by Luke Leavitt (luleavitt@vassar.edu)
Hey Guys!
Alphabet Species is a conceptual art project borne from my father’s collaborations with other artists, including myself. Here is the homepage for Alphabet Species (one of many other projects you should feel to scope out at dagostinostudio.com)
http://www.dagostinostudio.com/daviddagostino/alphabet/alphabet.html
read the statement, then click on 4 Intermedia Diagrams, read that statement, then click on Oz-Oz-Opiads — this is the best example of the project (in fact it is the only fully complete diagram).
When reading Hank’s Chapter on Text and Textuality from his book Intertext I was struck by the overlap between Hank’s interrogations and my father’s, although the two come from different perspectives (linguistic-anthropology and conceptual Fluxus art, respectively). Specifically, both projects raise the question of text, broadly defined as some sort of communication. What is text? How do we know where it begins and ends? Like a lot of art, I think it is fair to say that Alphabet Species seeks to raise questions in a creative way, rather than provide some sort of answer to these sorts of questions. So what does it make you think, in relation to what Hanks has to say in his chapter?
Here are some ponderings of mine. Hanks says that “text can be taken (heuristically) to designate any configuration of signs that is coherently interpretable by some community of users” (165). So first off, is Oz-Oz-Opiads a text by this definition? What role does interpretation play in making Oz-Oz-Opiads a text or not?
Hanks also says that at first glance, textuality is the “quality of coherence or connectivity that characterizes text” (166). Do you recognize any sort of coherency in Oz-Oz-Opiads that might give it textuality? Or is it simply a “text without textuality” (168)? — perhaps a text-work in a genre that inherently lacks cohesion?
Part of the ambiguity in defining text is that interpretation may vary considerably, but is an important factor in “concretizing” a text (ala Ingarden) in a social context. How does Oz-Oz-Opiads bring to the surface (or not) the role of social setting and interpretation in its creation? Interesting to note is that Oz-Oz-Opiads internalizes “reception into the production process itself… dialogizing authorship” (180).
Finally, Hanks says that “even though any strip of text can be multiply interpreted (through alternative centerings) [which might be one interpreted goal of Oz-Oz-Opiads], the range of possibilities is never open-ended in the real social world. Rather, it is partly inscribed in textual form, and partly contested by actors (which may be more or less than individuals).” How might Oz-Oz-Opiads confirm or challenge this? Could the diagram potentially go on forever or not? And what is its central “text” anyways? Is it the original visual poem? What exactly am I interpreting when I create both the Visual Poem Sound Composition and the Composition Manuscript? I am simply interpreting an interpretant (ala Peirce), or am I somehow interpreting some sort of semi-distinct, semi-unitary “text” or “piece of art” that exists nebulously under the title, Oz-Oz-Opiads?
When I heard the raw recording it sounded bizarre to me, but when I heard the vocals mixed with sound my understanding of it changed completely. Without the music the vocalization was in the context of language, and so it made no sense to me: its destruction or deconstruction of syntax felt almost disturbing. When it was overlayed with music though,it seemed to make sense as an abstract piece of art. In that context, I was able to gain some insight into why, as art, it was intended to be interpreted. The change of setting allowed for a different interpretation.
In these pieces, I was struck by the use of text and sound within them. The text plays a defining role, as explored by the artist. There is no denying the inherent textuality that dominates any piece, seeking meaning from the text first as it carries so much weight for us normally. This could be brought to Chandler’s view of a myth, now possibly a myth of language and its communicative power. The letters are scrambled as we desperately search for textual implications that will be revealing to the piece as a whole. Can all text carry such textuality? This text doesn’t seem to reveal any distinct qualities to the viewer, but rather brings it into dialogue with language as a system and the symbolic implications of it.
By Hanks’ definition, I see Oz-Oz-Opiads as a type of text. It is a configuration of signs, and most of it is left up to our interpretation. I think I’m so resigned to associating texts with actuals textuality, that it’s hard to accept this art as text.
I would like to add that this is very confusing for me, and after discussion in class I would like to comment further.
I don’t think that any text can be without textuality ( the “quality of coherence or connectivity that characterizes text”) when interpreted by the human mind, and that Oz-Oz-Opiads is a great example of this. We can’t look at the visual poem, with it’s accompanying auditory components, and be content to say, “This is a shape of a bear and some sticks and some letters with a song and raw recording and they are all together, but they have nothing to do with each other.” Once we see something like this as a single text, we believe it has coherence. We connect the bear to the men with guns and the stripes because we already believe they have something in common, even if we can’t articulate that.
Consider if I were to say “The married bachelor”. The words “married” and “bachelor”, when separated, are as incoherent as it gets. But when I join them and you see them in a phrase together, you probably nod your head and are willing to acknowledge “The married bachelor” as a meaningful phrase.
I’m going to have to disagree with Genevieve: I had a professor here, with whom I agree, tell my class once that, in a very loose sense, “Art is anything that can be interpreted.” What do we interpret in the world around us? Symbols. Even if you don’t quite get the metaphors in a book you are reading because they happen to be either willfully obscure or nonsense, the fact remains that you have a particular interpretation of the passages of such metaphors, interpretations which go towards making up the entirety that is a reading community.
Luke mentioned in the post that, “Interesting to note is that Oz-Oz-Opiads internalizes ‘reception into the production process itself… dialogizing authorship'”. This brings to mind the post-structuralist Stanley Fish and his discussion of reading communities: he wrote that if texts are not static monoliths which have only one impression to leave upon all readers, then the meaning of the text must be determined by the reading community. For Fish, any type of text open to interpretation was intimately connected to language. Reading communities are composed of all readers of a particular work (and by particular work, I do not mean story, which may be translated or abridged to suit the needs of its audience. I mean a text with a particular pre-text, as Hanks would call it) within a particular time, setting, etc. The real basis on which a literary community was formed was language: people within a specific language create a singular work based upon their ability to demarcate it through shared language and experience.
Hence, the reason that Kruchenykh or Duchamp or Joan Miro or John Barth or something as ingrained into modern Western consciousness as The Bible, no matter how linear the plot or plausible the characters, all commonly exist within a culture and can said to be art. We may not see anything in these works of art similar to what another given person sees, but as a reading community, we have a common language with a pre-determined set of criterion for interpretation.
I have to say that I think Oz-Oz-Ozpiads should not be considered a text under Hanks’ definition. While it is certainly a configuration of signs, I would not agree that it is “coherently interpretable”, and I think that’s a big part of the POINT for art like this. No two viewers will get exactly the same interpretation of the piece, even if they have similar backgrounds and tastes; for that matter, a single viewer may experience the piece differently if he observes it more than once, at different times. Of course, the same can be said for more traditional-seeming “texts”, like the futurist poetry mentioned above. On the other hand, where would we place certain other forms of “art”, like comic books or film, which typically carry out a very clear, linear narrative? Things like that certainly fall under Hanks’ definition of a text. Perhaps we need a new method of categorizing “text” and “art” (which are currently indexed in the common parlance as “things with words” and “things with images”) that more specifically addresses the purpose of the piece–does it consist of a single, directed message for the audience, or does it rely wholly on the audience’s varied interpretations? This is still a fuzzy distinction to make, but at least it provides some deeper context for the origin of the work.
This is of course all dependent on whether others agree that it’s not enough to demonstrate EITHER “a configuration of symbols” or “coherent interpretability” in order to qualify for Hank’s definition of “text”, but that the object must adhere to BOTH. Probably I am far too literal in my applications of many terms. And of course, there’s the matter of whether it’s possible to define a measurable amount of interpretability in anything. For example, using again the poem above: I can read the Russian phonemes and pronounce them aloud, even if I can’t understand them and even if they have no fixed meaning for me to discover. I can read a book steeped in allegory, but if I don’t know it’s a metaphor or don’t know the references, I won’t get the author’s full intent–but I still read the book and got an interesting story out of it.
Clearly I’m rambling at this point, but asking me about modern art is just the same as opening up a huge can of worms with labels like “meaning”, “interpretation”, and “what is art?”. And all the worms are tied together with granny knots. And they’re all the same worm.
The concept of coherence and cohesion is quite malleable in relation to forms such as FluxArt. Hanks gives one example of cohesion as “distinguishing text from an undisclosed array of other nontextual or anti-textual phenomena such as the senseless cacophony of a crowded street (as opposed to the senseful exchange of mutually oriented interactants).” (165) What then, do we make of situationist music, which is composed of recording and mixing street scenes? Can we enjoy noise for the pleasure of noise, and if the “cohesiveness” that we perceive in a nonsensical structure is self-imposed and completely arbitrary, then does a “text” still have a cohesive “textuality?”
The solution to this dilemma may lie in perceiving mediums as being constructed in layers, and not assuming that the recipient perceives a just single dimension of the piece. For example, in Oz-Oz-Opiads, one may listen to the narration, the underlying rhythmic syllables, the music—we do not intake the medium as a “sound” but “sounds,” complicated further by the image superimposed over the recording. Perhaps it is our own interior restructuring of these elements that lead to differential levels of cohesion.
Oz-Oz-Opiads reminded me of the work of Alexei Kruchenykh, a member of a Russian avant-garde (specifically, futurist) group during the early twentieth-century. One of his most famous projects was an amalgamation of poems composed of sounds and fragments rather than words known to the Russian language. Here is one of such poems, titled “Zaum,” in its transliteration:
Dyr bul shchyl
ubeshchur
skum
vy so bu
r l ez
These futurist experiments led to the development of Dadaist and surrealist moments by making us question what makes sense to us and why? Such movements were especially crucial in the wake of WWI where survivors were left stunned in the wake of a “senseless” slaughter. But the query remains the same for any media to this day: where and why do we get the sensation of cohesion?
Fluxus art offers a unique example of text in that it pulls from different media sources to subvert traditional conceptions of “meaning.” Art very often challenges its viewer to create meaning and interpretation; the viewer obviously draws from personal background and experiences in order to imbue the piece with signification. Each layer of media facilitates added meaning, and I think that though Oz-Oz-Opiads purportedly lacks cohesion, the interpenetration of media forms manifests as an intentional process and project. The compositional units are interconnected by a “flow” that is characteristic to this type of art, reminiscent of the stream of consciousness style. In this way, Oz-Oz-Opiads conforms to Hanks’s idea of text, despite the appearance of randomness and senselessness.
Hanks says, “The constellation of consequences and outcomes of producing, distributing, or receiving a text, whether intended and foreseen or not, might be thought of as an ‘after-text.’ The precise semantic shading and extension of the term ‘text’ changes, depending upon which portions of this range of concepts one chooses to include” (166). “Text” is flexible, and Oz-Oz-Opiads as text indeed provokes an array of consequential “after-texts,” as the viewer assigns a personal interpretation.
By Hanks’s definition, I think that Oz-Oz-Opiads is a text. It is a configuration of signs, even though they are not linguistic signs. I think that regardless of interpretation, Oz-Oz-Opiads is a text because it is always a configuration of signs. I do think, however, that different interpretations can change what kind of text we perceive it as. (For example, different interpretations could lead us to perceive it as a primarily visual text or a primarily auditory text.)
I think that there is definitely a certain amount of textuality in Oz-Oz-Opiads, but the degree of textually and cohesion depends on the interpretation. Because all of the elements are combined into one visual poem, the different elements should work together to form a cohesive text. The visual poem (images), raw recording, and sound composition, among other parts, are likely to reinforce each other and bring out the meaning of the poem. Thus, it is a cohesive text, but some interpreters may believe it to be more cohesive than others.
Because Oz-Oz-Opiads can be interpreted in so many different ways, setting and context probably have a large influence on interpretation. Some factors that could influence interpretation are the location of the visual poem, the mood of the interpreter, and the base knowledge of the interpreter. Thus, indexicality and context must be addressed when interpreting Oz-Oz-Opiads.