Caroline Bergvall “Social Engagement of Writing”
(presented at Conceptual Poetry and Its Others Conference, University of Arizona, Tucson)
Caroline Bergvall spoke about several recent projects that correspond to the questions of bilingual awareness and conceptual structure. Her main points touched upon question of multiple languages: where and how does one write when one has not one language of origin, but several? What is the site of such practices, the site multiple forms and spaces of inscription? Bringing poetry through a combination of modes and histories. Some from visual arts, some literary, some sonic. Body representation as a space. Exploring the authored body, giving it signs, finding its signals. Verbal and libidinal. Restrictions and actions of social readings of bodily space on what one calls one’s own body. Body as marker of an extended authorial space: performances/sitework/soundwork. Space itself becomes a field of work, a local/e, precise with its own histories.
She discussed her multi-national — and hence multi-linguistic — background as a problematic situation of self-definition as an artist and how sending bios & summaries for shows and readings for her is a complex affair; the social and cultural difficulties in calling oneself a poet in the first place.
Bergvall said, “I am inclined to consider conceptualism not primarily along strict critical lines but rather in the open-ended, integrative and often conflicted and socially engaged approaches that have also defined conceptual arts practices… A conceptual writer or conceptual poet so defined has a stake in arts practice, as much as they have one in poetics. Or perhaps one could simply say, they have a stake in broader cultural practice, one in which verbal and non verbal inscriptive methods coexist and are coextensive.”
She concluded by showing extensive documentation of her sound and visual works which illustrated the above notions of the multi-lingual, mishearing, translation, and identity.
“[Conceptual writers or poets] have a stake in broader cultural practice, one in which verbal and non verbal inscriptive methods coexist and are coextensive.”
This kind of latinate foo-for-all is an attempt to put lipstick on an intellectual pig. (Or, to degenderize and coextend the contextualization of my metaphor, it seeks to slap an Armani suit on an conceptual swine.) The jargon-rich, self-congratulatory overestimation of their ideology is just one of the qualities that make con-writers so laughable. They offer process without content — and assert the value of this approach by denying the necessity of content.
Con-writers bring to mind the Bush aide who, as journalist Ron Suskind reported, told him that he (Suskind) was “in what we call the reality-based community”…
However these con-writers vote in the real world, assuming they bother to vote, they represent the dead-end crypto-fascist neo-conservative mindset that has wreaked havoc everywhere since the election of Ronald Reagan. They are free, of course, to refuse the responsibilities of the genuine artist, but it would be a great blessing if they did not continue to pretend that they have a stake in anything beyond their own immense narcissism.
Please, Joseph Hutchinson, enlighten us as to what “the responsibilities of the genuine artist” might be. And should I humbly let you decide which artists are genuine and which are not? Why? You sound quite smug in what you discount and discredit, which makes me think you’re less open than the conceptual poets and artists I heard speak at this symposium. That is, you seem to discount the work without looking carefully at it, because you don’t like the language that characterizes it. That’s just too easy. Engage, man, that’s our responsibility and your responsibility (I hope); and such engagement comes in lots of forms and manners, and coated in a lot of different sorts of language.