Kathy Acker as Conceptual Artist: In Memoriam to Identity and "Working Past Failure"
2013; University of Arkansas Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2374-6629
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
Resumo1. Plagiarism: Task Work and Conceptual Art I grew up basically in conceptual part of world, and 1 was trained to think about writing in a certain way. You have an intention, then you set up experiment, you go ahead and do experiment as you set it up, and anything that's outside that experiment detracts from what you're doing. The experiment was never about, say, good writing. --Kathy Acker, Body Bildung One of Kathy Acker's narrative methodologies was borrowing and rewriting lines from other authors' texts. Her plagiarisms are announced in titles of some of her novels, namely Great Expectations and Don Quixote, or else made obvious in book blurbs, textual notes, or citations of authors' names. Acker acknowledged that Sherrie Levine's photographs of illustrations in books inspired her appropriation fiction (Conversation 13; Path 29). (1) Yet her conversations with artists and scholars such as Sylvere Lotringer, Larry McCaffrey, and Lawrence A. Rickels suggest that her interest in conceptual extends beyond Levine. She mentioned by name Dan Graham, Joseph Kosuth, and Sol LeWitt and revealed that latter was an early patron (Devoured 9). (2) In epigraph quoted above, Acker explained how writing novels as she did can be a type of conceptual art. LeWitt's austere, mathematical gallery artworks hardly resemble Acker's sexually explicit punk narratives, but two shared a common approach to creation. [A]ll of planning and decisions are made beforehand so that the execution is a perfunctory affair (LeWitt 12). Acker and LeWitt privilege and activity that generates work over resulting object (or text, in Acker's case). Lucy Lippard and John Chandler called this dematerialization of art in a famous essay of same name published in 1968. Terry Atkinson, an English conceptual artist, claimed in response to Lippard and Chandler that object was but a necessary by-product, borne of the need to record idea (54). Scholars today continue to call attention to this basic attribute of conceptual art. Art historian Johanna Drucker writes that for conceptual artists form makes into something specific, a work, an image, and a material locus that sustains a contradiction: work is and is not idea (256). This article examines a similar paradox inherent in Acker's plagiarisms. She makes it obvious that she draws from certain sources so that readers regard intention to copy as an artistic decision. The actual experience of reading her novels, though, does not line up with concept behind her work, because she disregarded expectation that literary borrowing ought to be purposeful and transformative, as it is in allusion, parody, or satire. This article explores conceptual theories as a means of understanding Kathy Acker's narrative aesthetic. (LeWitt and Lippard are important touchstones, since they are major figures invested in philosophies behind conceptual from its very beginning in 1960s. The article does not give particular attention to individual artists or works, or many varieties of this kind of art. (3)) Recently Acker has found a place among postmodern authors known for formal experiments (i.e., Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith's Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing and Le Figues Press's collection I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women). This essay also aims to add to small but growing body of scholarship on conceptual writing, which thus far has emphasized poetry and poetics, by exploring intersections of conceptual and narrative. Although plagiarism and especially her rewriting of Arthur Rimbaud and William Faulkner in In Memoriam to Identity (1990) are focus of this study, over her career Acker adopted several creative techniques and implemented more than one at same time. Conceptual is not a more primary influence for Acker than, say, Black Mountain Poets' ideas about poetic language or cut-ups and fold-ins of William Burroughs. …
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