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To Write Within Situations of Contradiction: An Introduction
to the Cross-Genre Writings of Carla Harryman
*Laura Hinton <16.1bios.html#hinton.bio>*
/ City College of New York/
laurahinton@earthlink.net
© <#copyright>2005 Laura Hinton.
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1.
One of the most innovative and sometimes overlooked founding
writers of the West Coast Language Poetry school is Carla
Harryman, author of twelve books of poetry and cross-genre writing
that includes poet's-prose, plays, and experimental essays. Her
short classic pieces in collections like Percentage (1979), Animal
Instincts (1989), and There Never Was a Rose without a Thorn
(1995) reveal a commitment to cross-fertilizing literary genres,
interweaving theory and fiction, prose and lyric, satire and
dialogue, in a way paralleled perhaps only by Kathy Acker.
Harryman's more recent works like Gardener of Stars (2001) and
Baby (2005) continue to build an aesthetic based on the blurring
of conventional genres and literary boundaries, creating a
non-categorizable mode of writing Ron Silliman has called the
"inter-genre": a radical prose-poetry disengagement from Romantic
lyric or bourgeois "realism" in favor of a fantastical utopian
language of desire.[1 <#foot1>] But perhaps Harryman's most
unusual contribution to the Language movement and to postmodern
literature at large is her work in Poet's Theater. A leading
figure of the San Francisco Poet's Theater in the 1970s and '80s,
Harryman has continued poetry-performance work past the new
millennium, staging a series of avant-garde poetry plays that
include the ambitious multi-media piece Performing Objects
Stationed in the Subworld (2001/2003), and a new piece, Mirror
Play, recently performed in Michigan and to be performed again
this fall in Wels, Austria.
2. It is not a single genre or piece for which Harryman is known,
however, but for her refusal to be typecast, for her writing's
generic flexibility and poetic inventiveness as it
"restages"--either upon a literal stage or through the medium of a
literary text--hybrid writings that challenge and cross over
formal representational modes, sometimes engaging collaboratively
with other artists and media in the process. (The 2003 San
Francisco performance of Performing Objects, for example, brought
together an artist and a musician, as well as a co-director and
actors, through Amy Trachenberg's art-installation-like costumes
and sets and Erling Wold's songs.) Like most Langpo and
experimental writings, Harryman's writings have been confined to
the world of small presses and their distribution. Her
inventiveness and challenge to the structural foundations of
mainstream commercial literature have made her an icon among her
Langpo colleagues for over three decades. She is beginning to draw
a wider audience with several urban-performance incarnations of
Performing Objects and by appearing internationally (this fall
Harryman is delivering a series of lectures in Germany). The
upcoming issue of How2, which plans to devote a special section to
Harryman's work, attests to her increasing recognition.
3. One insufficiently discussed and--I would argue,
essential--component of Harryman's writing is its relationship to
feminist politics. Through her feminist and Leftist political
roots, Harryman has striven to create a wide and liberal range of
experimental venues, expressing and exploiting the potentiality of
ideological freedom. But Harryman has also created, in the
process, what I would like to call "an aesthetics of
contradiction." In this introduction to Harryman's writing, I
explore the ways in which Harryman's radical, non-genre-based
writing practice is anchored to the feminist insight that
literature itself must be unmade/re-made for it to begin to
express women's symbolic experience in a patriarchal
social-textual order, and to begin to express women's particular
relation to cultural-artistic power. Harryman's aesthetics of
contradiction, I argue, play upon tension, conflict, female
"exclusion" from mainstream and masculine-coded discourses, and
the artifice of aesthetic surfaces and "games," ultimately to
reject the artifice of gender altogether.
4. In other words, Harryman's poetic writings function not so much to
render literary objects beautiful (although sometimes they do so
in the process), but to question radically the function of
literature--poetics used against poetics, as a form of conceptual
art. Like conceptual art, a multi-disciplinary movement conceived
primarily in the visual-arts realm that has influenced Harryman
greatly, these poetics do not just mold shapely lyrics or lines or
phrases to be scanned or otherwise formally determined, but also
insist that the audience reflect upon the nature of "poetry" and,
in fact, /make/ of poetry that which questions its own existence.
In conceptually based literature like Harryman's, poetry acts as a
conflictual, challenging medium, a discourse of "communication"
that "fails" more than it communicates--that repeatedly replicates
these failures as lack of linguistic or narrative resolution. In
this conceptual aesthetics of contradiction, Harryman clearly
draws upon postmodern theories that seek a conflictual as opposed
to a unifying model of "meaning" or "narrative truth," theories
like Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition (1979),
whose challenge to /le grand récit/ is appropriated for feminist
purposes in Craig Owens's classic "The Discourse of Others:
Feminists and Postmodernism" (1988) in a discussion of women
artists' necessary relation to the avant-garde through their
"exclusion" from male-based history and aesthetics, and
exemplified by Acker's novels or by Cindy Sherman's fake
photographic Hollywood stills. Poet Rae Armantrout also writes of
the power of "exclusion" on behalf of women's experimental writing
in her essay "Feminist Poetics and the Meaning of Clarity" (1992),
articulating the role of conflict and contradiction as women
artists face the symbolic order. Interdisciplinary volumes like
Feminism/Postmodernism (1990) further open a dialogue in
sociology, philosophy, literary studies, and science about this
feminist engagement in conflictual models of epistemological
engagement, making synthesis no longer a preferred mode of
inquiry, as did Conflicts in Feminism (1990). More recently Judith
Lorber argues in Breaking the Bowls (2005) that "gender cannot be
a unitary theoretical concept, and the oppression of women cannot
be a homogeneous political rallying cry"; she calls for
"countermeasures to the effects of gender" that are "undoing
gender" itself (xii-xiii). Megan Simpson has expressed this belief
with regard to women's Langpo writings explicitly, in Poetic
Epistemologies: Gender and Knowing in Women's Language-Oriented
Writing (2000).
5. An aesthetics of contradiction is at work in Harryman's text as a
sign of political, personal, discursive struggle, a struggle that
has marked her own path as an adventurous woman writer from the
beginning of her career, who helped formulate the Langpo movement
after leaving college in the late 1970s. In the interview that
follows, Harryman admits that "the critique of gender when it
comes to 'language poetry'" has yet to be written." While she
applauds a feminist epistemology "that also critiques identity
politics," Harryman looks back on her experience of living in the
West Coast literary climate of three decades ago as creating
"different registers of experience and knowledge unreconcilable at
this time," and admits, "writing within situations of
contradiction was and remains an aspect of my work." In her
experimental essay on motherhood, "Parallel Play," Harryman
comments on "contradiction" as it inflects her aesthetic
philosophy in general: "The goals of the writing are built on
sometimes contradictory or competing claims, which manifest
themselves in shifts of style and genre within individual texts"
(122). She furthermore reveals here that "I want the claims to
work themselves out transformatively" (122). She means, perhaps,
that her aesthetics of contradiction is not meant to create
opacity forever and remain oblique, but rather to shift the
structural possibilities dialectically, and to offer, through
creativity and art, previously unimaginable modes of language and
thought.
6. Harryman's aesthetics of contradiction takes many forms, yet
always emphasizes the artifice and also the conceptual
underpinnings of art. One such form is "the game," that activity
both artistic and sociological, which Harryman imitates, probes,
and transforms in order to explore systematic and arbitrary
constraints. The "game" is regulated by a series of tightly
controlled rules that provide constraints to regulate the flow or
trajectory of various literary devices, ranging from plot
expectations to theatrical moves to imagery and symbols--or what
might be said in a given social situation.[2 <#foot2>] The role of
competing contradictory languages that resonate--however
arbitrarily--through the meta-language of the "game" becomes
noticeably part of an aesthetics of contradiction in The Words
after Carla Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul Sartre
(1999), a series of cross-genre writings in which Harryman toys
with implicit and explicit logical scenarios based on language
games, board games, relationship games--all the "games" by which a
pre-established ideological set of codes sets the direction of
social discourse. Contradiction is the effect of the collision
course that emerges when one set of rules vies for power over
another. Harryman's play with the "game" of rules concludes,
albeit circularly (and that's part of the "game"), that rules are
arbitrary formations of structures of belief, never separated from
"coherence" as imagined through language. Although another
function of the "game" is to behave as if there are no other
rules, it's only a game: the "game" is only binding--seemingly
natural--within its own set of obligations and restraints.
7. Related to this concept of the "game" that permeates many of
Harryman's writings is her textual relation to surface and
performance, as opposed to narrative depth. An aesthetics of
contradiction emerges within her writings as they prefer multiple
postures and voices--seemingly both serious and parodic at
once--and refute a subjectivity or psychological insight into any
one "character" or "persona," coded as "singular subject," as is
the tradition in realism or Romantic lyric. As a result of this
multiple use of potentialities for subjectivity, Harryman's
writings appear to value the surface of the text. They don't try
for "Meaning" with a capital "M"; and it's not that "meanings"
don't exist but that one set of meanings or an interpretative
construct overlaps with another, offering contradictory
possibilities. In works like Percentage, for example, as Chris
Stroffolino notes, "the traditional expectations that poets have a
locatable 'speaker' and 'situation' are discarded. Instead the
acts of writing, thinking, and selecting are foregrounded," and a
"stylistic disjunction" creates a surface that is not to be
penetrated beyond the language/discourse itself (172). What
Harryman achieves in this early chapbook will become a style that,
to use her phrase, is always "in the mode of," never with a
referential or outside "look" toward a universal realism. Her
short piece entitled "Animal Instincts" in the collection begins
with the announcement: "Out my window the view blocks what's
behind it." This anti-Balzacian narrative is anti-photographic,
anti-realistic, with no reference to objects delineated within
space through a visual language. As a result of this loss,
Harryman asks how one might advance through a narrative lacking
visual desire:
In any case, I know that the village is neither square nor
long, that science has specific status in private life, and
that no one is aware of anyone's standards. Here the road
forks and the mind cannot advance. ("Animal Instincts" 33)
8. Yet "desire" is concocted through another approach to narrative.
It is literally re-made, not through the falsity of a smooth
progressive description of objects in space within the linearity
of story but through the humorously disjunctive, troubled,
self-reflexive critique of a text about its own status as text.
The problem, of course, with reading a Harryman text--and the kind
of complex pleasure it provides--is that there is little platform
to remain upon while "the road forks" and the narrative--like the
mind--"cannot advance." Harryman, like many postmodern artists,
takes a contradictory attitude. Yet, unlike the tradition of
feminist avant-garde filmmakers, whose spokeswoman, Laura Mulvey,
famously articulated in 1975 narrative's "sadism" through its
linear "male gaze," Harryman prefers to /use/ narrative--against
itself. She declares in her short piece "Toy Boats," originally
published in Animal Instincts and republished in There Never Was a
Rose Without a Thorn: "I prefer to distribute narrative rather
than deny it," thus contradicting the conventional binarism Mulvey
identified between narrative and non-narrative writing. Harryman
writes that narrative is not a mode of writing that should be
dismissed, but used as its own witness: "Narrative holds within
its boundaries both its advantages and defects. It can demonstrate
its own development as it mutates throughout history" (There Never
Was A Rose 2). Its mutating effect gives narrative what she
declares to be its great advantage: " in accomplishing its
mutability, it [narrative] achieves an ongoing existence" (2). As
we use but also stand outside of narrative, we see that its
framing structures include ourselves. Rather than reject narrative
because of its tendency to employ the patriarchal "gaze," Harryman
offers this insight: "Those who object to this artifice are
narratives enemies," she writes, "but they, too, are part of the
story" (2).
9. In contradictory motion, Harryman asks that we be both inside the
"interior" of narrative and "outside," observing the artifice of
narrative's potentially mutable and shifting surfaces at the same
time. "Toy Boats" is one of the short inter-genre pieces in which
Harryman refuses to resolve her aesthetic contradictions. In
taking the form of a dialogue through multiple voices that
challenge one another, she challenges both the idea that any one
viewpoint prevails (Lyotard's "/le grand récit/" and the false and
contradictory division between subjects, all too often
masculinized and feminized in narrative as subjects and objects.
Harryman takes an interest in the "object." She views it through
the Hegelian dialectic, by which the object becomes a projection
of the subject's need for ego-identification. She explores the
object's status in great depth in Performing Objects Stationed in
the Subworld, where "characters" take on and become part of an
interaction not only with others (as objects), but also with
various objects of play arranged around the stage--objects that
are also remnants of a lost urban inner-city world: pipes, tires,
tools, clothes lines and hanging laundry. The re-placement of the
object into the subject's dialectic is central to Harryman's
writing. She resists conventional narrative or lyric poetry's
focalization on a single persona, character, or subject, in the
interest of exploring the margins of subjectlessness and the value
of "the other." And she focuses more on relational effects
/between/ "others" than on subjectivity as a monological effect.
Of great interest to her is one's status as object, in works like
Baby, as well: in families, communities, in art and in literature.
10. Harryman's interest in objects, and one's object-relation to
gendered others, is comically rendered in a short piece entitled
"The Male." This non-generic prose piece--is it a short story? is
it an essay?--caricatures not any one person but cultural
masculinity, while a presumably female "other" (as "writer") sits
making pancakes and chatting with "the male" across the breakfast
table. In this piece we witness a version of masculinity as
inarticulate, prosaic, disembodied, and wittily sentimentalized.
(The "male" asks a question "that reminds me of masturbating while
reading Wordsworth," we read. ) The piece does not only study but
literally enacts "the male's" gendered language: "The Male by
nature prosaic, moving from one place to the next in an
unrhapsodic way, thinking hard perhaps but communicating little,
allowing his motions to speak for him, so that he was followed by
a trail of his own making?" (There Never Was a Rose 143). This is
a loaded sentence. "The Male" is "by nature prosaic" because "he"
is not one to consider the ironies of the coded language, the
"game" of gender communication, into which he is fit. The
discomfort caused by reading such statements is replicated in "the
male" when "he" lacks communication and defines himself in terms
of silence. He "communicates little," because there is no exchange
in this textual dialogue. There is "thought," but it is
"naturalized" and made seemingly concrete to the "male"
body--"allowing his motions to speak for him"--which creates a
symbolic "reality" that he may interpret as the "real," but it is
"a trail of his own making," a chain of signifiers. The reader's
frustration is articulated by an equally frustrated female
figure-as-author: "I am just a person, I said to the Male, but you
are not just a male" (146). She adds: "I don't know why I chose to
present myself in this way to the creature" (146). While
dismantling cultural masculinity in the same way as it was formed
(like cultural femininity), "the male" is studied, eulogized, and,
ultimately, denigrated, like "woman" as cultural sign. Here
Harryman's feminist engagement is detached and comical in a way
reminiscent of Jane Austen. Ultimately, however, unlike the
psychological novels of Austen, a piece like "The Male" represents
not a person but a cultural identity, a faulty emblem of an
ideal--embodied perhaps, in social-textual life by actual men in
domestic settings in middle-class households, but not a "true"
flesh and blood person. "His" presence is a non-presence, a
fetishistic signifier of a larger cultural value in which subjects
and objects act too readily in ideological concert.
11. Harryman's aesthetics of contradiction often offer this kind of
scathing social critique--one that is often much more difficult to
trace or locate politically. Much of her writing, in fact,
operates like social-political satire--but without the tragic
"butt," without the missing ideal that gives satire its edge. Her
brand of satire operates in the manner Fredric Jameson describes
in "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," through "pastiche."
Jameson discusses postmodernism as a function of the "newly
emergent social order of late capitalism," as a resistance to the
high modernism, say, of a Joyce or Eliot, a Stravinsky or Frank
Lloyd Wright, itself once a reactionary art that is now
institutionalized by "the university, the museum, the art gallery
network, and the foundations" (111). According to Jameson, two
"significant features" of postmodern art exist, embracing rather
than repudiating "consumer society" and the post-industrial
electronic era dominated by the media and multinational
corporations: both "pastiche" and "schizophrenia" (113). These
features govern "the postmodernist experience of space and time
respectively" (113).
12. While I may disagree with some of Jameson's assumptions about
postmodern art and literature in general, I find that his
definition of pastiche describes the kind of contradictory
structure that inhabits much of Harryman's inter-genre work.
Jameson distinguishes pastiche from parody, which he describes as
"the mimicry of other styles ... of the mannerisms and stylistic
twitches of other styles" (113). Parody, a popular phenomenon in
modern art and literature, is that which accentuates the
"idiosyncrasies and eccentricities" of other styles, producing "an
imitation /which mocks the original/" (113, emphasis added).
Parody relies on the presence of an original, an acknowledged
presence which audiences may hear, read, or see. It also
structures an ideal for which readers may be nostalgic (in realism
or satire), when the ideal end itself is seen as impossible or
deflated. The effect of parody is "to cast ridicule on the private
nature of these stylistic mannerisms and their excessiveness,"
suggesting, however, in the process, that there might be a "way
people normally speak or write" (113). Yet pastiche does not rely
on the presence of an original or a normative expression--"the
imitation of a peculiar or unique style," Jameson writes.
Pastiche, instead, is "a neutral practice of such mimicry . . .
without the satirical impulse, without laughter" (114).
13. Harryman's writing creates the satirical effect "without
laughter." It is like parody, but a parody that "has lost its
sense of humor" (Jameson 114). Or has it? Rather, Harryman's
writing has lost its original referent. It may not be technically
satiric. But it is pastiche-parody quite full of what is funny and
absurd in gendered social life and texts. To understand Harryman's
writings, one must embrace a unique sense of feminist humor. And
one must revel in a sense of human incapacity and language's
absurdity and take joy in contradiction. I believe that at the
comic root of Harryman's writing is a deep pleasure in
feminist-inspired contradiction, not only because contradiction
un-does the gendered terms that structure language and world, but
because it offers an alternative space for creativity and
productivity, one based on openings rather than on closings.
Harryman's productivity appears to be opening again and again.
An Interview with Carla Harryman
I. "The Formation of this Scene"
* LH: Can you go back in time and recall the origins of your
aesthetic practice in the 1970s and early '80s West Coast
experimental literary scene--your association with writers we now
call "Language Poets"?
* CH: I was part of the formation of this scene. I had met Steve
Benson in college in Southern California in 1971, and he had
introduced me to Kit Robinson--who introduced Steve and me to
Barrett Watten in 1973. Barry and Kit would visit Steve and me in
Santa Barbara and L.A., where we moved in 1974, and we would visit
them in San Francisco. Some of the time we passed doing
collaborations on a typewriter while socializing: one person would
sit down and type, and when he or she was done, the next would
have a turn. The others sat around with beers and talked.
In addition to the poets and artists who informed my
aesthetic practice, there was the post-Vietnam War climate, the
grittiness, the revelation of histories of San Francisco culture,
sub-cultural social fluidity, queer culture, an edgy political
climate, an open public culture, low Bay Area rents and little
money--all were very influential on the development of my writing.
* LH: Was there a particular individual who stimulated you to start
writing in this particularly innovative way, in which creating
semantic "sense"--traditionally speaking--is not the primary
artistic goal?
* CH: Ron Sukenick, my instructor in college, would tell his
students that W.H. Auden's best poems were written for sound or
liveliness, not sense. Did I agree with that assertion? Perhaps
not--but the assertion itself interested me. With this statement,
I became immediately taken with the idea of writing for something
other than sense. I felt that sense was too limiting in regards to
what writing could do. So I tried to find out how to produce
writing in which the writing itself was foregrounded. The
associative, memory-based logic of Victor Shklovsky's A
Sentimental Journey, which I read at this time, suggested to me
that prose structures are actual thought. What fascinated me about
the temporality of Shklovsky's book was the fact that "free"
association was not free. The "freedom" of the writing is bound to
the problematic of degrees of freedom and un-freedom within human
experience. I wanted to write something that had a kind of
structural efficacy.
* LH: Were you drawn to this kind of logic of association and
"structural efficacy" within literature prior to this period--even
as a child?
* CH: When I was a little girl, I thought of writing as this kind of
magical or sublime thing. I was interested in telling stories, but
not stories about anything that was actually happening. I think I
had the idea from a very young age that there was no reason to
tell a story about an event already happening, that was already a
"story." I had a few friends who wanted to write or wrote novels,
and I was fascinated by their ambition; but I wasn't at all
interested in the content of their books. I wanted to write what
wasn't there in front of me.
My mother used to recite Blake and Shakespeare over the
ironing board. "Tyger, Tyger" was amazing and ironing was boring.
When she wanted us to exit the car more quickly, she would say,
"Out, out brief candle." I liked the idea of being a brief candle,
which translated into being swift. The associative concept always
fascinated me.
* LH: When you began studying literature seriously in high-school
and college, what authors most appealed to you intellectually and
artistically?
* CH: John Ashbery and his work, The Skaters, showed me the wonder
of surface. Later, a friend introduced me to Robert Creeley's For
Love. This book opened up another path of thought, that of
digression. This was the year of odd encounters: Creeley, Wittig,
Eluard, left French politics, depressive romances, and important
friendships.
* LH: Speak in more detail about these important friendships.
* CH: My friendship with Steve [Benson] encouraged my latent
interest in performance. Writing itself became, through Steve's
intervention, a kind of performance, especially in collaboration
with other writers. The experience of on-the-spot invention,
companionship, and edgy play at this time became important.
Barrett [Watten] was the "medium" through which I was
introduced to the writing of Lyn [Hejinian], Bernadette Mayer, and
Clark Coolidge. I can still see the manuscript pages of their
works, as well as Lyn's early letter-press production of A Bride
Is the Thought of What Thinking, passed around in Barrett's
Potrero Hill apartment in San Francisco, where Erica Hunt and he
were roommates for awhile. Erica, too, was an inspiring
conversationalist. That was part of the culture of the times:
poets talking.
* LH: Describe the gender politics that affected you as an emerging
writer during the late '70s and early '80s on the West Coast.
* CH: There was certainly an open space for women writers, which I
believe distinguishes our generation from earlier generations. But
I think the critique of gender when it comes to "Language Poetry"
has yet to be written. Megan Simpson's Poetic Epistemologies was
helpful to me in understanding the larger framework of the gender
issue, because she works with a feminist perspective that also
critiques identity politics. I found different registers of
experience and knowledge unreconcilable at this time. Socially, I
experienced an engagement with left politics and a kind of unity.
But the kind of aesthetic practice I was involved with did not gel
into a unity. I would say that writing within situations of
contradiction was and remains an aspect of my work.
II. "A World of Subjects Who Think of Themselves as
Historical in New Ways"
* LH: Let's turn the conversation to more theoretical-aesthetic
concerns--beginning with the very terminology one might use for
writing based in "situations of contradiction," or a "difficult"
writing. Such writing is often associated with the movements of
"modernism" or "postmodernism." Do you make a distinction between
these movements and/or the terms, as do many critics of
twentieth-century culture? These terms themselves seem to me a
site of contradiction and contestation.
* CH: Olsen's relationship to modernity is vexed. Williams's is
progressively engaged. That's an example of a difference.
Recently, I was reading Brian McHale's Postmodern Fiction. He
claims that the "postmodern" in fiction is predominantly concerned
with ontology, whereas "modernism" is predominantly concerned with
epistemology. Lyn's [Hejinian's] writing on Stein, I think, would
support this view.
However, in art-theory discourse, the two terms would be
reversed. In the visual-theory world, I would say that most people
think about "modernism" as ontologically situated and
"postmodernism" as about epistemology. Yet, always upon closer
scrutiny, one yields to the other--these terms are not easy to
stabilize.
"Modernism," as associated with modernity, gives of a world
of subjects who think of themselves as historical in new ways. The
modernist subject can make history. Also, history is not something
that happened, that is happening, that is future oriented. The
postmodern subject would have a more skeptical relationship to
history, yes? What does that do for art?
I don't really buy discussions that attempt to simplify
these terms or to claim that postmodernism is really just late
modernism. The artist's intervention into periodization is very
complex, because the present is always entailed. And the present
also changes. And one must write in a present. We are living in a
horrific new century under circumstances that perhaps one might
have imagined but can only now experience. We now live in a time
where citizens' voices are not heard, where the truth is
stonewalled at every turn, and lies and criminality in government
prevail.
* LH: I'm still interested in how you might use these terms, and how
they would apply to your own writing. Some critics are using these
terms "modern" and "postmodern" as a way of marking two distinct
literary historical periods to the century; others are using them
to mark aesthetic distinctions. For example, Stein, although she
worked early in the twentieth-century and is historically
associated with many "moderns," was, in fact, textually a
"postmodern"--based on her aesthetic breakthroughs, her
experimentation with time, with the sentence.
Some critics have written about "modernism" as a period when
there was this nostalgia for beauty, or the romantic sublime (but
as nostalgia, not timely "presence"). I am fascinated by the way
in which your own work takes on a kind of postmodern version of
the sublime, as it confronts utopia. Since "utopia" actually means
"nowhere" or "no place," going back to Thomas More's book title,
utopia is always an ironic place, a place that can't exist--a
perfect (which is imperfect) postmodern world. Is there any form
of modernist nostalgia in the utopias you work with? Take, for
example, Gardener of Stars--there are you registering a desire for
something lost, something better, connected to the sublime, in
"nowhere," as word and concept?
* CH: Well, utopia means many things. It means "nowhere," an
impossibly remote place, an impossibly better world, an ideal
world and so on. In modern art, the "nowhere" presented asks for
completion, and this entails irony: completion is the end of
utopia. I am interested in Ernst Bloch's construction of the
utopian emotion of hope, as he offers us a rich psychological and
aesthetic reading of utopian desire. There are certainly utopian
projects within modernism. I would include Stein and Breton in this.
For me, "nowhere" is a place to write into. It can be pretty
bleak. Gardener of Stars conflates utopia and dystopia. I have
been very interested in desire as a future-oriented feeling
generated by negative situations. Its positive value is in the
capacity to revise the future, not through closure or finitude.
Gardener of Stars ends with a comment about the wrecked city
becoming a promise: "rose thorns, slack wicker, and collapsing
fences arranged the city into a promise."
* LH: On the issue of the terminology we use to define this new mode
of writing in which you and other Language Poets are engaged, I
read an interview a couple of years ago of Charles Bernstein, in
which he called into question the term "experimental" in reference
to avant-garde writing practices. Others, as well, have questioned
the use of that term. Why is that word so problematic? Would you,
too, like to see a better word for this new practice or building
tradition? Kathleen Fraser, of course, has proposed the word
"innovative," and applied it specifically to many women's
avant-garde practices. I guess the real question is: how does one
categorize writing that works against traditional forms or
categories? How do you personally explain to people what you do?
* CH: The word "experimental" has been disparaged by many people for
many years. I understand why the term is disparaged. I also
understand that in a world that has real literary divisions, the
problem of how to cite what is non-mainstream--how to call
that--is really problematic. People also complain about the term
"avant-garde," and suggest that this word, too, is bad, that it
associates "experimentalism" with militarism. But didn't Ghandi
propose a peaceful army? I have been involved in an on-going
project at Wayne State University in which we often use the word
"new genre." This term also has its limitations.
I was on faculty panels at the Naropa Institute a couple of
times, and there were three or four boring statements by really
wonderful poets about why they did not like the word
"experimental." I'm not sure the term is useful all the time, but
it also sometimes seems rather like a straw horse. People get
worked up about the relationship of language experiment to science
experiment. The term "innovative," I think, comes with less
baggage--it doesn't get people all nervous about "those
experimentals." But there's also this other term used by writers
like Kathy Acker: "the other tradition." When Barrett was doing a
reading of Acker's work as it comes down through Daniel Defoe's
Moll Flanders [presented at New York University in the fall of
2002], he was writing a potential narrative for "the other
tradition." That's an interesting construct which encompasses
history--which isn't simply about a current practice.
* LH: Such a concept suggests that the kind of writing you do
emerges from a solid if sometimes overlooked historical tradition.
Is it possible that what some people call "postmodernism" is
perhaps not historically isolated or unique--even if some
contemporary readers feel "postmodern" experimentation is too
difficult or opaque for them?
* CH: Yes, absolutely. Going back to your first set of questions on
origins: some of my literary sources are in Rabelais--or Jane Austen.
* LH: Jane Austen?
* CH: Yes, Jane Austen. Really important. She's so funny.
* LH: I agree that she's unbelievably funny and very dry--the
quintessential ironist. So many people don't experience that
reading of Jane Austen, the way the irony and wit are so embedded
in the narrative that there's actually no place to stand, although
she manages to give this illusion of a realism in writing that
became the nineteenth-century domestic novel or novel of
psychological realism. In my opinion, Austen's "realism" in an
ontological universe doesn't actually exist.
* CH: No it doesn't.
III. "Games are Interrogations of Restraint"
* LH: I'm thinking of Austen as a figure of ironic surface and yet
disciplined restraint. You have written about the aesthetic of
"restraint" in the essay you wrote for the anthology Cynthia Hogue
and I co-edited, We Who Love to Be Astonished; the essay took up
"restraint" in work by Hejinian, Acker, as well as one of your
performance pieces. Could you re-articulate here your concern with
this aesthetic practice? How does "restraint" bear a relation to
your own work, in particular?
* CH: In the article, I try to explain that "/con/straint" would be
any formal device that structures the writing of the work. A
sonnet has rules, constraints. OuLiPo uses mathematical
constraints. Hejinian uses constraints: in Writing as an Aid to
Memory, the constraint was related to the alphabet. /Re/straint
has to do with what holds the writing back from taking some other
direction than the one it does take. So a restraint might have to
do with what a device or constraint allows and disallows, with
ideological limitations, with conceptual limitations, with choices.
In my writing for performance, I work with an open text, a
text that is available to multiple interpretations and that, in
fact, intensifies the capacity for performative work to be
multiply interpreted. It requires both explication of the text and
interpretive invention on the part of any ensemble. The work would
not be similar production to production--ever. The limit, then, is
that it can't be reproduced: each production becomes a unique object.
In general, much of my work questions the given, the
posited, not only from the outside but also in regard to the
writing itself. There are a number of works that I would place in
the category of games. Some of them have that formal designation,
and some of these are part of a collaboration with a visual
artist. I came up with the concept "games" when I was writing The
Words: After Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul
Sartre. Writing games have to do with references to conventional
games, like board games and card games--but I'm also interested in
conceptual games, political games, the games of hierarchy, other
power games, language games, philosophical games, games of
interpretations, and the game of the writing itself, which is a
kind of performance game. Within any possible written game, a
number of these kinds of games come into play. When they do, it's
as if the hand has been given. Then one sees how the hand is to be
played. A relationship made to composition becomes then an
important aspect of the game.
Perhaps the games are interrogation of restraints. The first
restraint is the given in language. The next restraint is what
results from breakaway moves. There are lots of breakaway moves,
trying to resist restraint.
* LH: I heard you read recently at St. Marks Poetry Project in New
York, from your new work Baby. Going back again to this concept of
"restraint," explain to me how this form of textual resistance
affects the "game," so to speak, of this new work.
* CH: You could apply the notion of restraint to any open text, to
see what the bounded ideological conflict is in the work. What
would I say about Baby? The world of Baby blends realistic
representation and irreality. But I guess the family is the most
overt restraint. Baby is determined by the family as an
ideological construct. There is no Baby without the family.
* LH: You mean the family body as social or figural?
* CH: Both. They are played with and against each other. Baby may
imply critique but it does not dismantle the family.
* LH: In other words, the "Baby" you "play with," so to speak, is a
figure upon which we are to sit in judgment against the bourgeois
or "nuclear" family?
* CH: The family in Baby more closely resembles the biologically
intertwined extended family. The tiger performs as a caregiver, a
kind of metonymic object of caregiving that could be mother,
grandmother, aunt--even "baby-sitter." But all of these roles are
predicated on family/biological relations. It's the primary
attachment that's important within the baby/tiger world, as this
attachment is projected imaginatively and discursively.
IV. "Narrative Itself is not One Thing"
* LH: I'm fascinated with the way you bring together nature and
culture in a non-dualistic way in Baby. Another kind of dualism
that's become fashionable in our critical language is narrative
versus non-narrative, and the critique of narrative in general.
Your own interest in narrative comes up again and again in your work.
I think you are doing something very interesting with
narrative. In the tradition of meta-fiction, you are writing about
representation itself. As you suggested earlier in your use of the
"game," you write "narrative fiction" that is not about plot and
characterization at all, but about the making of something
game-like in its narrative sequences. I'm thinking of your short
prose piece, "Toy Boats." There you raise the issue of narrative
and the reality it attempts to create through representational
objects. Quoting from "Toy Boats," you write: "I prefer to
distribute narrative rather than deny it." Then the piece goes on
to suggest that narrative is not a mode of writing that
experimental writers should rid themselves of at all, but should
use it accordingly.
I would say that this approach to narrative is very
different from the "non-narrative," or "anti-narrative," stance
taken on by many experimental poets, or, as so well articulated by
the cinematic avant-garde, in the tradition of art-house films.
But in Toy Boats, you seem to overcome this dualism about
narrative. You suggest that we should use narrative as its own
critic, as its own witness. As you write: "Narrative holds within
its boundaries both its advantages and defects. It can demonstrate
its own development as it mutates throughout history . . . in
accomplishing its mutability, it achieves an ongoing existence."
That all said, can you describe to me further what you meant
by "mutability" in this statement? How /do/ you imagine a
subject's relation to narrative?
* CH: I don't imagine a subject's ideal relation to narrative. I
also don't feel at all prescriptive about narrative, and I don't
judge narrative or non-narrative negatively. I am very much
engaged with non-narrative as well as with narrative: and that's
why I say, "I prefer to distribute narrative rather than deny it."
Narrative as a hegemonic construct is overpowering. The
concept that narrative is the basis for all communication is quite
faulty, and the interventions of non-narrative in all artistic
mediums are of paramount importance to me. And the construction of
social power and narrative themselves are, of course, related. I
wrote "Toy Boats" for the "Non/narrative" issue of Poetics
Journal. Because I have always read in all of the genres without a
sense of hierarchy, or exclusive identification with poetry, I
have a response that is different from that of poets who have
rejected narrative on ideological grounds. "Toy Boats" is engaged
with critique related to the construct of narrative/non-narrative
as binary. What continues to be an important engagement for me is
the topic of narrative in the context of debates that polemically
reject narrative. And, conversely, I am concerned with questions
of non-narrative within the pervasive contexts that reject or
recoil from non-narrative.
Yet, narrative itself is not one thing, exactly. I like to
think about how narrative structures work. I don't collapse
narrative into a single phenomenon at all. The critique of
narrative in film may be related to but is not identical with this
discussion.
* LH: Laura Mulvey, in her seminal film essay, "Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema," from the mid-'70s, made an argument for the
importance of avant-garde rejections of narrative when she wrote
that, in the classic narrative-film, "narrative demands a sadism."
She was studying Hollywood filmmakers like Hitchcock when she
suggested that, in the traditional narrative film plot, someone
has to get hurt, that there is a subject directing linear control
over its object (often feminized in her account). Do you agree
with any of these assumptions about classical narrative in film or
literature?
* CH: I met Mulvey briefly at a conference at Wayne State in 1990.
When her essay came out, I was--as were many people--already
involved with feminist-related questions concerning art making and
the positioning of the feminine within various art contexts. The
undoing of narrative, for me, is politically charged and it is a
political project. But this process works in various registers,
not necessarily consistent with one another, and not necessarily
entirely under my control.
On this topic of narrative and sadism, which you also
mention in your book, The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy, there is this
possibility that the forced change narrative linearity demands
/is/ sadistic. I am not sure that the word "sadistic," however,
would satisfy all transformative events within the linearity of
narrative. "The forced change" can be seen from multiple
perspectives.
For example, in my piece "Fairy Tale," which is a fantasy
about Bush No. 1's Iraq War and one of my more straightforward
narrative works, the story is about the ideology of apocalypse. A
child considers--is she "forced" to consider?--the meaning of "the
end of the world." What causes her to consider the meaning of the
phrase is, on the one hand, the destruction she's experiencing,
and, on the other, the lying and duplicity she experiences from
the outside. She is subordinated by the splitting narratives,
"right and wrong," "good and bad," of American warmonger
discourse. Since morality is not moral, but simply an aspect of
war implementation, she has to come to terms with the hideousness
of apocalyptic ideology, its ability to control people through
fear and to permit violence. The utterance "the end of the world"
produces "the end of the world" within her mentality, and the
story shows us something about how this phrase helps produce the
denial of the violence of the present, which, for some people, is
"the end of the world."
I would say, if we were to use the word "sadism" in regards
to this story, that the sadism is what the story represents /as
the real world./ It is the violence of capital that has visited
itself on the girl. But the girl is represented not simply as a
victim. She is represented as a thinking and perceiving person who
has been given a set of problems to solve. The solutions or
mandates of the problems, however, do not lead anywhere except to
the fact of existence. This fact of existence is inscribed within
the fairy tale that doesn't end (all the terms of the tale have to
be understood to end), and is directed toward that in the world
which denies the fact of existence of real people whose existence
is denied and wrongly interpolated for propaganda purposes to
justify government-mandated violence.
V. "I Was Examining the Language as Material, for its
Plastic Values"
* LH: I have been struck by these issues of narrative in your work
as best articulated, for me, by film rather than literary theory.
I feel there is something about your work--perhaps the performance
quality, and also the awareness of the visual--that is potentially
cinematic. What do you feel is your own work's relation to cinema,
or the theories behind perhaps some of the art-house or
experimental cinema?
* CH: Let me digress and offer again a bit of literary biography.
Throughout the '70s, I was working very actively with the sentence
and the paragraph. But I also worked a bit with the line, and that
work with the line actually was, in several instances, quite
influenced by my viewing of experimental film. The poem
"Obstacle," published in my first book Percentage, for example,
was dedicated to the filmmaker Warren Sonbert, because it was
written in the dark of a movie house in the Mission District of
San Francisco while I was watching his film, Divided Loyalties.
My poem was concerned with this work I was doing on
sentences and paragraphs. I was examining the language as
material, for its plastic values, and I was interrogating meaning
making within literary, performance, conceptual, and visual-arts
contexts. "Heavy Curtains," also included in Percentage, is a
collaboration I wrote with Barrett as we watched a television
show. Around the time that I began working with narrative and
non-narrative trajectories--and in addition to my engagement with
visual art of the '60s and '70s--I became acquainted with the
works of Brakhage and also numerous early twentieth-century films.
LH: You seem to value theory, both about language and about
the visual arts. You even write theory yourself. What do you value
most about theory, and how might you be using theory in your
"fictive" work?
* CH: I guess I am interested in the problem of the artist
conversing with the theorist, as well as the problem of art being
positioned in relationship to theoretical constructs. This does
not mean that I am "anti-theory." But there is generally, in my
work, a tension between the artist and the theorist.
Butler's Gender Trouble is of great value to me
theoretically; her theorizing of gender with respect to
performativity is very important. But what she sees and represents
as performative is very restrictive in regards to what is made in
art.
* LH: How might performativity be particularly central to many
contemporary women writers like yourself?
* CH: I find performativity as an important generative for women
writers--excuse this peculiar map--from Gertrude Stein to Toni
Morrison to Gloria Anzaldúa, to emerging writers like Laura Elrick
and Redell Olsen. The performative isn't some kind of exclusive
domain of a particular gender. But within the context of gender,
and with an emphasis on the woman writer, through the
performative, one can find generative interpretation as well as an
analytic system.
I suppose that I am very anti-prescriptive with respect to
approaches to the aesthetic. And I am so engaged with the problems
of difference that I truly resist theoretical projects that try to
mandate the aesthetic.
VI. "Writing Can Be a Conversation with Oneself, with
Another, with Many"
* LH: Do you imagine for yourself a specific or ideal audience? Do
you gender that audience? What kind of reader--from what strategic
social positioning--do you see when you write? Do you imagine
multiple readers, or someone specific?
* CH: I don't imagine an ideal audience. I may have an audience--but
take away the word "ideal." Writing can be a conversation with
oneself, with another, with many. And those in the conversation
can come and go. Another can invite oneself into their place,
language, mentality. Writing can be drawn to or attracted by
another. In addition to this contingency of the audience--whom the
work appears for--art is an aspect of appearance itself.
On one hand, the audience for the artwork is a function of
the art work--even an aspect of it. On the other hand, the art
work is constituted by the audience. The audience can thus be
"Nobody." Let us consider "Nobody" to be an idea which can
gravitate toward non-existence or toward colloquialism: i.e., I'm
just a nobody. The writing is constructed through the
identification with the "non-" in a certain way. Activity of
composition may require the negation of identity. I do not write
for you because I can anticipate that or how you will respond to
something, but because you might respond but in a manner that I
cannot fully anticipate. Writing is the appearance of thinking,
but of course thinking doesn't exist in a free form. Nor does the
audience. This is what I know, what writing knows, what the
audience knows of writing.
I could be a writer who knows what I write for, for what
purpose. That purpose might be to instruct and to entertain. That
purpose might be to encourage a question. That purpose might be to
interject a proposition into the intellectual sphere that places
key assumptions about the nature of literature or society. Does
the audience identify with the imagined purpose, and then the
writer writes for the audience's identification with such an
imagined purpose?
One might say that Baby is motivated by a proposition such
as: there is a baby in each of us. But this baby in each of us may
also be a maguffin. If the word "baby," in each of us, is really
an appearance of a non-existent something (word and not word), a
nothing, or a nobody, then there is an idea of a baby in each of
us that is not a baby. There is an x in each of us that might
arouse an aspiration to be or to know or to respond to "baby."
There is also the proposition that to "know" baby is not to know
baby as a narrative about babies. We are looking to understand
that baby who interacts with environments, who is constituted by
and intervenes in the environments--because we want to understand
the volatility of human nature, its libidinous aspects and its
social meanings, and its ability to address problems positively as
well as to reflect problems negatively.
So consider this and then the question of the audience. The
audience is a baby, or one who would like to engage with the
"baby" proposition, or who is interested in the way in which the
word baby elicits responses that position baby differently. Yet
one also assumes a positive identification with the grammar and
logics of baby: I pee, you pee, baby pees. I think, you think,
baby thinks. If baby thinks what I think ,then a baby might think
. . . what you think. What do you think?
I do imagine that somebody will not want to read Baby; in
its own baroque fashion, it might produce some kind of anxiety
about maturity or masculinity or gender identity, for "baby"
proposes, perhaps, another gender, even as baby goes by "she."
VII. "The Ensemble Inhabits Something Already Given"
* LH: Let's turn to your work in poet's theater. Much of your most
important work over the years has been accomplished in direct
engagement with actual present audiences, through the
performance-poet's experience with the stage. A few years ago, you
debuted your piece Performing Objects Stationed in the Sub World,
first in Detroit and then in San Francisco. I was very fortunate
to have been able to attend the San Francisco premiere. I found it
very exciting, original, engaging--and also professionally
produced and performed. Would you talk about when you first
developed this particular theatrical work, and how it might
connect to the last decade of your life spent living in Detroit?
* CH: The work was originally written for a poetry colloquium
organized by Romana Huk at Oxford-Brookes University in the spring
of 2001. In a two-three day period, I directed a staged reading
with Cris Cheek, Miles Champion, Cole Heinowicz, Redell Olsen, and
myself, all performing the roles of the performing objects. The
reading was really what Jim Cave, the director I worked with on
the later San Francisco performance, calls a "demonstration." We
were demonstrating performance approaches to and performative
functions of the text.
The work was performed in an abbreviated form as a
demonstration, again, in San Francisco in the winter of 2002,
under the direction of Jim Cave at the first annual Poet's Theater
jubilee co-sponsored by New Langton Arts and Small Press Traffic.
At this point, a number of the principal collaborators for the
2003 San Francisco performance were assembled.
In the meantime, Zeitgeist Theater in Detroit produced the
play, directed by John Jakary. Zeitgeist is a small avant-garde
theater space that produces some plays by local playwrights while
it focuses on the European avant-garde: Jarry, Becket, Ionesco. In
many respects the Zeitgeist Theater was an exceptional venue for
the play, especially as the text was inspired by living in Detroit.
Many people have fantasies about Detroit: the weeds growing
in the abandoned parking lots signify a return to nature. Or it is
the most violent and horrible city in the United Sates. Or it is
the most segregated city in the country.
Detroit is a majority black-populated city. This does not
make it the most segregated city in the country. This is a concept
difficult for Media America to grasp. It does mean that, in fairly
specific ways, Detroit is undercapitalized: the people of the city
have significantly less economic power than they require to
develop the political base that would be most advantageous to them.
What interested me about Detroit, as it developed in
Performing Objects, was the life of what I call the sub world. The
sub world does not correspond to any rigid or fixed notions of
this part of the world. At the same time, the sub world is
predicated on fantasies about and ideological projections of
Detroit, while working within the elided social spaces between
city and suburb that Detroit techno has so brilliantly
conceptualized. In order to live in Detroit, one must live in a
sub world; but one also must live in the above/the dominant world.
The sub world in Detroit refuses fixed definitions and social
rigidity: and everybody knows this world. It's where you have fun,
it's where things get made, it's where rigid narratives about race
relations and social uplift have no hold, it's where things get
sexy, it's where life happens: it is not, however, the same thing
as a subculture, because the mainstream culture and activity of
the sub world variously interpenetrate.
The text references various genres--from the lyric poem, to
lyrics, to fairy tales and documentary, and other inter-genre
stuff. It is a fragmentary work that, in performances, is meant to
be seamed together through the discovered rhythm of the
performance: the ensemble inhabits something already given (the
text and the referential spaces determined by the text) and it
constructs its own relationship to what's already given; it makes
its own space.
In Detroit, the play was directed in a more traditional
fashion than it was in San Francisco. John Jakary made a plan and
rehearsed the performers based on his plan. But the performers
were also performing something that they recognized as being about
where they were, and the performance reflected this sense of
familiarity.
* LH: Speak more about this space you call a "sub world."
* CH: In a way, the sub world is a kind of refuge. People in Detroit
have their refuge--in some sense, you can't live without it. It is
also a critique of the way in which "refuge" might reproduce
hegemonic structures and narratives. Detroit is antagonistic, for
often very good reasons, toward outsiders' views of it. It is also
xenophobic: it doesn't like geographic outsiders, and expects to
be misunderstood and betrayed by them. The play in its
construction of the sub world undercuts the xenophobic aspects of
Detroit culture.
In addition to this interest in the sub world as I learned
it by living and working around and in Detroit, I became
interested in the phenomenon of the suburbs and the way in which
my current experience of suburbs intersected with my childhood
life. There is something quite compatible between my
rural/suburban childhood and the family and sub world cultures of
contemporary Detroit. This was recognized--quite sensitively, I
feel--by the Detroit ensemble. And the play took on a very
particular kind of familiar working-class backyard feeling under
Jakary's direction.
LH: So how did the Detroit production evolve into the
production I saw at the LAB in San Francisco? How did
city/geography change the performance values?
* CH: During the Detroit performance, both Jim Cave and Amy
Trachtenberg--the visual artist who eventually collaborated on the
San Francisco production--came out to see the play. Even though
the San Francisco production was radically different from the
Detroit production, the Detroit production and the future
collaborators' visit to Detroit had a significant impact on the
2003 production at the LAB, including that I was able to invite a
Detroit actress, Walonda Lewis, out to San Francisco for that
production of the piece.
The dynamics of cross cultural relations within the Bay Area
and Detroit are quite different, and this is something I wanted
the Bay Area people to recognize. I wanted to widen the
discursive, narrative, ideological space in which intercultural
relations were experienced by the performers. Or, another way of
saying this is: I didn't want them to feel locked into pre-given
assumptions that could limit what they might do with the work.
This inter-city conferencing was so exciting to me that I am
now embarking on a quite ambitious, six-day project that involves
bringing people from the Bay Area and Detroit together at the
Susanne Hilberry Gallery in Ferndale, Michigan, in August to work
on another performance piece, Mirror Play.[3 <#foot3>]
* LH: I was impressed with the way in which Performing Objects not
only was a work of poetry as performed in a theater space, but
also hybridically invaded, so to speak, by so many other forms of
art. The script itself had this feel or mood of a great
Shakespeare comedy, without the same kind of scene-making. It also
brought together music and visual art: you composed some lovely
pieces that were brilliantly sung by Ken Berry, and you worked in
collaboration with Trachtenberg, a wonderful visual artist, on the
costumes and sets--the latter of which looked like a
conceptual-art installation project in the semi-round of the
theatrical space. You also collaborated as director with Cave. Can
you speak a bit more of the collaborative experience of this
project, and its infusion of poetry, theater, music, and visual art?
* CH: Lots of theater uses the elements you identify, but my work is
not purely theater in the conventional sense. As in the writing,
there is an inter-generic property: here I would say it is marked
by the crossover of experimental theater and performance, and
conceptual art. Performance here is not genre-directed, so much as
it is a signal of promise within conditions of what might be
called a certain postmodern distress.
Unlike the work of Joan Jonas of the conceptual installation
art movement, or early Meredith Monk in the world of dance, or
Laurie Anderson, who works with electronic media and recorded
narrative--all of whom have worked with multiple media in
performance in non-traditional/theatrical modes--my work takes a
complex text, based in multiple genres that is linguistically
self-reflexive, as the initial site of the work: so
language/writing is the point of departure and what must be
actively sustained to realize the performance itself. If the value
of the work is first language, then it is important for me that
the language of the visual is intensified as such, that the visual
is /not/ an illustration of language but a language in its own
terms. This would, in most cases, be true with music as
well--although in this particular piece, the music was cast in a
more supporting role than it was in the 1989 production of my
performance work, There Is Nothing Better Than a Theory, or in my
current piece, Mirror Play, which will involve layers of sound,
music, noise.
VIII. "What Makes the Work Good has Everything to do with
Who is Involved in It"
* LH: Can you discuss the value of process versus final product as
you write--and also say more on the issue of collaboration so
essential to your process as an artist?
* CH: Process for me is extremely important. I have an open
relationship to process. I set no value on regulating the duration
of the development of a work. Something might take one week or
three years to realize. Something that takes three years might
turn out to have been most interesting to me at some earlier
phase. This is the way an artist or poet thinks, not the way
someone in repertory theater thinks. My works are well made
because their realization requires that they be well made and I do
not have a fixed value for what that means. What makes the work
"good" has everything to do with who is involved in it as well as
with the conceptual approaches to the text and the collaboration
process.
* LH: Indeed, you have worked steadily over the years with a number
of fine poets and artists. How has the process of collaboration
itself been most recently important to the multi-media nature of
Performing Objects?
* CH: I have been collaborating in various modes with Amy
[Trachtenberg] since 1991. There are other visual artists I have
worked with and am currently working with in performance and in
interdisciplinary collaboration. But Amy has been my closest
visual arts collaborator over time. Jim [Cave] is also someone I
have worked with as a director--and continue to work with--as well
as Erling Wold, who wrote the music for the song lyrics, and who
was the composer for the 1995-2005 chamber opera project that
brought all of us together as a team for the first time.
The "demonstration" of Performing Objects presented at the
Poet's Theater Jubilee at California College of the Arts in 2002
was a sketch. It brought together a number of people who remained
in the piece, and it provided a basis for further discussion about
the realization of the work. The style of the sketch was somewhat
slapstick, which was interesting as a way to bring out the
contrast between those aspects of the work that could conceivably
lend themselves to that kind of humor, and the more lyric and
melancholic aspects of the work.
In the summer of 2002, when I was an artist-in-residence at
the San Francisco LAB preparing the performance, I began looking
at the piece from a completely different angle. I invited both
trained performers and Bay Area poets to come in and work on the
piece, and, in effect, to take it apart. Both Amy and Jim
participated in some of the rehearsals: Amy came into the space
and took notes; Jim observed my approaches to cacophony and then
came back with shaping responses. My job was to explore collective
vocalic and spatial approaches to the work, which would open up
the work and ways of working for Jim, as director. I also wanted
to hear the piece and find out how performers responded to it--and
each other--in an open and improvisatory situation. Outside the
practice space of the LAB, Jim and Amy and I had on-going
discussions about the relationship of language to performance and
to mise-en-scène. In working collaboratively in this way, the
visual ideas of the artist influenced the directing of the play.
In the summer of 2003, I returned to San Francisco.
Actually, I commuted back and forth while living part-time in
Detroit, and there were occasions as the rehearsals got underway
when I wasn't there. This is another aspect of collaboration: I
didn't want to have too much control over the piece, and I wanted
to give Jim plenty of space to play around with it on his own. I
find this detachment on my end works very well, because changing
the process and focus from time to time leaves room for new things
to happen.
Amy really knew how to work with the total space of the raw
gallery as the sub world itself. Now Amy and I are considering
putting together a lecture on collaboration. Jim responded
brilliantly to the givens of the space so that there weren't any
dead spots. This is something we discussed a lot in collaboration
on the piece: keeping the space alive.
* LH: In conclusion, how might collaboration continue to be the
basis for your writing--and its performative structure? Can you
comment on process and collaboration in your latest performance
work, Mirror Play?
* CH: My latest performance work is written as a "mirror" of
Performing Objects. The space of what was the sub world is now a
foyer, so architectural concept has replaced the social structure
concept of the sub world. But each of these concepts "mirrors" the
other. In Mirror Play, the one room is also a site within "one
world." Any "body" in the world can enter or not the space of the
one room. The question is: what's happened to the house?
As I have conceived its relationship to media now, Mirror
Play stresses language, sound, and music--at least, that's where
I'm beginning with it. Initially, I had conceived of Mirror Play
as a poly-vocal piece for one performer: I liked the idea of one
performer working with multiple voices within the conceptual
anti-chamber space. However, that one immediately turned into two
as I felt that an instrumental voice needed to be an aspect of the
speaking voice. I started working with Jon Raskin, developing the
piece for spoken voice (mine) and jaw harps. Now the poly-vocality
is being extended to many voices and more instruments. I am about
to embark on a six day experiment in developing the work at the
Susanne Hilberry Gallery near Detroit, and I have gathered people
from San Francisco and Detroit to work on the piece then. We'll
see what happens and go from there.
/ Department of English
City College of New York
laurahinton@earthlink.net /
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Notes
1 <#ref1>. Silliman was the first writer, to my knowledge, to use
the term "inter-genre" to describe this new style of poet's prose
that forms a conceptual-poetry critique of bourgeois realism. See
his "Introduction" to In the American Tree.
2 <#ref2>. These constraints are different from but related to the
technique of "restraint" about which Harryman has written and
about which she comments in the Interview.
3 <#ref3>. Mirror Play was performed at the Susanne Hilberry
Gallery in August 2005--/Ed/.
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