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"We thrive in the cracks of society, We, the Artists. We have never quite fit in to anywhere ‘solid’ really- schools, churches, nine to fives- we are too restless you see, too electric." Kevin Tole reviews David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress in the style of the book.
Plus poetry from Susan Taylor, Barbara Anna Gaiardoni, Stephan Delbos, and Marieta Maglas.
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Sarah Mayo in the spotlight discussing being an 'insider-outsider'.
Feature column from Kenwood Blenderhand 'The Age of the Screen', plus more special content released throughout the month of April.
Photograph 'Do Not Hang' by Thom Boulton |
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Kevin Tole
Published in 1998, Markson went through 54 rejections before he found a publisher…. Allegedly. The double meaning of some phrases or words. When two letters are sometimes typeset so close together that they can come to resemble a third letter and so the meaning of a word or phrase changes. In my copy of the Dalkey Archive edition, ‘things burn’ appears to become ‘things bum’. But then of course it might simply be my own deteriorating eyesight. Words that are similar but mean completely different things, let alone any dissimilarity or differences in meaning across language and culture. Symbolically similar words but conceptually totally divergent. Letters are symbols standing in for universally established meaning. Is that meaning established by rules? We can only play chess by knowledge of the rules of chess. We can play a game which uses a chessboard and chessmen with any rules, or rules that may change throughout the game. But that game would not be chess. WELFARE CONCEPT WARFARE CONCEIT Memory and forgetting. Those that are deliberate actions and those that are natural or chance aberrations of time. Like ‘time out of mind’ – time when the person was out of their mind, mad - OR – time when the subject was not in the mind, when the thing was unknown or forgotten or deliberately put out of the mind. The subject and object of a phrase may change the meaning of the phrase completely. MEANING. We remember music, as non-musicians, by symbolic notation or external manifestations – recordings. As such music itself is the most ephemeral of the Arts. It is performed and experienced at that time. Any music of any kind that comes into our heads (what does that mean) is the version of that music which we were and are most familiar with. Sequence – referring back; how far back? To the last statement? To the last congruent statement. We make an implied sense based upon what we feel should be the sense. Does a particular juxtaposition of statements make sense? Do we compare it with pre-set, pre-cognised paradigms which we have already established and hold? I turned over two pages of Markson together by accident and continued reading. It made no difference. A painting of an object is not the object itself but a depiction of the object. It is another object, a depiction of an object which itself becomes another separate object. ‘To allow oneself to consider’ – i.e. It is not just the external reality; it is the interaction between the outside external object and perception of the external object that forms the image. The OBJECT and the NAME. I saw. I believed I saw. We are dealing with the phenomenology of perception. Accidental and Deliberate. Men are all bastards. What one really wishes is that Virginia Woolf had written something creative in the style of a lingerie catalogue. There are other versions of course, such as Tintoretto’s treatise on brassiere construction. He called it ‘The Origin of the Milky Way’ in fact. It stands at the opposite end of the gallery from Titian’s work on the off-the-shoulder three-piece toga which he called ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’. It has an ultramarine sky made from the pigment derived from lapis lazuli which probably came from Afghanistan. Lapis means ‘stone’. Lazuli has a more twisted derivation but is generally taken to mean ‘of the sky’. Hence Titian painted the sky with stone of the sky. Accoutrements / Baggage. Acquisitions which move from being benefits and useful to being superfluous and burdensome. Value is not inherent. MEANING. Is meaning inherent? We know that meaning may simply be temporal, an understanding, a cognisance which pertains to something at that time but which may not be persistent. Where does meaning reside? Can we objectify meaning? I once ate four boiled eggs to see what it felt like. It was not a good idea. TRUTH. May be temporal or positional, may reside in a time and place. Truth is not absolute but is predicated. The imprecision of language. The precision of linguistics. What am I trying to say, to get across what I mean. “Now the ladies of the harem of the court of King Caractacus… were just passing by. Altogether now!” “If the painter had closed her eyes, or had simply refused to look, would the person still have been at the window?” (p. 53). Oh blah-dee-bloody-blah. Here we are back at that old hoary chestnut of ‘if a tree falls in a forest and there is no one around to see it, does it make a sound’ metaphysical bollocks. It all depends on definitions, Watson. So he had it rejected 54 times by various publishers? And you can see why. Debar yourself from the intellectual shenanigans that the work has acquired and to Markson himself and you get back to the oh-so-familiar stream of verbiage you’ve heard so many times darn the sad cafe of performance artists. And then it drops into the familiar ground that I remember well, of Tacita at Falmouth and her BA show, all stretched latex sheets and charcoal text about Greece, pre-menstrual fluids and vulva geography. And yes…. it got a first, of course. That’s the kind of thing they want to see in the contemporary world of art education. The book ‘Great Bus Journeys Of The World' was written by Alexei Sayle, by the way. Ethics; Guilt; Responsibility. By 60 pages in it has become faintly risible and I find myself composing my own Markson-esque epigrammatic sentences to sit opposite his. Some of these appear here. What was definitely not written by Friedrich Nietzsche was ‘It’s all bollocks, chickadee.’ I am equally convinced that had he written that I would have noticed it. But I know that he did not because it was spoken to me on the stage of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden during the scene change between Acts 1 and 2 of ‘Die Frau ohne Schatten’. I once saw Zizi Jeanmaire dance on that stage. Nietzsche had a big moustache, certainly in every painting I’ve seen of him. Of course all the painters could have been lying. There is a big difference between the art work and the work of art. Derek and Clive. The Two Ronnies. I sometimes laugh so much when I am reading something that I cannot finish what I am reading. It causes me so much merriment that I have to stop. Mark E. Smith. ‘I’ll see the manager.’ ‘Terminal Boredom’. That’s what John Lydon says at the close to track 1 from the first of the Public Image Ltd albums. Whether he is terminally bored with the recording process or the product or it is just a general statement about life is open to question. It can hardly be the second part as ‘First Issue’ is in many ways groundbreaking. Did I mention that it’s all bollocks, chickadee? I feel sure I must have, but that is perhaps beside the point. One of the popes made people bum most of what Virginia Woolf did write. Of course, that may have been ‘burn’. But who really knows? The houses that I have lived in throughout my life all still exist. I cannot, however, say that that is verifiably true because I have never revisited all of them. In fact, I know for certain that one of them does not exist any longer because the rooming house where my parents lived at the time I was born and which I spent my early years in and of which I remember nothing was demolished to make way for a series of blocks of flats. I do not sign or date my own artwork. Sometimes I initial it. So is this a work of fiction? And by ‘this’ I might mean either this review which I am writing here at this table but not with a typewriter, or the book by David Markson entitled ‘Wittgenstein’s Mistress’. Is fiction a series of epigrams which may or may not be true? If I recuse myself from this whole process, does the writing stop? Richard Long, whilst walking in circles on Dartmoor, once said, ‘It’s all bollocks, chickadee’. Or rather it may have been when he was walking in straight lines in the Himalayas. On the other hand he may not have. Done or said. And then again only he experienced this psychodrama and all we have to go on is a series of maps and photographs. To say the experience was somewhat solipsistic is stating a fact. As such, can his work be considered art? Andy Galsworthy would, of course, not have stuck his neck out so far in such an outré a manner, being concerned with both the concrete and the ephemeral and the intertwining between them in the short time that his works are in existence. More metaphysical bollocks. Peter Ustinov stole the whole film in ‘Spartacus’. Actually, he didn’t steal the film. The No. 1 Bus from Bermondsey does not stop at Highbury Corner. It is in fact a song by Nuru Kane. It is perhaps the best song that I have ever heard about a bus. Tim said that to me several years ago now, but it is still true. I still don’t understand what she was on about connecting Greece and menstrual fluid. Later she did a work called ’Majesty’ where she photographed the Majesty Oak in Kent, blew up the photograph enormously and then carefully painted out all the background stroke by stroke. It is very hard to walk in straight lines in the Himalayas. But it is easy to walk in circles on Dartmoor. When I was younger there was a time when I used to think I was turning into a woman. My nose would periodically run and sometimes bleed fairly regularly. Over the years this became more erratic till it finally stopped. Maybe I am nasally menopausal and what I was experiencing was a peri-menopausal phenomenon. I used to like swimming in the sea also. I once discovered that for some reason, in a little town on the coast of Japan, there were hundreds of old postcards of the forest at Fontainebleau. Maybe I just read that somewhere, possibly in a footnote which I never read. Or I wait till I have finished the text then go back and read the prologue, footnotes and epilogue. I have been to the forest of Fontainebleau. There is a camp site there. And a lake. It was there that I first saw an otter. Or my young mind assumed it was an otter. Not one otter but three all swimming together in the same direction. But now heavens Kirsten Flagstad does not produce a very wonderful version of Richard Strauss’ ‘Four Last Songs’. The only version of this work worth listening to is the performance by Jessye Norman. I believe that Jessye Norman had carte blanche to sing any part of the Strauss repertoire at any time without having to seek consent or pay royalties. The ‘Four Last Songs’ were indeed the last four songs Richard Strauss composed before dying. He finished them before passing away. Unlike Giacomo Puccini who died before completing Act 3 of Turandot. Although most of the act had been sketched out it was left to one of his pupils to complete the composition. Well, doubtless I have merely assumed it was unnecessary to mention that the sea was generally cold when I was swimming in it. But to me it felt OK and the more one swam, the warmer it appeared to become. This may be because I was experiencing hot flushes Above where I used to swim in the sea there was a small café come bar which was pleasant to sit in after a dip in the sea. A woman who I greatly admired used to sit opposite me. It didn’t last and I endured much anxiety and depression for a long time afterwards. It was time out of mind. I believe I saw what I wanted to believe. In the end I wished her all the same pain she had inflicted upon me. Not that it would at all have mattered as she cut all contact at a very early stage which was part of the problem. I do not swim in the sea now and I avoid going through certain areas and to certain places. I have always wanted to make a work called ‘Inferiority’ where I would take a photograph of the Majesty Oak, a 1400-year oak in Kent, blow up the photograph to a ridiculous size and then carefully paint out the oak tree with white gouache stroke by stroke to leave the background alone. It wouldn’t sell and would be hard to exhibit let alone mount. Markson is like someone semi-randomly with a semi-researched aim wading through Wikipedia. It is more enjoyable to write in that style than read in it. As such he must have had a hoot writing his work that was rejected 54 times. As indeed I have had cobbling together this pastiche which may or may not be true, doubtless to say. The Descent from the Cross is a stunning mid-15th century painting in the Prado. There are ten figures in it. I have no knowledge of whether there are windows opposite the painting in the gallery or whether they are washed or unwashed, but given the value of the painting and its age, it is highly unlikely that there are any windows opposite it in any case. So the matter is totally superfluous. I have just knocked over a glass of wine which of course flew across the book I was reading. Forevermore my copy of ‘Wittgenstein’s Mistress’ will be wrinkled at the edges, slightly stained and redolent of Primitivo from Puglia. And I was exactly half way through the book Maybe it was the sea air that contributed to the abuse she heaped on me. Or maybe it was just the peri-menopause. Maybe it was only the sea air that contributed to her deterioration. Not that it was her deterioration but rather the deterioration in the relationship that I thought I had with her. Or maybe it was her divorce or her children leaving the nest and failing or even not wanting to keep in contact or maybe it was her failed PhD, not that she failed to attain the doctorate just that her thesis proved to be a big negative and a dead end, or her growing sense of disillusion with her own goals and aims, not that I now believe she ever knew what she wanted in any case. I find it difficult now to feel enraptured, though seeing reproductions of paintings like ‘The Descent from the Cross’ still gives me hope. I once drank lager stained with green gouache. It was an art school St Patrick’s Day jaunt. I remember the lager as tasting vaguely eggy. Not as eggy though as eating four boiled eggs consecutively. The wine staining has left an irrationally shaped edge bleeding through each page of the book. It is not really ‘irrational’, just irregular and there is a relationship between the shape on one page and the subsequent shape on the next page as well as the shape on the preceding page. It makes for an interesting flicker book. I may apply for an Arts Council grant to develop this idea. Philosophical insight or intellectual narcissism? It becomes more obsessive, more manic in an authorially methodological manner. It's a descent into madness over 230 pages proven in the last 15. And I begin to recognise my somewhat mad repeated writings to the woman that sat opposite me that could never be sent and the truth in them is my truth at the time of writing them; my understanding of what I saw at that time in that state, as real then as they are unreal now. Truth. Layers within layers. It’s all bollocks, chickadee. And the Afterword by David Foster Wallace? He cannot bear to not be the centre of attention and show off his intellectual pretensions which are as big as the planet. An arse of a novelist content to hear his own voice. It is not enough to be simple and straightforward for him. He must use and reuse words, change meanings readapt and invent words. But in doing so unexpected things emerge. i.e. the curator (who has become more important than the artist) used to be someone that grouped and hung work; NOW their purpose is “to give meaning; to impose order, the synecdochic of the life of the solipsist”. Through that, and the self-defined importance of the curator, all contemporary art becomes narcissistic. DFW is part of that narcissism. And his analysis of feminism is the usual middle-class male guilt in the face of someone else’s empowerment that we have come to expect. And of which there is little need. Philosophical treatise? Narcissistic self-stroking whine? Example of the atomism of modern life? A “flawed moving meditation on loneliness, language and gender?” Probably all of them. That’s all we’ve got time for, so it’s ‘goodnight’ from me. And it’s ‘goodnight’ from him.
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