Raising Our Obsessions to the Level of Creation!

Of what I was able to discern from this dense reading, the general idea seems to be the departure of various art movements from adherence to traditional forms and their reasons for doing so. Specifically, Drucker addressed the need for an avant-garde to “[rescue ] poetic imagination […] from the dwelling effects of ordinary graphic and linguistic practices.” This process entails the creation of a figural or visual mode that is “radically anti-grammatical” and derives meaning not from traditional syntactic structures or cliché phrases , but rather by the arrangement of language to create a form “independent of the grammatical order of the words.” She mentions exhaustively the various figures in these different art movements that agreed on the importance of making art that was presentational rather than representational. I just took Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle out of the library last night (along with pretty much every book they have on FLUXUS, minus two that I had to order online because they are renewed until the end of the year*) and the idea that art should be a presentation rather than a representation is similar to how Debord describes a modern society in which genuine social life has been substituted with representation. This leads me to believe these avant-garde movements were seeking to create art (or non-art) that conveyed this realization about modern society, though this theory was published much later than a lot of the work Drucker discusses, most of it being much nearer to the early part of the twentieth century.

What I want to hold onto as I embark on my own projects is the idea of the image and the word as different orders of symbolic activity. Additionally, I want to apply that idea to the notion that each given medium “has its own particular effect on our impulses,” in order to create animated writing that make the most out of the possibilities of image and word in the framework of animation. Furthermore, I want to follow an idea about modern poetry Drucker sums up succinctly in the text: as not lacking government, but being governed from within. I want to create pieces that work, but work in their own way and according to their own internal logic…hopefully, a logic that is new and refreshing and engages the reader/viewer.

*I'm planning on researching FLUXUS for my independent research project.