Artists Among Poets - Conceptual Art

What is Flarf poetry? - Wikipedia

Flarf poetry can be characterized as an avant garde poetry movement of the late 20th century and the early 21st century. Its first practitioners utilized an aesthetic dedicated to the exploration of “the inappropriate” in all of its guises. Their method was to mine the Internet with odd search terms then distill the results into often hilarious and sometimes disturbing poems, plays, and other texts.

It is precisely, however, to the degree that Flarf does something new performatively and with its use of the detritus of popular cultural and the internet, treading the high/low distinction until it breaks under the weight, that it reinvents the avant-garde. In a larger aesthetic economy, it seems, "the truth will out." Flarf's recent productivity shows how the injunction against the sentence, paragraph, narrative, and even discourse from some sectors of the Language school intersects with actual conditions of language use. Any such thing as stylistic norms in the avant-garde must inevitably intersect with "life."

Q: What is conceptual poetry? –Frances Sjoberg

Charles Bernstein: Poetry pregnant with thought.

Kenneth Goldsmith: Conceptual writing obstinately makes no claims on originality. On the contrary, it employs intentionally self and ego effacing tactics using uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts; information management, word processing, databasing, and extreme process as its methodologies; and boredom, valuelessness, and nutritionlessness as its ethos. Language as material, language as process, language as something to be shoveled into a machine and spread across pages, only to be discarded and recycled once again. Language as junk, language as detritus. Nutritionless language, meaningless language, unloved language, entartete sprache, everyday speech, illegibility, unreadability, machinistic repetition. Obsessive archiving & cataloging, the debased language of media & advertising; language more concerned with quantity than quality. How much did you say that paragraph weighed?

Susan Howe. I don't know what conceptual poetry is. Maybe I will find the answer in Tucson.

Christian Bök: Recent trends in technologies of communication (such as digitized sampling and networked exchange) have already begun to subvert the romantic
bastions of "creativity" and "authorship," calling into question the propriety of copyright through strategies of plagiaristic appropriation, computerized reduplication, and programmatic collaboration. Such developments have caused poets to theorize an innovative aesthetics of "conceptual literature" that has begun to question, if not to abandon, the lyrical mandate of originality in order to explore the potentials of the
"uncreative" be it automatic, mannerist, aleatoric, or readymade, in its literary practice. Some of the modernist notions of the both accidental and the procedural have begun increasingly to inform the current writing, by poets who find inspiration in the principles of conceptual art. Such poets have begun to use stolen texts, random words, forced rules, boring ideas, and even cyborg tools, in order to mobilize a variety of anti-expressive, anti-discursive strategies that erase any idiosyncratic demonstration of "lyric style." Such activity has become one of the most radical, if not one of the most popular, limit-cases of the avant-garde at the advent of the millennium.

Our immersive digital environment demands new responses from writers. What does it mean to be a poet in the Internet age? These two movements, Flarf and Conceptual Writing, each of which formed over the past five years, are direct investigations to that end. And as different as they are, they have surprisingly come up with a set of similar solutions.

Identity, for one, is up for grabs. Why use your own words when you can express yourself just as well by using someone else’s? And if your identity is not your own, then sincerity must be tossed out as well.

Materiality, too, comes to the fore: the quantity of words seems to have more bearing on a poem than what they mean. Disposability, fluidity, and recycling: there’s a sense that these words aren’t meant for forever. Today they’re glued to a page but tomorrow they could re-emerge as a Facebook meme.

Fusing the avant-garde impulses of the last century with the technologies of the present, these strategies propose an expanded field for twenty-first-century poetry. This new writing is not bound exclusively between pages of a book; it continually morphs from printed page to web page, from gallery space to science lab, from social spaces of poetry readings to social spaces of blogs. It is a poetics of flux, celebrating instability and uncertainty.

Yet for as much as the two movements have in common, they are very different. Unlike Conceptual Writing, where procedure may have as much to do with meaning as the form and content, Flarf is quasi-procedural and improvisatory. Many of the poems are “sculpted” from the results of Internet searches, often using words and phrases that the poet has gleaned from poems posted by other poets to the Flarflist e-mail listserv. By contrast Conceptual Writers try to emulate the workings and processes of the machine, feeling that the results will be good if the concept and execution of the poetic machine are good; there is no tolerance for improvisation or spontaneity.- Kenneth Goldsmith

Art as Concept

Joseph Kossuth states that art exists in the artist's ideas rather than in the object itself. However, Kossuth does address the paradox: as an artist, he is consigned to produce objects, and yet he develops objects that cast off their identities as things and become pure ideas.

In ‘one and three chairs’ (1965), he displayed a photograph of a chair, an actual chair, and a dictionary definition of the word ‘chair’. The piece distinguishes between the three aspects involved in the perception of a work of art: the visual representation of a thing (the photograph of the chair), its real referent (the actual chair), and its intellectual concept (the dictionary definition). reality, image, and concept: the three ‘sides’ of a perceived thing.

The Langauge Poets

The Language school of poetry started in the 1970s as a response to traditional American poetry and forms.

Rather than poetic voices, language poetry directs us to pay attention to the materials of language itself: the structures of sentences, the bits of expressive language we encounter in a day, the way our lives encounter multitudes of linguistic fragments that prompt unpredictable associations with other fragments. Language poetry thus involves a combination of using unusually familiar language for poetry such as bits of commercial writing one might encounter in contemporary life and making such language unfamiliar by taking away the connected, personal narratives that we often find even in contemporary poetry.

The Chief Architect of Conceptual Poetry

Kenneth Goldsmith attended the Rhode Island School of Design for sculpture and worked as a visual artist for about ten years before taking up conceptual poetry. He is perhaps best known for his work Day, in which he transcribed every word of a mundane day’s issue of the New York Times into a nine-hundred-page book. For his work “The Day,” he did the same exact task to the New York Times of September 11, 2001. Hence, even the innocuous news reports and weather are loaded with fact, fear, and emotion, making us aware that language is never simply an innocent carrier of meaning but is wildly variable depending upon context and framing.

Artists Among Poets - Conceptual Art

Rauschenberg erases De Kooning

Duchamp: my life as a work of art

Conceptual Poetry

What is Flarf poetry? - Wikipedia

For example, see

Flarf vs. Conceptual: Kenny Goldsmith intro

The Great Order of the Universe - Christian Bok

Q: What is conceptual poetry? –Frances Sjoberg

Cosumerism Critique - Barbara Kruger