Vrzhu claims no expertise in reviewing or criticism—we lack the necessary competence and nerve to accomplish anything in this area, and we are awed by a critic’s ability to discern, distinguish and apply hermeneutical apparatus in the destructing of creative works.
Bethathowsoever, once in a great while, a work (other than ones we have published, which are brilliant and unsurpassed) crosses our mahogany desktop here in the Research Bureau that we find so radical and original and groundbreaking that we are compelled to comment, if only to bring it to the attention of our vasty multitude of readers (104 hits in the last seven days alone!).
A work recently set before us can, I believe, accept the mantle of epic without so much as a blush, and meets our criteria for comment, being unique from several perspectives:
1. That it is a breakthrough work in a little known or appreciated genre.
2. That it combines visual artistry with post-lyrical writing such that both are so closely bound that neither could exist without the other—only together do they constitute meaning. This is so unprecedented a feat that comparisons with other, faux-similar, works—the collaborations of Susan Bee and Charles Berenstain, or the environments and compilations of Arakawa and Gins—are feeble at best.
3. That the work itself represents the next step beyond collaboration. The book was created by a collective—no individual or group of individuals takes credit as the author(s). It harks back in this sense to the medieval guilds whose productions were both anonymous and exquisite (note: There are some possible clues folded into the text itself that may identify members of the collective, at least visually. However, these are so integral to the work as to be opaque to any possible definite identification or biographo-interpretation).
If anything, the apparent methodology reminds us of nothing so much as some of the cinematic collectives of the 20th century: Chris Marker and Société pour la Lancement des Oeuvres (SLON), the films of Vertov and company, or the various technician/artists who produced Citizen Kane under an elaborately fictional persona they created known as Orson Mercutio Welles. However the work before us even more fundamentally erases the distinction between the individual and the group, the group and its productions. One could designate the whole enterprise (the book with its visual/written axes, and the “creators” of the book) as “Static Cinema,” to semi-coin a term.
[Editorial correction: It has been brought to our attention that we misspelled one of the individuals in this post. The corrected phrase should read “..the collaborations of Susan Bee and Charles Bernstein.” Mr. Bernstein is in no way related to the avant garde experimentalists Stan and Jan Berenstain. Vrzhu regrets the error.]
Enough preamble. It would be impossible to do justice to the whole work, its gestalt, without many hours, nay, months, of deliberation, research and analysis. Instead here is a tentative commentary about some of the sections in this sui generis miesterstuck.
There are threaded and woven themes and leitmotivs throughout the work. These predominate one section and show up sporadically (though not, it seems, randomly) in other movements within the work. The book as a whole opens with a long, finely wrought and subtle section on themes of containment and enclosure. Other themes tentatively identified are closure, imperatives, the seal, and there are indirect references to articulation, the concept of “safeness.”
But the opening section established a rigorously controlled poetic, wherein small and continual variations accumulate. The written to visual ratio fluctuates through the work but here in the beginning, text most strongly asserts it hegemony. The written portion seems to based on an Olsonian “open field” of projected verse, but mutated into a matricial truth-function that constrains the page and the expressible materiality within the page’s “horizon.” This “grid” contains the text even as it releases it to the reader/viewer as participant, and becomes a subspecies of its genetic ur-lyric: intrajected verse. Could the matrices that enclose and free the text be here at the inception because of the etymology of matrix as “brood animal, womb (‘All that openeth the matrix is mine’ - Exodus xxxiv.19)?”
This transitions into a epithelium on the instrumentality of aporia, here signified under the rubric “that which seals.” Note the “impulse” sealer—which undoubtedly functions as both Lacanian superego (the psychical agency constructed around residual fantasies of the Oedipal father’s access to the sovereign jouissance of the mother's body denied to the child) and instinct-jailing civilization (where the subject {text} must bear up vis-à-vis the condition of being a castrated animal forced to pursue its desire on 'the inverted ladder of the signifier', within the phallic order of its society’s big Other) which, ironically, requires “less pressure to activate.”
After the monochromatic permutations of the long opening section (akin to perhaps an overture?) the next sections build to an exhuberant climax (“Je suis un petit mort.”) that is part Jenny Holzer, part Kafka, part heterotopic JoJo the dog-faced boy.
Another section which struck us was one that alludes to the unique human “being-at-hand” here shown as articulation, but, significantly, covert articulation concretized by the glovedness of our interpenentration with the thing-world.
One final preliminary prolegomena: imbedded in and as part of the visual text are “people.” Could these function as both markers and as hints to the multidentities of the author(s)? Perhap only in a combinatorial construct where Art is also Artist, the self-created creator who becomes her own creature (created) collapsing that which knows (sapiens) into that which guards (canis).
Vzhu salutes the Uline collective for this tantalizing and depthless work of art.
Bethathowsoever, once in a great while, a work (other than ones we have published, which are brilliant and unsurpassed) crosses our mahogany desktop here in the Research Bureau that we find so radical and original and groundbreaking that we are compelled to comment, if only to bring it to the attention of our vasty multitude of readers (104 hits in the last seven days alone!).
A work recently set before us can, I believe, accept the mantle of epic without so much as a blush, and meets our criteria for comment, being unique from several perspectives:
1. That it is a breakthrough work in a little known or appreciated genre.
2. That it combines visual artistry with post-lyrical writing such that both are so closely bound that neither could exist without the other—only together do they constitute meaning. This is so unprecedented a feat that comparisons with other, faux-similar, works—the collaborations of Susan Bee and Charles Berenstain, or the environments and compilations of Arakawa and Gins—are feeble at best.
3. That the work itself represents the next step beyond collaboration. The book was created by a collective—no individual or group of individuals takes credit as the author(s). It harks back in this sense to the medieval guilds whose productions were both anonymous and exquisite (note: There are some possible clues folded into the text itself that may identify members of the collective, at least visually. However, these are so integral to the work as to be opaque to any possible definite identification or biographo-interpretation).
If anything, the apparent methodology reminds us of nothing so much as some of the cinematic collectives of the 20th century: Chris Marker and Société pour la Lancement des Oeuvres (SLON), the films of Vertov and company, or the various technician/artists who produced Citizen Kane under an elaborately fictional persona they created known as Orson Mercutio Welles. However the work before us even more fundamentally erases the distinction between the individual and the group, the group and its productions. One could designate the whole enterprise (the book with its visual/written axes, and the “creators” of the book) as “Static Cinema,” to semi-coin a term.
[Editorial correction: It has been brought to our attention that we misspelled one of the individuals in this post. The corrected phrase should read “..the collaborations of Susan Bee and Charles Bernstein.” Mr. Bernstein is in no way related to the avant garde experimentalists Stan and Jan Berenstain. Vrzhu regrets the error.]
Enough preamble. It would be impossible to do justice to the whole work, its gestalt, without many hours, nay, months, of deliberation, research and analysis. Instead here is a tentative commentary about some of the sections in this sui generis miesterstuck.
There are threaded and woven themes and leitmotivs throughout the work. These predominate one section and show up sporadically (though not, it seems, randomly) in other movements within the work. The book as a whole opens with a long, finely wrought and subtle section on themes of containment and enclosure. Other themes tentatively identified are closure, imperatives, the seal, and there are indirect references to articulation, the concept of “safeness.”
But the opening section established a rigorously controlled poetic, wherein small and continual variations accumulate. The written to visual ratio fluctuates through the work but here in the beginning, text most strongly asserts it hegemony. The written portion seems to based on an Olsonian “open field” of projected verse, but mutated into a matricial truth-function that constrains the page and the expressible materiality within the page’s “horizon.” This “grid” contains the text even as it releases it to the reader/viewer as participant, and becomes a subspecies of its genetic ur-lyric: intrajected verse. Could the matrices that enclose and free the text be here at the inception because of the etymology of matrix as “brood animal, womb (‘All that openeth the matrix is mine’ - Exodus xxxiv.19)?”
This transitions into a epithelium on the instrumentality of aporia, here signified under the rubric “that which seals.” Note the “impulse” sealer—which undoubtedly functions as both Lacanian superego (the psychical agency constructed around residual fantasies of the Oedipal father’s access to the sovereign jouissance of the mother's body denied to the child) and instinct-jailing civilization (where the subject {text} must bear up vis-à-vis the condition of being a castrated animal forced to pursue its desire on 'the inverted ladder of the signifier', within the phallic order of its society’s big Other) which, ironically, requires “less pressure to activate.”
After the monochromatic permutations of the long opening section (akin to perhaps an overture?) the next sections build to an exhuberant climax (“Je suis un petit mort.”) that is part Jenny Holzer, part Kafka, part heterotopic JoJo the dog-faced boy.Another section which struck us was one that alludes to the unique human “being-at-hand” here shown as articulation, but, significantly, covert articulation concretized by the glovedness of our interpenentration with the thing-world.
One final preliminary prolegomena: imbedded in and as part of the visual text are “people.” Could these function as both markers and as hints to the multidentities of the author(s)? Perhap only in a combinatorial construct where Art is also Artist, the self-created creator who becomes her own creature (created) collapsing that which knows (sapiens) into that which guards (canis).
Vzhu salutes the Uline collective for this tantalizing and depthless work of art.
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