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TWO EQUAL TEXTS
1.
THIS TEXT AND THE ONE BESIDE IT ARE EQUAL. I WROTE THIS ONE FIRST, AND THEN I GAVE IT TO MY FRIEND CHRISTIAN BOK AND ASKED HIM TO GENERATE A NEW TEXT USING EVERY LETTER AND EVERY PUNCTUATION MARK THAT I USED IN MINE. THE OTHER TEXT IS HIS.
2.
MICAH LEXIER REQUESTED IN ADVANCE THAT I REINVENT HIS TEXT. SO I UNKNOTTED IT AND REKNITTED IT INTO THIS VERY FORM, BUT THEN I BEGAN TO THINK THAT HIS MESSAGE HAD ALREADY RESEWN A TOUTED ART OF GENUINE POETRY. HIS EERIE TEXT WAS MINE.
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Micah Lexier (a renowned, Canadian sculptor who works out of New York City) has so far produced an almost poetic oeuvre of minimalist, conceptual artworks, many of which suggest that artistic creation itself has lately become so abstract in its premises that artists no longer have to fashion a “thing” for observation so long as they perform some “drama” of measurement, analyzing themselves in the very acts of such analysis….
As part of a retrospective about his career, Lexier invited me to collaborate on this piece, “Two Equal Texts,” for display in the windows of the bookstore Printed Matter Inc. in New York City. He later remounted this work at MKG 127, a gallery in the artistic district of Toronto, where the work caught the interest of the local media for the month of its exhibition. He is now hoping that we can produce a variant edition that begins “This text and the one on the other side are equal” so that he can exploit the characteristics of other kinds of surfaces….
For me, every anagram underlines the degree to which language, in advance, has already anticipated, if not inventoried, the alphabetical permutations of our own thoughts—and even this sublime concept already exists somewhere else, written on another page and spoken by another voice. As Borges writes: “to speak is to fall into tautologies”—and “the certainty that everything has been already written nullifies or makes phantoms of us all….”
This reminds me of a notion that lodged in my memory from a book review i read: if the universe is infinite in a particular mathematical sense, then any event with a probability greater than zero (the writing of this comment, the upcoming world series, the death of a pet hamster) is necessarily being reproduced infinitely, somewhere.