There are few different threads of ideas that I want to bring together in this post. Relating to the use of restrictions and rules in the creative process, and the use of language in art. Raw War, the title of a Bruce Nauman neon sculpture is a palindrome, a word or phrase that can be read in either direction. This form is not new, and a quick look at wikipedia will show that there are ancient examples in hebrew and latin from at least 79 A.D. The word is a combination of greek words for “again” and “way direction”. Palindromes are also used by the literary movement known as Oulipo, writers and mathematicians who use constrained writing techniques.
The nature of the phrase ‘raw war’ is that once read or heard, it sticks fast into the mind, the words become linked by their relationship, it seems that the two are now inseparable. When language is used in visual art then the form of the presentation of the words adds another layer to the potential meaning, or potentially undermines the meaning further. There are, I think, three ‘raw war’ pieces, the first, from 1968 is painted, and is a study for the second, a neon sculpture that lights the letters of the word ‘war’ first forwards, then backwards, to make the sequence ‘raw war’.
The third piece is a lithograph from 1972, in which the marks themselves are raw looking, and the words are layered in such away that the words appear unsettled, the two words are linked and unstable simultaneously.
Other examples of simple wordplay exploited by Nauman are ‘run from fear, fun from rear’, which is a spoonerism. Two consonants are switched to change the meaning, the dark humour of which relies on the relationship of the two meanings again. Another neon by Nauman is ‘La Brea/Art Tips/Rat Spit/Tar Pits’ 1972. There are six letters in ‘La Brea’, which is know for its tar pits, the letters of which are then reordered to make other words, a subtle relationship then develops between the four phrases. Another slight change is used in ‘Life Fly, Life Flies’, an etching from 1996.
The Oulipo group are known for using lipograms, in which the omission of a particular vowel is used as a constraint, A Void, Georges Perec, is a 300 page novel without the letter ‘e’. The inspiration for this feat may have been Gadsby: Champion of Youth, 1939, by Ernest Vincent Wright which is also a lipogram. Queneau’s Exercices de Style recounts the same inconsequential episode ninety-nine times, each in a unique way, to my mind this relates to the practive of drawing from life, in which an artist may make many studies of the same subject, all of which will be totally unique. Plaisirs singuliers by Harry Mathews describes 61 different scenes, each told in a different style, in which 61 different people masturbate. Subject matter aside, this again seems to relate more closely to the processes of a visual artist, making man similar studies and compositions, with only slight adjustments.
This use of rules in writing also brings to mind The Periodic Table, by Primo Levi. The book is made up of a set of stories and incidents, some autobiographical, some fictional, which correspond to each of the elements in the periodic table. The use of this device is not arbitrary however, Levi spent his life working as a chemist.
Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes, by Raymond Queneau, another member of Oulipo, contains 10 sonnets, each on a single page. Each page is split into 14 strips, one for each line. Due to the nature of permutations, this means that there are an effectively never-ending number of ways to read the poems (about 100 billion apparently).
The use of permutations is a key feature in the work of Sol Le Witt, in some of his wall drawings, such as Wall Drawing 413. In this piece four coloured squares are painted on a wall in all twenty four possible permutations, in another he represents all possible arrangements of a curve within a square applying certain geometrical rules.
Approaching something as subjective such as literature in an objective way is a technique also used by the artist Sam Winston, who gave a lecture at college on Friday. Among the various ways of working he employs, is the analysis of written language. For example, in his Darwin project he split the whole of ‘Origin of the Species into Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, and Others, using computer software. He then arranged the nouns in order of frequency to make list like ‘frequency poems’. Another project, ‘Romeo and Juliet’, takes a different approach. Here Winston divides the text of the play into three categories, relating to three emotional states, passion, rage and indifference. This method of selection closely relates to some of the projects I have been working on recently, and they reinforce to me the importance of developing a strategy that is then followed through to make the work.
[...] in question, are also relevant to my work and indeed there is an article about one of them on this blog, Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes by Raymond Queneau & Robert Massin, [...]