a journal of new writing
cover art by Michael Basinski
“Everything will be tested by fire.”--I Corinth., 3,13 (paraphrase)
In the introduction to a catalogue of his works--Sulla Strada / On The Road--Luc Fierens is described as an art “provocateur.” This term prefaces the variety of roles the artist steps into as creator or maker in obscuring the intent of the modern work from preconditioned responses of the art audience. The first law of abstract art is the depiction of reality in an unexpected way in keeping with its--reality’s--basic character.
The Fierens’ work above seems to take as its starting point the art of Andy Warhol--in particular Warhol’s works with multiple panels, especially four panels, generally depicting a variation of a photographic image in each panel. One of these works remains particularly popular, comprised of four “psychedelic” colored silk-screened images of Marilyn Monroe. Critics chastised Warhol’s mass produced work as being “art for art’s sake” in the extreme, implying that it was detached from meaning, especially from the life-filled tradition of art and its long involvement with social issues. The monetary value of Warhol’s works also labeled him as materialistic.
Unlike Warhol’s exactness, the Fierens work is hastily assembled. Three of the panels are subjects that refer clearly to social problems. One is a well-known Walker Evans photograph from Evans’ and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men about Southern sharecroppers. Another is a news photo of a protester. The third possibly taken from comic book art is a conflagration and an agonized man holding a measuring tool aloft in his hand. The fourth, a double female image, with a separate period as blemish, is similar to the other three, despite its contrasting surface qualities, because we know that in Fierens’ work the female figure generally symbolizes political and personal repression. Three of the images are in black-and-white (including half of the double female image) and two of them are in color. Yet in referencing the Warhol work, Fierens tells us that the four images are variations.
Whereas Abstract Expressionist compositions, from the same time as Warhol, deconstructed visibility and gave rise to radically unfamiliar views of the material settings and forms of humanity on the infinite canvas, Warhol approached the same philosophical or social problems from a diametrically opposite direction. Warhol’s work unrelentingly contains iconic images, tinted with the colors of unreality and artificiality. Rather than substance, presence and existence, the subject of Warhol’s art is illusion, isolation and nonexistence.
In saying this, I disagree with the critics that call Warhol detached. Art critics disparaged Warhol’s colors as being unlike the Fauves (for example), saying that Warhol’s colors had no connection with emotion or symbolic meaning. But non-literal coloration also alludes to the amazing outward experiences derived from the splitting of the atom and from telescopic glimpses across galaxies. It isn’t Warhol that is detached. It’s the iconic perspective itself that is detached. As pioneer provacateur, Warhol’s depictions are intended as a satiric criticism of cultural shallowness and fadishness-- its absoluteness and lack of everyday relevance, its dominant downward push against the social fabric in general, its association with atrocities and recurring erroneous crimes perpetrated both against and by humanity. Warhole depicts unsecularized tokens arbitrarily directed toward morality, obeyed without reason. With his multiple panels, he even brings in numerology enhancing the idea of meaninglessness.
Fierens’ work revisits the discourse of Warhol and abstract painting. Does Fierens, as provacateur, cleverly endorse Warhol’s social criticism--the empty religion of inert images--or does it sternly condemn Warhol himself as detached? The subject matter and style of art of Fierens’ four or four-and-a-half panels seems to be quite different from that of Warhol’s. Perhaps Fierens is saying that “thrilling” unnatural coloration of the photographic image of Marilyn Monroe is related more closely to social issues than critics think, that Warhol is right that the actress was misperceived. Perhaps, on the other hand, Fierens is saying that his own images of protest and social unrest are more iconic and detached from reality than is generally understood. I think these two artworks are very similar in their agreement that the visual aspect of any social situation is difficult to understand.
Warhol brings out the issue of the value of art, no matter if it is placed on the level of action. In posing the question of burning the books of Franz Kafka (Kafka himself being the first to pose this question), Georges Bataille calls Kafka’s works “doomed” and written only to be “anihillated.” (1) Bataille writes, along with some remarks critical of Communism, “Nobody doubts the value or questions the ultimate authority of action.”
In Communism, the goal, the altered world, situated in time, in the future, takes prescedence over existence. (2)
But Bataille isn’t merely criticizing Communism as much as he is criticizing time.
This is no longer a mere denunciation of the vanity of one “aspect of life,” but of the vanity of all endeavors, which are equally senseless: an endeavor is always as hopeless in time as a fish in water. (3)
Thus, a fish in water is “doomed” to remain a fish, just as the children of false gods are doomed, just as the images in both Fierens’ and Warhole’s works are meant to be questioned as iconic.
Yet,undoubtedly the portrayal of social issues in Fierens is present. Provacateur though he may be, unlike Warhol, Fierens includes in this work an avant-garde collage-piece of text that reminds us that he is also a “visual” artist (writer) for whom a work of entirely visual imagery is always iconic. Among other things, visual “writing,” visual poetry is a call for articulation. In my opinion, Fierens’ work here and elsewhere fits with the new flexible age of criticism that “typifies the wider, more positive parameters of postmodern culture.” (4) Fierens’ workman-like multi-media piece calls for a revived interest in and a rearticulation of the valuable, forgotten discourses of Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism, McLuhanism,Warhol and other works of that time. Fierens’ open, less dismissive, less categorical, less secretive and painstaking, ironic and more plain viewpoint is uninterested in taking sides and aims at making sure that all sides taken are fully examined at face value. Fierens seems to be saying that Warhol’s iconic imagery might very well be unrecognized for the criticism it offers, but, at the same time, Warhol hasn’t really made an effort to make himself clear. Fierens, like his numberless compatriots, is less focused on museum masterworks, sales, the niceties of tradition and more on exploring the accusations, examining the lasting values that relate to both art and social imbalance--on the internet, in small publications--and being open to change. He is interested in art and literature that for these reasons have more freedom in relation to content and style, traits as common and geometric in the Renaissance as they are in the varieties of media of today.
Notes
1. Literature and Evil, George Bataille, Marion Boyars, New York, 1993, p. 152
2. Ibid. p. 152
3. Ibid. p. 152
4. Parameters of Postmodernism, Nicholas Zurbrugg, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 1993, p. 99
It’s autumn in the Pacific Northwest, and I’m sitting in front of a picture window on the other side of nature as it shifts in preparation for the darkest season--a frenzy of scrub jays harassing squirrels in the neighbor’s yard; a snow’s fall of medium cadmium leaves collected at the base of tree trunks, littering sidewalks, clogging gutters; electric October skies with their permeable cloudscapes.
Observation: to watch carefully, notice.
This is what we do the better part of our lives: study the landscape and its upheavals through the assumed safety lens of glass casements (in houses, offices, automobiles), under the seeming protection of steel joists and wood beam-supported structures.
Vantage point: broad view, perspective.
Up and down this narrow street, construction. Condo, or duplex? Convenience store, or coffeehouse? Every morning, fragments of jackhammer juxtaposed with willow. Traffic signal with coyote. And as always, seeing and hearing only what we choose to.
Myopic: insular, restricted.
And in this environment of limited life spans and variable terrain--man-erected edifices, man-destructed woodlands--we require something greater than ourselves to provide nourishment, serve as a sanctuary. As Paz might suggest, an “architecture of sound/meaning,” so that we might survey and navigate the rending and shaping.
Poetry: food, shelter.
This morning, and for many mornings, I have found such sustenance in ALL STEEL--Lori Anderson Moseman’s fifth collection of verse (Flim Forum Press, 2012). Here, poems of construction, destruction, and the forests or clearcuts that lie in between. Here, the craftswomen and men, builders and foresters at the front lines of the built environments we inhabit. Rural and urban testimonials, accounts, and narratives that take their cues (and shape on the page) from a library of hand tools and machinery.
Toolbox: manual, mechanical.
But to weigh the impact of the destruction of our natural resources, the transformation and extraction of our landscapes, we must first consider motives, and our position in the process.
Henri visits every canoe he's made and sold. I'd rather
visit each slaughtered birch, tar them, wrap them, heal
each toothed leaf free so green unfolds into fall yellow
(18-19) “Crooked Knife | Reportage”
Like Henri, who fashions canoes from birch both found and felled, it has become more and more effortless to disconnect ourselves from our role in the devastation of the natural world. But Moseman’s careful examinations remind us of the intimate connection we have with industry; both global and local.
We covet and partake. No matter what prompts our consumption--replicating Thoreau’s canoe with nothing more than “an awl, an axe, and a crooked knife,” or fashioning an urban landscape with tools and technology that have become extensions of our physical selves--nature has still been transformed, permanently altered.
Yet, these poems challenge all of our assumptions, providing multiple viewpoints from which we might formulate an opinion.
A Filipino forester pronounces it ugly. Our scientist concedes: perhaps
they had wanted fire to kill fewer trees. I am happy
below the charred spires. This ridge asks for risk.
Snags and seed trees say dare. Design.
(26) Partial Cut, Broadcast Burn Hope Tour Stop #2, from “Increment Borer | Comparative Analysis”
Divided into three sections--“TEACHING TOOLS,” “LABOR POOLS,” “WORK CYCLES”--ALL STEEL offers a range of perspectives and structures that push the limits of the page, often times evocative of the tools and landscapes each poem inhabits.
And in these habitats Moseman consistently demonstrates a precision of language, whether as phonetic characters, ideograms, or a hybrid system of the two.
retired sawhorses [] long-backed and painted blue [] branded NYPD
she buys ‘em on eBay [] underbids everyone, yet [] rigs it to win
(30) 2003, from “Sawhorse | Manifesto”
The poem continues to bracket and column its way down the page in a series of signs and sounds, giving voice to its vision:
This is her mustang time [][] her All-American free speech [][]
her lost lasso convention [][] her manifest corral [][]
The temporalization of Moseman’s poems demands our acute attention, asks us to engage with them as metaphors of time and space itself. Syntactic disruption and anastrophe subvert the normal order of things, lending a sense of unease as their subjects seek to find a balance between culpability and innocence.
But ALL STEEL is not without its quieter moments, and places of respite. In “May 1945 | Benediction,” the poem’s speaker and her husband wait out the queue of tourists at Anne Frank’s house in a Delft shop. As they peruse a selection of souvenir plates and figurines which recall the surrounding Dutch landscape, “A field of grain. A sunrise. That moment / in all the time-worn repetition of pattern,” enigmatic objects of their desire intersect with the very forms they were designed to mimic:
Amid the platters--each with its own lineage: two cats.
Persians sunning above porcelain replicas of themselves
Gentle stealth navigating so much bone--
not a break. Just. Sweet, alert purr.
(76) .
I pick this book up, and place it down. I have sat with it for many minuets. Here at my snug post, which I will leave only to eat, or to jog through the neighborhood in between rain showers. But I’ll return, as I always do, to watch the trees unburden themselves of their leaves through the picture window, to listen to the freight train as it ushers in evening. Like Moseman’s narratives, in their calm and raucous:
"She saved my life, but I can’t remember a single word she said. All the little leaves / of her stories, the full forest they became--rants that lifted left boot up now humus under the right.”
25) “Core Bore(r) | Oral History”
