideally) remove any and all need for later decision making.
Kenneth Goldsmith is probably the best known conceptual writer working today, both in the indie lit scene and beyond (he’s read his work at the White House, even). Originally trained as a visual artist, Goldsmith derived many of his ideas from LeWitt. For one thing, he agrees with the notion that the artist should accept whatever results occur when executing a concept. In a conversation with Marjorie Perloff, he described how his own art-making improved when he stopped editing his results:
The precursor to No. 111 was a gallery work called No. 109, whereby I used the same method of collecting language as I did for No. 111: any word or phrase ending in the sound of “r” or the “schwa” was permitted. In preparation for the gallery show, I edited the piece down to only contain what I considered the “good” words — the “fun” words, the “entertaining” words, the words that really “zinged.” […]
In an introspective moment after the show had ended, I went back and looked at all the words and phrases I had omitted. They seemed to be perfectly good words and leaving them out did not make the piece any more of a popular success. So I incorporated them all into a new work which grew to be No. 111. But even then, many years into the project, I found myself not able to accept just any word or phrase; instead, I took only the phrases that interested me. That’s why No. 111 is such a readable book; it tames the wide world of available language and focuses it through the fine lens of one person’s experience. In that sense, it’s a very organized and sharp collection.
But in the end, I decided that that was only one way to go about a collection […]. Instead of focusing on the text itself, I began to focus on the greater method or the concept instead and let the language fall where it may within that specified context. Hence, no words could be “wrong” or “boring” if I could justify it being there conceptually [sic]. Suddenly, more traditional linguistic concerns of readerliness, rhythm, phrasing, song, etc. were no longer of importance to me and I found that incredibly liberating.
We should find here strong echoes with Cage: Goldsmith’s realization that all words are equally good—that none of them are “wrong” or “boring”—recalls Cage’s argument that all sounds are equally fine and therefore acceptable when making music. Goldsmith is also adhering to LeWitt’s notion that once a concept is set in motion, it should be obeyed without judgment or interference.
Goldsmith’s Day (2003) provides an excellent example of a simple concept executed faithfully. Goldsmith decided to transcribe the Friday, 1 September, 2000 edition of the New York Times, “word for word, letter for letter, from the upper left hand corner to the lower right hand corner, page by page.” That idea then became the machine that made the art: it set Goldsmith in motion, and he mechanically executed it (literally, as he later abandoned retyping in favor of using a scanner).
Here, then, is the situation we’re dealing with. The conceptual artist stands behind the concept, and therefore behind the artwork, and takes care not to interfere with the execution of the artwork:
- Artist > Concept > Artwork (Product)
It should be clear now why the Oulipo’s N+7 technique can be considered conceptual. In that procedure, each noun in a chosen text is replaced with a noun seven entries down in a dictionary. Obviously it doesn’t matter who performs it (although it does matter which dictionary is used). As an example, here’s the procedure applied to the second paragraph of Harry Mathews’s novel Cigarettes, using the Random House Webster’s Dictionary (2nd Edition):
[original, nouns emphasized] The gabled house loomed over us like a buzzard stuffed in mid flight. People were still arriving. Through the lilac hedge came the rustle of gravel smoothly compressed, and swinging streaks of light that flashed beyond us a pale bank of Japanese dogwood, where a man in a white dinner jacket stood inspecting Allan’s letter with a penlight.
[after N+7, new nouns emphasized] The gabled househusband loomed over us like a bygone stuffed in mid Flint. Peppermint were still arriving. Through the lilac hegemony came the Rwanda of gravy smoothly compressed, and swinging strength of light meter that flashed beyond us a pale banner of jaundice, where a Manama in a white Dionysus stood inspecting Allan’s letup with a Pennsylvania.
I performed this operation by hand, even though there exist now websites that will do it for you automatically (such as this one). And while performing it, I was tempted a couple of times to cheat, substituting “better” words for the ones the procedure generated. For instance, I thought “lightning” more interesting than “light meter,” and “manatee” preferable to “Manama.” But the procedure calls for obedience, and I could hear Kenneth Goldsmith whispering insistently in my ear that no word is wrong or boring—so I obeyed.
This essential component of conceptual art—non-interference—leads us directly to Goldsmith’s argument against most of the other work done by the Oulipo:
One of the greatest problems I have with OULIPO is the lack of interesting production that resulted from it. While I like the idea of “potential literature,” it strikes me that their output should have remained conceptual — a mapping, so to speak; judging by the works that have been realized, they might be better left as ideas. On the whole, they embraced a blandly conservative narrative fiction which seems to bury the very interesting procedures that went into creating the works.
Goldsmith’s critique will take some unpacking. What does he mean by “the lack of interesting production”? As well as “blandly conservative narrative fiction”? Because these judgments are, I want to argue, directly related to the assumptions and philosophies motivating conceptual art. I’ll start there in the follow-up to this post, where I’ll look more closely at constraints. [Update: Again, here’s Part 2, as promised.]
But for now, we have our first indication of why the Oulipo, and constraint-based writing, is not conceptual art. There’s something wrong, Goldsmith is proposing, with how the Oulipians have executed their ideas. (Hint: it has to do with the fact that they edit.)
Ta-ta for now. Until next time, may all your ideas be good ones.
Tags: conceptual art, conceptual writing, constraints, harry mathews, Jason Stec, John Cage, kenneth goldsmith, n+7, oulipo, Sol LeWitt
Eager to read post #2, hey yo. Best, –Alex K.
cool, nice job. do you flirt though with over-reducing? isn’t it not just ‘don’t edit’ but the whyness of that stance? you say you’ll get to that in later installments, so ok, i trust you, but it seems hard to me to remove all that unpacking from the [conceptual] art.
It might be best to think about this series as me laying out the theoretical approach as cleanly as possible. Of course there are conceptual artists who go on to edit; there are always hybrid cases (what Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman call “the baroque” in Notes on Conceptualisms). But I think there is value in examining the extreme position, because it will expose some very serious commitments LeWitt and Goldsmith have made. For instance, Goldsmith’s critique of the Oulipo, and his own “uncreative writing” stance, will make more sense if we take seriously his commitment to a lack of editing—to letting the concept play out unhindered.
Not quite “as much as possible”–DeWitt’s commitment seems to me pretty intact, and not only concretely in the production of “drawings”, but especially in the conceptualizing of them.
Liberation: a pretty “traditional linguistic concern”.
For me, the question isn’t ‘how “conceptual” is Oulipo?’, but rather, ‘how “conceptual”–how mechanical, how non-subjective… how unhuman–are conceptual artists?’.
Apropos, posted by the superb John Latta today: a “conceptual poem” by
someone with the (one assumes!) adopted moniker ‘Place Holder’ (the 60-section
piece reprinted from the new issue of eccolinguistics mag), titled “Evaluation:
Uncreative Writing 101.” In its numeration and flat statement, the piece reminds
one of the great Russian Conceptualist Lev Rubinstein, who with Dmitri Prigov
and brave samizdat others in 70s and 80s USSR had the poignantly derivative U.S.
ConPos beat by a quarter century.
http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2013/02/notebook-eccolinguistics-place-holder.html
I think a more skeptical approach is required. You take Goldsmith at his (obviously) polemical, deliberately provocative and over-the-top word. But his statements are just a red herring, as any one who has actually read his work will know. Every Goldsmith book demands to be read, as every book is highly edited, peppered with obvious editorial interventions and sly asides. There is no Goldsmith book within which the concept “plays out unimpeded”. In fact, a work like ‘Day’ exacerbates and explores precisely such issues as editorial choice and the distance and friction between tidy initiating concept (“transcribe-the-newspaper”) and definitely-not-‘perfunctory’, messy and decision-heavy execution. (Everyone transcribing a single page of a newspaper will produce a different text). In part, this is what Day (and other Goldsmith works) are all about: the contingent, singular, and elastic ways in which conceptual work embodies the general; the way conceptual works deviate from their initiating concept. And only reading his books brings these issues out. In the end, its not the idea that matters, but the singular execution which, once realized, can never again of course be assimilated or subsumed back into the simple idea.
AD:
Good points here that are helpful and smart, and thanks for them, though I wonder if you might be parsing the bigger matter in too punctilious a way? One could put your kind of scalpel to the ideational contours of just about any a-g tendency and fairly arbitrarily, no? Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Language poetry, etc.
Notable particularities of method and style almost always exist within shared, overarching philosophical and aesthetic predispositions. We can pay productive attention to compositional differences between Rothko and Pollock, say, without canceling other, maybe deeper, affinities of artistic belief and pursuit. Or without proposing that before we can use the term Abstract Expressionism in an art historical sense, we first have to decide exactly what discrete works by this or that painter precisely conformed to Greenberg’s pronouncements.
Constraint is always present in this recent conceptual retro-revival, in one form or another, not excluding Goldsmith’s works. I think it was deadgod who pointed out the obvious constraint of the ‘r’ sound gathering, or of any choice as generator, for that matter. (And by the way, the major textual works of Goldsmith’s hero Cage are *very* Oulipean, even when he is combining their application with chance methods: e.g. the mesostics he used for “writing through” other texts.)
Interestingly, by your definition, Bok’s Eunoia would not be a conceptual work, for example, nor would much other stuff he’s done, which tends to be at divergent angles of approach to Goldsmith’s (though both, along with Place, seem to share a very un-conceptual mania for the Author Function). But I wouldn’t think you’d argue that he shouldn’t be considered under the Conceptual rubric because of his more ‘corseted’ textual tactics.
In any case, inasmuch as originary manifestos from the practitioners themselves do count, Notes on Conceptualisms explicitly states, I believe, that Oulipean gestures and other procedural modes are perfectly within the realm of the Conceptual. The key notion is that the *idea* is primary, controlling, and enacting; the execution, as they say, is a perfunctory affair.
That the general game and its practice is completely poached and recycled
from decades-old sources and marketed like something “New” is another matter. A much more interesting topic to explore than this ‘What’s real ConPo and what’s not,’ I’d proffer, would be why the phenomenon has been so gleefully embraced by officializing institutions, and why the phenomenon so excitedly returns the hugs. Which would be to start to ask: What’s exactly “avant-garde” about it all, really, anyway?
I guess I have to respectfully disagree. Where is the editing in Day? I’m not aware of any myself, though if I’m wrong I hope you’ll educate me.
I find Goldsmith pretty consistent in his commitments whenever he talks about his work, and I think it’s worth taking those convictions seriously. I hope this series of posts demonstrates why.
Cheers,
Adam
Thanks!
Hi Kent,
Thanks for commenting. You’re definitely right that conceptual writing, and conceptual art, and any artistic movement, contain varieties. I wouldn’t argue that this analysis covers all conceptual art. But I do think there’s value in taking some of its central tenets seriously, even if not all conceptual artists abide by them. My scalpel may be sharp, but I’m trying to wield it carefully, and to respect Sol LeWitt’s and Kenneth Goldsmith’s (considerable) influences.
I would not call that a constraint, for reasons I hope my second post will make clear. And I hope that I can demonstrate why the clarity I’m aiming for in those distinctions matter.
I don’t think I’d call Cage Oulipian, but that’s certainly debatable, as who is and who isn’t Oulipian tends to be fickle. However, I think the Oulipo is more distinguished by their commitment to constraint, and I would again argue that Cage’s mesostics are not constraint-based. They’re writing procedures applied to texts, and therefore more conceptual. I do think this distinction matters.
There we’re actually in agreement.
It’s been about a year since I last read NoC, so I’d have to review it again before I could really respond there. But I don’t think it’s any real conflict if that book uses a different notion of conceptual than I’m laying out here. There are always going to be lots of different, and conflicting, definitions of things; that’s just the way it is. But I will try to demonstrate that, historically, there is some real significance to some very real definitions that have been proposed and have been different.
Ah, see, but this really is like LeWitt’s notion of the concept, and I think there’s value in not confusing it with Oulipian constraint. The key difference is that, in the case of a constraint, the execution is not perfunctory—and that makes all the difference. Though, again, more regarding that in Part 2.
I won’t deny that those questions are interesting, but I’m afraid they aren’t really my present concern. Personally, I will confess to having very little interest in the notion of the avant-garde, for reasons I’ve laid out here and here (albeit, I fear, sketchily).
It’s always good to hear from you!
Adam
This gets a bit at where my interest actually lies. I consider parts 1 and 2 of this series somewhat perfunctory, as I try to lay out as cleanly as possible historical definitions, and theoretical commitments, underlying conceptual art and constraint-based writing. I’m not trying to be exhaustive, but rather to engage with some actual definitions and proposals that certain (influential) artists have committed to and attempted, more or less, to abide by.
But ultimately my interest lies beyond that, as what I’d most like to do is to dig beneath those commitments, and see what’s actually going on there. Which will necessarily involve asking some questions similar to the ones you propose above. How possible is it to make the execution of an artwork a perfunctory affair? Why should that be desirable? Does such a practice remove “the human” from art-making? Does that question even make sense? I do hope that Part 3 of this series will be illuminating along those lines, even as I fear that it will end up being the sketchiest installment, being the part where my thinking is still, I believe, the most rudimentary. But I’ll also look forward to hearing how I’ve misunderstood what I think I understand :)
Cheers!
Adam
Of course Goldsmith is consistent in his comments about his own work: his interviews and essays are largely self-plagiarizing, and part of a carefully cultivated performative persona. They are, though, undeniably deliberate provocative and polemical, and as such largely misleading when measured against the specifics of the texts themselves, as many critics have been quick to point out. (See, for but one example, Dworkin’s essay “Zero Kerning”). Like I said, every Goldsmith book demands to be read, and each deviates in significant ways from the initiating concept.
‘Day’ is an extremely edited and sculptured text which. Here, Goldsmith chose to reproduce the text reading from left to
right, making no distinction between the different stories, columns, advertisements, etc. This meant that, far from “letting the concept play out unimpeded” or the “execution being a perfunctory affair”, Goldsmith was forced to make on every page a large number of non-pre-determined decisions with regard to the transciption (for but one example, the lines in adjacent story columns are not always “lined-up” with each other; how then should one “read across” the page?). Moreover, he also included text and numbers that appeared in photos but was not part of the ‘body text’ per se (as Goldsmith himself explains: “Everywhere there was a bit of text in the paper, I grabbed it. . . . If
it could be considered text, I had to have it. Even if there was, say,
an ad for a car, I took a magnifying glass and grabbed the text off the
license plate”[“Being Boring”]). Still more, the layout of the text in the book is very carefully considered and sculptured, frequently designed to produce a visually rhythmic effect. In these ways and many, many others, ‘Day’, as I said, exacerbates and explores editorial choice and
the distance and friction between tidy initiating concept
(“transcribe-the-newspaper”) and definitely-not-‘perfunctory’, messy and
decision-heavy execution. And all these issues only come to light by actually reading the book, and not by bypassing reading altogether and simply pondering the concept (improverished in itself relative to the resultant text).
I think we might be meaning something different by editing. I know Goldsmith had to make decisions when transcribing the paper—but he really did, broadly speaking, follow his initial concept (and the paper’s layout was also, to some extent, formulaic). That is to say, Goldsmith (to my knowledge) didn’t go in later and change words or line breaks/juxtapositions to make the resulting book “read better,” or to fit some larger formal aesthetic ideal—which is what I would call editing. He accepted the text that was there in the paper, without changing it.
I also don’t see how his method of grabbing all the text on the page constitutes editing. Rather, it strikes me as his obeying his original concept (which was to copy the paper “word for word, letter for letter”). He said he was going to copy the whole thing, and he did. The procedure caused text to be juxtaposed with other text, but I wouldn’t call that editing. Instead, it strikes me as being more in keeping with the accidental collisions that result from employing other conceptual procedures, like N+7 and the Cut-Up Method.
If the concept when executed led Goldsmith to make innumerable decisions, then a strict conceptual artist might infer that the initial concept, strictly speaking, wasn’t a very good one. But that’s also a different matter than what’s usually meant by “editing.”
As far as the book’s layout goes, while I can’t claim to have read the whole book straight through, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at it, and I’ll confess I don’t see the “sculpturing” you speak of (though it’s a very long book and perhaps I’m missing something). As I understand it, the layout is pretty formulaic: each line/paragraph taken from the paper is represented on its own line, left-indented, while each page of the paper begins on its own page, continuing as far down as it will go. After which there comes a page break, after which the next page of the paper starts. Although I also don’t and can’t claim to be an expert on the book, knowing only what I can see from the finished copy, really.
But this is also somewhat beside the point. If Day isn’t the perfect example of a conceptual artwork, so be it; there are other examples one could choose to illustrate the philosophical commitments and aesthetic ideals of CA. And if Kenneth Goldsmith ultimately isn’t the world’s most consistent conceptual artist, then that, too, isn’t really the biggest problem for my present purpose. Because what I’m mainly interested in sketching out here is the ideal that conceptual art, historically, is committed to. Lord knows people often fail in their attempts to attain ideas, but that doesn’t necessarily make the ideals less important, or less worth considering.
Furthermore, I don’t think it really interests me all that much whether Goldsmith is ultimately sincere or not regarding his lifelong performance as a conceptual writer, at least not presently. Whether it’s wise of me or not, I’m trying (for now) to take his numerous (and often relatively consistent) statements seriously. I can’t imagine that everything the man has said and written over the past decade-plus is some vast put-on or hoax. I’ve been studying his work that long now, and would argue there’s some real consistency in what he’s been professing. And ultimately, one must be held responsible for what one professes (professors especially). As Kurt Vonnegut put it, we are who we pretend to be.
I do appreciate these comments, however, as well as any other clarifications regarding KG’s work, and conceptual art in general. Regarding which, I again won’t claim to be any kind of expert—more a persistent hobbyist with illusions, perhaps, of some greater grandeur.
Cheers,
Adam
So: constraint: decision within explicit and imposed boundaries; concept: boundaries with decision ruled out of textual production.
A sonnet–let’s call it ‘Shakespearean’: 14 lines, each an iambic pentameter, rhymed ABABCDCDEFEFGG, with the first octet setting up a ‘problem’ solved (or complicated) by the final sestet and especially by the final couplet.
–these rules are all “constraints”, fairly inflexible, but with no governance over any poem’s subject or any particular word in any ‘Shakespearean sonnet’. (That Shakespeare himself chooses to write about love, time/aging, betrayal, and so on–that’s all his choice; if you follow the rules above and write about your favorite NFL team, the result would still be a ‘Shakespearean sonnet’.)
To make “conceptual” sonnets… abolish the rhyme scheme and keep the rest of the ‘Shakespearean sonnet’ rules. In fact, forget those (and any) ‘sonnet’ rules and take – instead of formal compositional constraints – the actual 154 sonnets of Shakespeare. Take the first line from Sonnet 1, the second from Sonnet 2, and on through the 14th line in Sonnet 14: that’s Sonnet 1′. Sonnet 2′ begins with line 1 of Sonnet 2 and ends with line 14 of Sonnet 15. …and on through to line 1 of Sonnet 154 through line 14 of Sonnet 13 in Sonnet 154′, so that each of the lines of Shakespeare’s sonnets appear once in the Sonnets’. (Small problem:
The difference between “constraint” and “concept” is obvious: you the poet decide the words in the Shakespearean sonnet(s) that you write (within the rules), whereas the Shakespearean Sonnets’ are already written as soon as the idea of them is imagined. (That there might be some few interesting poetic effects in the 154 Sonnets’ is not the responsibility of the sonnet’eer, but rather, an aleatory product of the sequence of Shakespeare’s sonnets.)
Interesting questions of, say, authorship and authority, or of semantic meaning in poems, might be raised by these 154 Sonnets’. Good poems to read, maybe less so — but so what?
I guess that’s the question conceptual art goes a pretty long way to ask.
How do you invest in theory so heavily and still love practicing art?
AD, interesting thoughts and interesting approach trying to place the scalpel through concept and constraint to get a clear distinction. look forward to seeing the second installment to flesh it out more.
I find Goldsmith at times to over state his approach. In particular his statement professing the unreadability of his work. Does he mean that literally or not as I feel from the works of his I’ve read- and that’s only been the odd piece- or the work collected on ubuweb under conceptual writing that most of this work is readable.
Sure they are not the same as a narrative work but they are still readable as decipherable and the possibility is there for person reading/viewing the work. So I guess the question I have is is the point of difference between constraint and conceptual writing around the definition of readability? For to me it seems that this is the allegations around Oulipo (the void, life a user manual are readable whilst using the constraints imposed in them) of Goldsmith are.
I love analyzing things. I was a math/science major before I switched to writing. I’ve always been drawn to theory.
My own art-making is very intuitive and impulsive, though, I think. But also very formal. I think of form as being very sensual and emotional, myself. One feels it and responds to it. I tend to think in structures.
Hi Scott,
Goldsmith might overstate his case, and his work may be more readable than he insists. But I think it’s interesting to try taking that commitment seriously, and see what spills out of it. Because when one does that, yes, I think that the issue of “readability” becomes a real point of difference—meaning, one does read conceptual work differently than constraint-based work. My goal is to try to clarify that, and demonstrate why that is, in the follow-up posts.
Cheers,
Adam
Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Now I don’t need to write the follow-up posts!
Deadgod,
All poetic writing contains some measure of constraint, whether
foregrounded (as in a sonnet) or veiled beneath constructed effects
of naturalness (as in a “free verse’ poem by Billy Collins).
But there is constraint and there is constraint. Or, one could say, it all
depends what you mean by the “con”… Your comment, though nicely
stated, somewhat misses the issue in question because it conflates very
different *kinds and aims* of constraint. And, in principle, it’s always good to
look at these formal moves and matters under the more contingent light of
sub-cultural frames.
For example, the sonnet form in 16th-17th century England (first
introduced, by Edward de Vere’s tutor and uncle, you’ll recall, if you’re a
Shakespeare-controversy nut like me) quickly comes to be a *dominant poetic mode* of the period and long afterwards, a formal effect and affect deeply assimilated into cultural convention and performance. It should be obvious that this is a very different species of formal constraint than a quirky, outlier form like the mesostic used by Cage, or the lipogram used by Perec, or the N+7 move (quirky in its early stage, anyway, when the notion still had some freshness). In these cases, the *formal performance of the constraint* is the main action on the stage; the (so-called) perfunctory “content”–however tour de force its realization–is the arras. In the latter cases, the device is laid bare and focused as exoskeletal premise of content itself; in the former case (the sonnet), ritualized prosodic constraint is perfunctory undergirding for primary ideational propositions (these not excluding, to be sure, fairly common gestures of formal self-reflexiveness). That’s one awkward way of putting it, anyway.
Has anyone seen this documentary on Ai Wei Wei? Well, obviously people
have–Never Sorry, I think is the title. What’s fascinating is how conceptualism
in its variegated, international examples has been and continues to be a
central, multiform strategy of cultural and institutional critique– as
instances of its practice in the former USSR, and Chile, and now China have
shown. These very different, in their natures, from the institutionally
obsequious–arguably reactionary–practices and stances of our belated U.S.
version. I guess the point of troubling these distinctions as we’re doing here
would be to better continue to theorize how similar “ideas” can often come to
have such outrageously different cultural and political implications.
Ha ha — the concept of the “concept”: come for the idear–leave right away.
I’ll disagree slightly. This is why I think it’s useful to distinguish constraints from concepts. I’d say that conceptual writing does not contain constraints. Rather, it is all formal writing that contains constraints. (Conceptual writing is therefore non-formal—the force or value of using a conceptual procedure being precisely to create products that are ambivalent to form.)
This I agree with, in principle. The Oulipians do seem to mean something different when they say “constraint.” They’re obviously drawing on formal traditions, but their tendency to invent new formal constraints in the work is worth noting.
I still don’t think mesostics are constraints. Or, rather, I think there is value in distinguishing conceptual procedures from formal writing constraints. The difference is entirely formal, but that distinction has big consequences.
The lipogram is a constraint. N+7 is a conceptual procedure.
Not to give too much away, but in part 2 I’m going to argue that Oulipian constraints function as formal dominants (a la Roman Jakobson and the other Russian Formalists—I know, big surprise…).
It’s correct, though (minus my objection to calling the mesostic and N+7 constraints).
I’ve never seen Never Sorry, sorry. Will pursue, thanks…
Glad to be having this conversation with the two of you! Cheers,
Adam
Deadgod,
All poetic writing contains some measure of constraint, whether
foregrounded (as in a sonnet) or veiled beneath constructed effects
of naturalness (as in a “free verse’ poem by Billy Collins).
But there is constraint and there is constraint. Or, one could say, it all
depends what you mean by the “con”… Your comment, though nicely
stated, somewhat misses the issue in question because it conflates very
different *kinds and aims* of constraint. And, in principle, it’s always good to
look at these formal moves and matters under the more contingent light of
sub-cultural frames.
For example, the sonnet form in 16th-17th century England (first
introduced, by Edward de Vere’s tutor and uncle, you’ll recall, if you’re a
Shakespeare-controversy nut like me) quickly comes to be a *dominant poetic mode* of the period and long afterwards, a formal effect and affect deeply assimilated into cultural convention and performance. It should be obvious that this is a very different species of formal constraint than a quirky, outlier form like the mesostic used by Cage, or the lipogram used by Perec, or the N+7 move (quirky in its early stage, anyway, when the notion still had some freshness). In these cases, the *formal performance of the constraint* is the main action on the stage; the (so-called) perfunctory “content”–however tour de force its realization–is the arras. In the latter cases, the device is laid bare and focused as exoskeletal premise of content itself; in the former case (the sonnet), ritualized prosodic constraint is perfunctory undergirding for primary ideational propositions (these not excluding, to be sure, fairly common gestures of formal self-reflexiveness). That’s one awkward way of putting it, anyway.
Has anyone seen this documentary on Ai Wei Wei? Well, obviously people
have–Never Sorry, I think is the title. What’s fascinating is how conceptualism
in its variegated, international forms has been and continues to be a central,
multiform strategy of cultural and institutional critique– as instances of its
practice in the former USSR, and Chile, and now China have shown. These very different, in their natures, from the institutionally obsequious–even arguably reactionary–practices and stances of our belated U.S. version. I guess the point of troubling these distinctions as we’re doing here would be to better continue to theorize how similar “ideas” can often come to have such
outrageously different cultural and political implications.
AD, thanks. but just to say quickly that not sure how you wouldn’t see mesostics as a constraint, as the vertical structure of the chosen name determines total selection of text…
Speaking of editing, though I suppose it’s in somewhat indirect connection, I came across the link below, and thought I’d ask a couple questions:
How much does stuff like this, within the manifold darkrooms of the habitus, still get practiced on the “post-avant” Poetry Scene?
http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fil:1918_vmayakovsky-lbrik_retouched.jpg
(Mayakovsky and Lilyan Brik in 1918, above; image circa late 1930s below)
That’s the first question. The second question, still pertaining to the pictures, is whether or not the ethically evacuated aesthetics of U.S. ConPo share some kind of subterranean dialectic with the aesthetically stuffed ethics of Stalinism?
I don’t know the answer, for sure, but I have this hunch I can’t seem to shake.
Well, the issue I took up (from Adam’s blogicle) is the distinction between “constraint” and “concept”–how Oulipo writers are mislabeled ‘conceptual’. From the perspective of that contrast, however deconstructable it is, Shakespeare’s sonneteering is definitely a matter of constraints consciously chosen to express himself within and by, however historically determined that option was (among other equally historically determined possibilities for writing poems), as opposed–though not by Shakespeare–to what conceptual writers would do.
(I’d meant to go on about the ubiquity of “constraint” in art, in ‘human making that admits of refinement’, but the comment seemed long enough.)
I think all linguistic mediation is constrained; in English, for example, there are word-order rules that every competent speaker follows or disobeys deliberately as a function of their awareness of having become competent: ‘that’s how you say it’. In other words, the word ‘constrain’ has a legitimate meaning–a broad connotation–that’s applicable to all language use.
So when “constraint” is used in the Oulipeauvian sense, one has to assume or make explicit that a narrower meaning is meant than the broadest possible: ‘a rule arbitrarily imposed on–as opposed to inherited within–author-expressive writing’.
What’s different between Oulipo writing and Tudor/Elizabethan sonneteering is the former’s thematizing of “constraint” itself; not that the performance of form is more self-conscious by Perec or accepted more ‘naturally’ by Surrey and Wyatt, but that, differently than the historical self-understanding of Oulipo, the Tudor poets turned critical self-consciousness in other directions. But any English sonneteer in the last 500 years is choosing rules from among dozens (hundreds?) of possible poem-forms, however co-governed that choice is by cultural, political-economic, and more personal circumstances.
I don’t think you’re right about the content of Perec’s games being “perfunctory” or ground (as opposed to figure… I think that’s what you mean by “arras”). In Life: A User’s Manual, a knight’s tour governs the sequence of sections of the building edificographed, but–for me anyway–not at all to the upstaging of the human stories that the building-novel houses. The Bartlebooth story, for one: Melville, erasure, the feelings one might get about the character’s fictive life — not the motions of an exercise, but rather, the pleasing-and-edifying nutrition of one’s reading.
Shakespeare takes up a form that seems a useful way to express himself; Perec imagines a form that seems fun and expresses himself by and through it. I don’t think the difference is great in the way you’re suggesting–Perec is an old-fashioned pleasure to read, and Shakespeare, constrained (albeit without making a subject of the particular formality of sonnets).
Whether conceptual writing and/or thematized formalism (“constrained” writing) act in service of political-economic reaction… maybe. I think the reason American artists who make political-economic revolution (of some kind, in some way) the content of their work are marginalized is two-fold: the audience is pre-neutralized by comfort, and artists qua expression are quite ‘free’.
(Bradley Manning isn’t free, but if you want to copy wikileak data into your poem, g’ahead–scan whatever you can right off the internet. American artists can fight the man, man, in ways Ai cannot–so that fight recommends itself to him as one worth fighting, however obliquely, where American artists who engaged in his provocations would be accused (however unfairly) of comical theatrics or, worse, pretension to suffering and good ol’ middle-class hypocrisy.)
[…] D Jameson has a very interesting post up at HTMLGIANT regarding an issue goes to the core of a lot of what I say in The End of Oulipo? […]
There seems to me a definitive and useful distinction between “concept” and “constraint”, which Adam points at with his “fact that they edit” tease: a “constraint” is a partial mold into which the artist pours, but around whose hard surfaces the artist continues to sculpt, where a “concept” structures the whole of the work’s surface without any deciding by the artist after pouring.
The conceptual writer takes some text that already exists and runs it through the machine of a “concept”; the only deciding is a) raw material and b) machining process. The constrained writer decides on some bundle of “constraints”, but then continues to decide until the writer feels – or perhaps is ‘told’ by one of the “constraints” to feel – that the work is complete.
I think this presence of choosing–let me tendentiously call it writing–throughout the textual production is a real difference between “constraint” and “concept”.
–and a horizon of continuity between strongly constrained writing (like most of the Oulipo games; Adam sensibly suggests that n+7 is an Oulipeauvian “concept” and not a “constraint”) and all non-conceptual writing (and, indeed, language usage), which latter I’d call ‘always at least weakly constrained’.
I’d not heard of Kasey Silem Mohammad’s sonnagrams. At this (I’m guessing) accurate introduction, http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/three-sonnagrams/Content?oid=14656745 , McHugh makes the clear point that Mohammad actively chooses the anagram-words, so the (literal) machine-generated aspect you mention doesn’t obtain here–and the three poems she reprints sure seem deliberately (and not only apparently) playful. –unless I’ve misunderstood either you or her or both of you.
It seems to me that Mohammad is straightforwardly an Oulipo-by-another-matrix writer of these sonnagrams.
(Also, all I could find quickly was information about Mohammad’s 20 Shakespearean sonnagrams, not “all” 154. ?)
deadgod, thanks. Fine comments.
On the KSM sonnets, what I meant is that the online anagram generator creates an option list for each word. So in that sense, at least in first instance, the base concept “runs up” the raw material with no authorial intervention. A kind of fracking for the basic lexical stuff, done by robotics, so to speak… Which then, yes, gets refined and channeled via careful editing into preset prosodic containers, for shipping as avant product (in all this talk of the Conceptual, we should never forget the cultural market). So
maybe we’d want to see this as a hybrid instance? Constraint-based, yes, but still concept-driven and thus within the generic arena of Conceptual writing practices? I’d say so.
I do see your point about “sculpting,” how the act implies a
key intentional difference, and I don’t argue with it at all. In fact, the sharp differences you (and Adam) are drawing could/should be usefully applied to the better understanding of “conceptual” writing’s spectrum of strategies. Actually, other than Place’s and Fitterman’s big-tent welcoming of constraint-based stuff
in Notes on Conceptualisms, I don’t think there’s been much sustained reflection on the matter. Maybe this is because in Conceptual art there wasn’t too much earnest parsing of the question, either, and you had all sorts of stuff by conceptual artists that involved some manner of “choosing” (Smithson, for
one, whose work is very much an extended meditation on “choice” as core element of conceptual proceeding).
The distinctions of approach you and Adam draw seem right and critically productive to me. But I don’t think they amount to an argument for a boundary of difference in genre or kind. Again, I’d propose that so long as we’re speaking of any work whose *base, generating source* constitutes the poetic and philosophical premise of whatever result its operations might provide, then we’re speaking, at bottom, of a Conceptual work. I’ll have to make that definition sound less like it’s written by a poor-man’s Charles Altieri, but plenty of time for that.
Am I being too simple if I suggest a distinction between *purely* conceptual art and art which, though able to be evaluated (as a work of whatever kind) without the witness knowing of the originating concept, cannot be fully understood without knowledge of the artist’s idea(s)? In other words: art which is fully determined by the context caused by the concept /vs/ art which is only somewhat determined by same. (Not that I would want a new metric for rating the ‘conceptuality’ of a work of art … actually, yeah, they’re called “Cageums” and you can only refer to them in non-numerical amounts, e.g. “This piece is lots of Cageums.” or “That piece is nearly devoid of Cageums.” but never “My novella rates 101 Cageums.”) Actually, nevermind.
Those anagram generators work at the word level–each word is anagrammed separately. But Mohammad’s 20 (?) sonnagrams are anagrammed at the poem level, right? Each of the letters of each chosen sonnet is used to make new words and then the leftovers are used to form that sonnagram’s title. –unless I misunderstand McHugh…
–hence the genre “sonnagram”: ‘sonnet-level anagram‘, a rearrangement not of the letters in each word in a poem individually, which ‘new’ words are then rearranged, but of the letters of all the words rearranged into words without care for the length of the words each letter is in in the source poem.
In accordance with the definitions Adam’s presenting (and that I take up), the “concept”/”constraint” distinction depends on the absence of editorial work in the former and persistence of it in the latter. Mohammad is making words–almost surely a different number of them than in the source text–out of the mass of letters in the source text. That’s going to result in poems unique to Mohammad; no one else following the procedure will have all–most won’t have many–of the same words as he comes up with in their sonnagrams of the same source sonnets (in, I guess, the same way no two sonograms of the same fetus look exactly the same… even more different than those, I’d say).
Mohammad’s poems are, to me, plainly constrained and not conceptual.
I should say, I’m pretty sure we’re working with two rivaling usages of “concept”/conceptual. “[G]enerating source constitut[ing] the poetic and philosophical premise of whatever result its operations might provide” is fine. More common, careless usages of conceptual art include ‘doesn’t look like a picture of something else’ (so Pollock and Rothko and Stella and Ai are ‘conceptual’, Turner seascapes are ‘conceptual’) and even ‘art that gives you ideas’ (Warhol… Poussin! why not).
But neither your ‘premised operation’ nor ‘everything that’s not an accurate picture of something else’ nor ‘intellectual art’ — none of that is what DeWitt, Goldsmith, Adam, and (for now) I mean by “concept”. Or would DeWitt would call Smithson ‘conceptual’ in DeWitt’s way?
Not that DeWitt and Goldsmith get to, eh, conceive the terms conceptual art or conceptual poetry narrowly for everybody else. But Adam’s got a pretty solid, coherent reason for denying that Oulipo is “conceptual”, and that’s what I’ve been thinking about in these conversations.
Regarding Goldsmith, I learned today of this, just put up at Jacket2,
written by Jacob Edmond, a New Zealand critic who’s written widely on Conceptual poetry. Goldsmith sings Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library.” I have to say, this really is quite impressive, weirdly beautiful, at times, and far from “unoriginal.” And I can only tip my hat to KG on this one.
http://jacket2.org/commentary/kenneth-goldsmith-unpacks-walter-benjamin%E2%80%99s-library
Ha ha — that’s terrible singing — ha ha ha.
–and, I think, Goldsmith (knowingly?) challenges the precepts of “conceptual” writing/art with it.
Performance is ineradicably expressive of contingent ‘personality’. No performance is repeatable. It’s not that a performance is a machine-reproduction of an originary text, like ‘conceptual writing’ is the redundant execution of an idea–though that’s a practical way for a performer to build their performance: from some ground–, but rather, that the text of any particular performance presses on its audience (as well as performer(s)) ‘originally’.
And to consider the universality of “performance” — in art, every piece is ‘performed’ into existence — is to deny the premise and achievement of iteration in DeWitt’s and Goldsmith’s conceptualisms. That is, from the point of view of “performance”, having the idea does not render unnecessary executing it or taking in the execution of it.
Yes, here I’d agree the performance has little to do with “conceptualism.” But it’s his most engaging, advanced, and queer work so far, much more interesting than his straight derivative “conceptualist” covers. There’s a kind of cutting-edge camp to it all, though not sure exactly how to put the finger on it. And the “awfulness” (I agree!) of the singing has something to do with the mystery-effect he achieves. Lots of technically “distressed” art and music does this, obviously, but doing it with Benjamin is a gestural cut above. All differences granted, it does remind me somehow of the old karaoke singer in La Paz I heard some years back, who was totally in trance, doing Dylan for nearly two hours, with heavy Bolivian accent, until his voice gave out.
The only choice made is “what name,” which then gets applied to a given text. The procedure gets run, and everything falls out from there. So the only decision made is prior to the production of the text. No editing necessary. … Hope this is clearer after Part 2! Almost finished!
I basically agree with this.
Again, basic agreement.
Again, basic agreement. To me it doesn’t matter is KSM uses a computer to find all the anagrams he can use. He still has to arrange the new sonnets himself, and he has choices there. He’s doing machine-aided constraint-based writing. I relied heavily on computers when I wrote my constraint-based novel Giant Slugs.
I do think there’s a great value in keeping concepts distinct from constraints. I’ll try to get more into that in Part 3. For now, though, I think the concept folk need that distinction more than the constraint folk do. Indeed, it’s the concept folk who, historically speaking, have claimed that distinction, and its import. (I’m thinking here in particular of Joseph Kosuth’s “Art After Philosophy.”)
Vanessa et al. may make a big tent for conceptual work in NoC, but I don’t know if they really get out of that distinction in the end. Sure, they acknowledge the presence of the “baroque,” or “hybrid” conceptual works where the author goes on to “change his or her mind” after beginning, and doing some editing. But that doesn’t necessarily bring constraints into play. Constraints are formal and the bottom-line question is, “Is the artwork formal? Or not?” Much of the work Vanessa then takes up in the book is not formal, which is what allows her to proceed to her reading that “all conceptual writing is allegorical” (I’m paraphrasing). A strict formalist would take issues with that, for the same reasons Susan Sontag rails against allegorical readings in “Against Interpretation.” Briefly put: in formal art, the art’s meaning is the artwork itself, nothing more. In non-formal art, if the artwork has any meaning at all (debatable), then it is often something other than the work’s content—e.g., its political message.
One always has to go back to the foundations of the thing and examine the assumptions there. Conceptual art is founded on the idea that it is desirable to remove conscious decision-making from artistic production. It’s well worth asking why that is the case, and what it gets the artist.
It’s interesting, back when I was teaching a course on conceptual art and conceptual writing, I arrived at similar thoughts regarding performance. Perhaps they are unavoidable.
I agree that performance art is something different from conceptual art, though there are definitely ways to relate the two. The chief connection, it seems to me, is the absence of form. (Though there might be some performance art that is formal; I’m speaking broadly/theoretically.)
[…] There’s an interesting interview with Kenneth Goldsmith, whom I discussed a little bit last week after A D Jameson discussed him here. […]
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[…] back to this. In Part 1, I traced out how in conceptual art, the concept lies outside whatever artwork is produced—how, […]
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