Thursday, September 03, 2009

Uncomfortable Proximity

Hollis Frampton describes his work Poetic Justice as uncomfortable because it doesn't move.

But it does move. It's the camera that is stuck in the past.

Here is where writing asserts its energy as innovative engine of screen play. Maybe that's what he means by "poetic justice":


In a letter to my former senior colleague, the late Stan Brakhage, Frampton writes:
Decades ago, Ezra Pound wrote that the most intense criticism is in new composition.
Does this mean that only by innovating new forms of critico-artistic expression can we even begin to experience the intensity of revaluing all values?

Frampton the intermedia film artist, like Allen Ginsberg before him, went out of his way to go visit / spend time with Pound at the end of his life. Pound, despite all of his personal setbacks, knew what it meant to be the artist-medium whose generative practice and dictum was to always "make it new," that is to say, to make news that stays news since "the artist is always beginning" and the creative process does not "live in a vacuum."

"Any work of art which is not a beginning," wrote Pound, "an invention, a discovery, is of little worth."

As far as I can tell, and tell it I will, the writer as artist-medium is a novelty-generator operating in auto-affect or auto-remix mode and, as such, is forever role-playing the next version of becoming each new beginning begets. Whether this means the writer approaches said auto-affect or auto-remix mode by way of a purely textual apparatus or not need not concern us since, unless you write by hand, each new composition is manifesting itself in digital writing space and this means it's always already network connected and socially co-dependent.


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