The Anti-Dictionary: Ferreira Gullar’s Non-Object Poems

Gullar gave primacy to the word as the locus of meaning of the non-object poem, and the visual, whether the materiality of language or the sculptural turn of his Neoconcrete art, opened up additional meanings contained in the word. According to Gullar the non-object as anti-dictionary cannot be reduced to one meaning or limited to only an arbitrary sign. Like the visual non-object, the verbal non-object avoids sameness or commonness and rejects the ability of language to only designate. And yet paradoxically, are not all words readymades themselves?

Some Passages from Virgil’s Eclogues

That was the day Corydon became Corydon.

Bernhard’s Way

Bernhard can link a Bourdieu-style sociological critique of art to an anti-theatrical critique of art because both the sophisticated collector and the actor depend on the pretense that they are not doing what in fact they are doing: asking you to recognize them. People make judgments of taste in order to be recognized by others. Painters paint paintings, actors deliver lines, poets write poems in order to be recognized by others. The objects they create come into the world deformed by their attention-grabbing fineness of line, color, and phrase.

Ecological Art: What Do We Do Now?

Araeen’s “ecoaesthetics” insists that artists can and should make a difference in a world beset by environmental emergencies. He shows one way to move in this direction, by collectively implementing artistic ideas. Thinking of his polemic and of the many and various ecoart projects realized in recent years, we could be forgiven for wondering how much of a difference in this direction is “enough.”

Django Unchained, or, The Help: How “Cultural Politics” Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why

So why is a tale about a manumitted slave/homicidal black gunslinger more palatable to a contemporary leftoid sensibility than either a similarly cartoonish one about black maids and their white employers or one that thematizes Lincoln’s effort to push the Thirteenth Amendment through the House of Representatives? The answer is, to quote the saccharine 1970s ballad, “Feelings, nothing more than feelings.”

The Music Issue (Issue #8) is here

In our newest issue nonsite turns its attention to music.

Issue #8: The Music Issue

In this issue, nonsite turns its attention to music.

Issue #8: The Music Issue

In this issue, nonsite turns its attention to music.

Trans-Canada Express: Glenn Gould, Petula Clark, and the Possibilities of Pop

The technological form we have already encountered: “the dials…the dials.” “Dial twiddling is in its limited way an interpretive act.” The reduction of performance, from public to private, from the sorts of manipulation required by a piano or a guitar or a string section to the sort of manipulation required by a Tascam console can seem to be a great loss, hard to distinguish from the onanistic regression that Adorno ridiculed in “The Fetish-Character in Listening”—those “countless radio listeners play[ing] with the feedback or the sound dial.” The dial is the barest index of interpretive will. For Adorno, that reduction is a falling away from the challenges of real listening; for Gould, the attenuation of effort opens up the possibility of analysis. For analysis to take hold, then, it needed more than technological support; it also required a temporal form: ABA, counterpoint, Romantic revelation.

Formalism, Fair and Foul

Fair is foul, and foul is fair;
Hover through the fog and filthy air.

Thus chant the three witches at the beginning of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Now it’s clear enough that the witches weren’t talking about formalism; they had more sinister, bloodier business to attend to. But suppose for a moment that they were talking about formalism–in aesthetics in general, or about formalism in musicology, music theory, and composition in particular. What then might their words mean?