Commentaries

I didn’t start reading or writing poetry until I was in my mid-twenties. I didn’t study avant-garde art or literary history/criticism until after college. I did, however, read Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit sometime during my John Lennon phase in junior high, so though I wouldn’t have known the word, I’d been fluxed to a certain degree. Though Grapefruit is, well, kinda hippy-cheesy, I do think that it ‘holds up’ as an exemplary model of a book that transcends its avant-garde context, something that (like Joe Brainard’s I Remember) achieves that rare mode that can be understood and mind-opening to kids and aged seen-it-all’s alike.

While certainly not as edgy as her “Cut Piece” or other performance and film works of hers, the book and the many instruction pieces she’s written since then remains a model of a kind of performance writing, in the sense that many of the texts are instructions for performances (even if many seem impossible outside of the imagination). Of course, Ono’s work came out of her off and on relationship to Fluxus (as well as the overlapping Happenings, avant-garde music, conceptual and performance art movements), and it’s the written works of Fluxus I’d like to explore in this post, specifically to query the relationship between writing and performance, script/score and enactment.

In many ways, most Fluxus ‘scores’ (for music or other kinds of performance and/or composition) are fairly legible as scripts for performance/enactment; i.e. the text comes first and the performance after (if at all). Certainly, one of the interventions (and charms) of Fluxus scores were the openness of the scores, where interpretation and chance were much more important than following the letter of the law, as one might in traditional sheet music, for example. As such, reading Fluxus scores as performance texts allows us to see how writing can activate art/life works that writing cannot contain or control.

Interestingly, though, (excuse the gross generalization, but this is a blog, not a dissertation) while Fluxus scores continue to be read, studied, and collected (click here for a free PDF of one such anthology), there is not as large an archive of performance documentation, performance presumably being the ‘point’ of such scores. Certainly there are photos and recordings and limited-edition book-art objects, but just as often as not the scores were never performed or enacted, and in many cases were not intended to be. What I find compelling about the work is thus how scores can become literary and ‘stand on their own’ as works of art. Certainly this happens in other genres; one can purchase plays and filmscripts and sheet music, etc., but usually those are still understood to be in relation to an actual (or realistically potential) performance and less often of interest ‘only’ as text (except to fellow practitioners, who might geek out on a transcribed Anthony Hill improvisation or the stage directions of Tadeuz Kantor for insight/fuel/etc.). Still, Fluxus scores are models for other poetic traditions, from aleatory and procedural poetry to Oulipo and newer forms of conceptual writing, where the resulting work/'product' is not a commodified art object, but literature. 

At the same time, while all Fluxus scores could be said to have literary merit on their own, this does not mean that they all make for ‘good’ literature. I’m most interested in those works that somehow contain (if that’s the word) the performance in the text itself — not as a document or as performative utterance per se, but in the way that poetic writing can make something happen in the world, even if that ‘in the world’ is only in the reader’s brief imagining of potential enactments. I’m also interested in how the ‘magic’ of a Flux work does or does not ‘live on’ once the works become museumified. After all, just as many Fluxus were invested in finding new modes of art/life beyond the calcified forms of musical composition and choreographic instruction, the Fluxus object became the way into the museum and the art market. “Official” art history (both in the museum as well as the textbooks) requires documentation and objects in order to categorize and canonize a movement.

Unlike, say, karaoke, with its democratic use of scores to make/remake art, the democratic promise of Fluxus (‘anybody can do it’) bumps up against the archive-commodity status of the work (work=object in this case, vs. work = poetry/performance/‘magic’). As William Pope.L has written, “If karaoke is memorialized via the hangover, Fluxus is memorialized via the boxed performance relic. Notwithstanding Fluxus’s utopic desire to level the playing field of art, the issue of quality still matters. Unlike karaoke, differences between performers and performances in Fluxus are tracked very carefully.”1

So — do we carefully track differences between performers and performances, or between poets and poems, when it comes to practices such as procedural, aleatory, process and constraint-based writing? Compared to many Fluxus scores, descriptions of procedural and aleatory poems often tend towards the explanatory, the assumption being that the ‘resulting’ poem is where the literary lives (even as in avant-garde traditions proceduralism and chance operations can be zones of contingency and improvisation, and not always non-egoistic or mechanical). Thus one often reads a description of a compositional process that might sound compelling to fellow practitioners (as new ways make poems), and then one reads the poem that comes out of the procedure. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has found that many times the resulting poem is not nearly as interesting as the process, and yet at the same time I’m rarely inspired to then use the procedure myself (in part because it feels like the experiment has been executed? it’s ‘not mine’? I’m afraid the ‘differences will be tracked carefully’?) Certainly there are writers whose descriptions of their procedures are compelling compositions in and of themselves, ‘regardless’ of what comes out of them — I’m thinking of poets and performers such as Caroline Bergvall, Steve Benson, cris cheek, CA Conrad’s (Soma)tic exercises, just to name a few — but somehow Fluxus-inspired ‘scores’ at their best feel more like poems (as well as performance texts) than most poets’ descriptions of compositional procedures/instructions (even as the latter can be compelling and inspiring in different ways).

George Brecht, from Water Yam Box

As with many avant-garde movements that press against the art/life divide, fluxus and similar performance scores can profoundly change the way we understand our own relations to the kinds of banal instructions that make up our daily negotiations of text and behavior. Whether or not we might think of driving directions or to-do lists or instructions for putting together an Ikea bookshelf as performance scores, there are ways in which we do perform tasks, shape our bodies, work within and against constraints, in response to written ‘scores’ that we often do not think of as aesthetic in nature (much less in the spirit of Fluxus). Of course, we generally don’t think of such tasks as art/ful unless we are ‘breaking the rules’ (think the derivé vs. mapquest), and many of our daily encounters with instructions are instrumentalized and governed by Taylorist notions of efficiency, purpose, and productivity (in Marxist terms, towards the production of value; for Foucault, towards the production of disciplined subjects). “Following the letter of the law,” after all, is usually an exercise in privatized actuarialism and not something we’d call performance writing (unless taken to some kind of parodic extreme, like when I bring a child to carry on the escalator at the mall in order to adhere to the ‘carry children on escalator’ sign).

But: consider the figure of the chef in today’s foodie culture. The chef is now a celebrity, an artist. The recipe? A score for interpretation, choreography for durational performance, a script for a paying audience drawn to the culinary theater. So might the recipe be a performance score? “Yoko Ono” seems to think so. In Lettuce by Yoko Ono, a book written by the pseudonymous author of several National Novel Writing Night Month titles, we find recipes-in-flux for grapefruit word salad:

FORGET THE LETTUCE PIECE

Make salads this week with Florida

cucumbers, Quebec endive and Mexican

hydroponic tomatoes, all foods in top

shape at low prices.

Lettuce, coming mostly from Arizona, is hit-and-

miss as to quality.

Observant shoppers may find brown butts

and ribs on iceberg. Leafy types are in

better condition.

alongside a 35 page 'recipe' addressing the genetic makeup of various strains of red lettuce.

And in Mark Rodriguez’s wonderful Idea Art For Kids, among the many instructional pieces such as "Write letters to companies praising their product, and request a hand-drawn picture of what their office looks like, what they'd rather be doing, where their boss is, or what their boss looks like" and the sample above is the instructional food piece: 

"Obtain free condiment packages from restaurants and use them as art supplies."

Finally, Charlene Tan transformed George Brecht's Water Yam into "Burnt Ube," a box of event scores celebrating the Filipino staple Ube (Tagalog for "water yam"), including a recipe for her Filipina-American Burnt Ube dessert.

Does it work — as art? as life? As they say, the proof is in the pudding.2

1. “Canary in the Coal Mine,” Art Journal, 2011 (and yes, I did more or less take this post in a direction where I could justify using a WmPopeL quote about karaoke hangovers)

2. Sorry, couldn't resist. Still, mmm, pudding.

Trash. Garbage. Junk. Waste. Refuse. Rubbish. Detritus. It was on everyone’s mind at the Conference on Ecopoetics. The dreaded contradiction: With a gathering of 250 of even the most environmentally minded poets, scholars, educators, and activists comes, by the end of a long weekend, a heap of trash — empty cartons and wine bottles; used paper cups, napkins, and towels; soggy tea bags and even some food waste (in the English lounge, we ended up with one to two large bags of trash by the end of each day, excluding recyclables). As we all know, it’s impossible to travel, convene, eat, and live in our society while not, at the same time, creating waste. And despite a 50-year-old modern environmental movement, today we send greater amounts of rubbish to landfills and incinerators than ever before.[1]

That said, Conference on Ecopoetics participants made an admirable effort to keep waste to a minimum. Almost everyone drank their water, coffee, and tea from reusable water bottles and travel mugs. If anything, trash was of foremost concern — and this fact was certainly reflected in panel, roundtable, and seminar presentations and discussions. As part of the panel “The Thingness of Things: Connecting with the Culture’s Material Trace,” Allison Cobb presented her “conference codex,” an array of discarded plastic items that she had collected from in and around Wheeler Hall — disposable silverware, food containers and lids, cigarette wrappers, a Starbucks cold-drink cup, a broken vinyl record — “the record of our presence here that will outlast us for the next several centuries and serve as our trace,” Cobb explained. Cobb related her surprise at how much plastic littered the halls and lawns of the UC Berkeley campus. But, she explained, “I realized soon after I got here that [Berkeley] is just like America.” (America, indeed — a country where more people recycle than vote, and yet, at the same time, 80 percent of consumer products are still used only once and then thrown away.[2]) According to Cobb, her trash-collecting exercise in Berkeley is part of a larger project, for which she has been systematically collecting discarded plastic items during her daily walks and cataloging them at her blog, and which will inform her new book, The Autobiography of Plastic. During her presentation, with her “codex” spread out in front of her, Cobb asserted, “There is no difference between this, and you. You are this. This is you. You are looking at your past, your present, your future.”

Kaia Sand also gestured toward the complex temporality of trash during her presentation on “The Thingness of Things” panel, reflecting on the way objects come and go quickly in our wired lives, so soon obsolete, yet continue to circulate, reverberate, and “add up” in and through commodity chains. During her performance of her poem "Tiny Arctic Ice," Sand read fragments written on a "logjam of e-waste" (to use her words) — obsolete cords and cables, cameras, and dongles. In this way, the performance presences that which we would prefer to write out of our narrative of technical innovation and “progress.” The poem, for Sand, is “ledger”: “This and this and this. Watching. Researching. Collecting.”

Walter Benjamin’s angel of history comes to mind, with that pile of debris heaped before him, growing skyward, amidst the storm that Benjamin names “progress.” To think these methods — these temporalities of trash — I would argue that what we need is perhaps not “object-oriented ontology” (a catchphrase of the weekend) but rather good old-fashioned historical materialism, which has long been one of our most authentic object-oriented philosophies. It is Benjamin who wrote in (and of) his own Arcades Project: “Method of this project: literary montage…the rags, the refuse — these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.”[3] (And it is Theodor Adorno who suggested similarly that it is theory and art’s task to “deal with [the] unassimilated material,” the “waste products” that fall by the wayside of the dialectic.[4]) In this way, for Benjamin, method (what we might also call creative practice, or poetics) — contrary to the interests and institutions that facilitate the casting off of “refuse” in the first place — "annihilates within itself the idea of progress."[5] And so, in Benjamin's terms, what Cobb and Sand offer us is perhaps more than anything a kind of "dialectics at a standstill": an image of the relation of the what-has-been to the now [6], a performance of the moment in which “alienated things” become legible as “genuinely historical.”[7] (As Wallace Stevens suggests: that “truth” which manifests “Between that disgust and this, between the things / That are on the dump.”[8])

(Re)making history out of “trash” — we saw a strong interest in it on the panel “The Ghost in the (Drum) Machine: Tracking Remix, Reuse, and Return in Contemporary Ecopoetics” as well. In their presentation “Radical (Re)assemblages,” Patrick Rosal and Ross Gay performed a piece in response to police violence against young men of color, a remix in which they layered recordings of bees over audio from police dispatch calls and interviews with citizens about murdered young men (e.g., question: “Who is Oscar Grant?”; answer: “I don’t know”). Remix, for Rosal and Gay, is “making music of detritus.” Moreover, they argued, it’s a practice that reconceptualizes time, collapsing time, evoking the imminence of our own disappearance — what they call our “ecological condition.”

Importantly, though, as Joshua Schuster pointed out in his paper “After Recycling: Environmental Conceptual Poetics” (on the panel “The Troping of Ecopoetic Form”), “recycling” in language and art can only tell us so much about the chemical process that is the recycling of actual matter; recycling in art is not the same as recycling in the real, material world. That said, Schuster argued, conceptual poetry’s immersion in “artificial environments” and “junk spaces” (citing, for example, both Christian Bök and Tan Lin) — coupled with the “ethical neutrality” of some of these practices, in contrast to the moralizing of some ecopoetry — is promising for any ecopoetics interested in getting away from the paradigm of “sustainability” and exploring the concept of ecology from other perspectives (and so, for Schuster: from “sustainable” poetry to the “purposeful purposeless” of conceptual poetry as a “blatant act of expenditure”).

Physical trash was not the only form of waste under consideration at the conference. Rob Halpern read from his recent book Music For Porn on Thursday night at a Bay Area Public School off-site event and also at the Friday conference evening reading. In his book, which reflects on the condition of the militarized body under the American biopolitical regime, Halpern repeatedly takes up the question of “waste”: "From somewhere deep, waste returns, my constant theme."[9] It is from this place and time, where and when bodies are increasingly devalued by capital, in which a surplus of life is thrown off by capital itself in its late stages[10], and in which life is more than ever before administered, policed, and mechanized by the state, that Halpern writes — “Having arrived at junk status myself, declassed by overproduction."[11] And in my own paper on “bodies at risk,” part of the panel “Emergency, Ethics, Ecopoetics,” I discussed the chronic wasting thematized by Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. On my reading, Rankine's book registers the abjection of the racialized subject under the biopolitical state, a state that, according to Rankine, is characterized by a proliferation of chronic disease, policing, and preventive warfare — what Rankine names the “wasting away” of life, and what Lauren Berlant aptly calls “slow death”: "the physical wearing out of a population," the structurally determined and administered "attrition of human life."[12]

Trash, remixing and recycling, waste and wasting — if you have been thinking about these concepts and phenomena in your own creative work, please contact Laura Mullen (lmullen@lsu.edu) and/or me (angelamariehume@gmail.com), as we are co-curating a special issue of The Volta on “trash" (forthcoming fall 2013). We would love to consider your work for possible inclusion in this issue.

[1] Heather Rogers, "Garbage Capitalism's Green Commerce," Coming to Terms with Nature, ed. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007), 238.

[2] Ibid., 231.

[3] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 460, my emphasis.

[4] Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 151.

[5] Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 460.

[6] Ibid., 463.

[7] Ibid., 466.

[8] Wallace Stevens, "The Man on the Dump," The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage Books, 1982).

[9] Rob Halpern, Music for Porn (Callicoon, New York: Nightboat Books, 2012), 7.

[10] For more on the phenomenon of surplus populations, see Aaron Benanav and Endnotes, "Misery and Debt: On the Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital," Endnotes 2 (April 2010).

[11] Halpern, Music for Porn, 25.

[12] Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency),” Critical Inquiry 33 (Summer 2007): 754.