I was at Calgary’s Grand Theatre Saturday night (to see Quebec City’s excellent L’Orchestre L’Homme-Orchestra perform the music of Tom Waits) where Eric Sauvé has two chandeliers installed in permanent exhibition. These pieces were commissioned in response to The New Gallery‘s exhibition of Sauvé’s Yield while i was Administrative Director of the gallery. I had forgotten about his work, but this seems a good opportunity to post my explanatory note written for his 2006 Yield exhibition:

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From its origins in the medieval Catholic church, the chandelier has been a pointed marker of class & privilege. Through the 18th & 19th Centuries, with newer techniques of glass-making, the chandelier became increasingly aligned with the ruling & merchant classes, & continued to remain a classist signifier of wealth & power. The bourgeois decorated their houses—& found their way in the darkened rooms of their own homes—by the light of purchased, crafted, ornate, cut glass.

The chandelier, with the advent of electrical light, is increasingly an antiquated form of lighting, now even more associated with excess—even the very structure of classic chandeliers require reinforced (& higher) ceilings—necessitating specifically designed rooms to house these devices.

With Eric Sauvé’s Yield, we are no longer presented with a vision of privilege & safety; he has détourned the chandelier through a series of material & contextual interventions. Instead of finely cut glass shimmering safely above us, our heads are threatened by clusters of broken beer bottles emitting the vomitous-green glow of the evidence of an ideological bar-fight.

Hanging slightly too low for functionality & just above the height of injury, Yield disturbs the scale of the gallery space, making the viewer hideously aware of her own body; we move with a slight cringe through a space defined by the jagged edge of the proverbial glass-ceiling. Our own bodies betray our place as class interlopers—we do not belong around these structures. Their nauseous colouring belies the threatening fragility of emptied & shattered remains restructured as a momento mori—a reminder of the temporariness of celebration, uprising & insurrection.

These chandeliers reconfigure cultural & economic bottlenecks; for while the bottle’s necks themselves are intact, their bases are missing, no longer containing or restricting flow. The jagged edges of potential Molotov cocktails are hoisted to the ceiling in clusters hanging just beyond reach—suggesting both an ease of distribution, & a commemoration of the glassy-eyed stare of excess.

Sauvé gathers our refuse, our garbage—these broken beer bottles—& presents them as a threatening reminder of their previous function. Sauvé’s Yield is as much as a silent, illuminating symbol of the power of class as the traditional chandelier is. The reference here, however, is not to the hand that cut the fine crystal glass, but rather to the hand that gripped the bottle by the neck.

What once held ales, liquors — the very spirit of classist debauchery & celebration—are now raised to the ceiling (mimicking the bottles being raised in a toast) & hanged in a glorious, eerie revolt.

Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith’s monumental anthology

Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing

has just been published by Northwestern University Press.

In much the same way that photography forced painting to move in new directions, the advent of the World Wide Web, with its proliferation of easily transferable and manipulated text, forces us to think about writing, creativity, and the materiality of language in new ways.

In Against Expression, editors Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith present the most innovative works responding to the challenges posed by these developments. Charles Bernstein has described conceptual poetry as “poetry pregnant with thought.” Against Expression, the premier anthology of conceptual writing, presents work that is by turns thoughtful, funny, provocative, and disturbing.

Dworkin and Goldsmith, two of the leading spokespersons and practitioners of conceptual writing, chart the trajectory of the conceptual aesthetic from early precursors including Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp to the most prominent of today’s writers. Nearly all of the major avant-garde groups of the past century are represented here, including Dada, OuLiPo, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and Flarf to name just a few, but all the writers are united in their imaginative appropriation of found and generated texts and their exploration of nonexpressive language. Against Expression is a timely collection and an invaluable resource for readers and writers alike.

I am honoured to have contributed the cover image (from Local Colour) and an excerpt from Flatland to this collection.

But words are neither significant nor experimental. They are, quite simply. That, in any case, is the most remarkable thing about them. And suddenly the obviousness of this strikes us with irresistible force. All at once the whole splendid construction collapses; opening our eyes unexpectedly, we have experienced, once too often, the shock of this stubborn reality we were pretending to have mastered. Around us, words are there. Their surfaces are distinct and smooth, intact, neither suspiciously brilliant nor transparent. All our literature has not yet succeeded in eroding their smallest corner, in flattening their slightest curve.

Instead of this universe of “signification” (psychological, social functional), we must try, then, to construct texts both more solid and more immediate. Let it be first of all by their presence that words establish themselves, and let this presence continue to prevail over whatever explanatory theory that may try to enclose them in a system of references, whether Structuralist, Freudian or metatextual.

In this future universe of the novel, words will be there before meaning something; and they will still be there afterwards, hard, unalterable, eternally present, mocking their own “meaning,” that meaning which vainly tries to reduce them to the role of precarious tools, or a temporary and shameful fabric woven exclusively—and deliberately—by the superior human truth expressed in it.

Henceforth, on the contrary, words will gradually lose their instability and their secrets, will renounce their pseudo-mystery, that suspect interiority which Roland Barthes has called “the romantic heart of things.” No longer will texts be merely the vague reflection of a hero’s vague soul, the image of her torments, the shadow of her desires. Or rather, if words still afford a momentary prop to human passions they will do so only provisionally, and will accept the tyranny of significations only in appearance—derisively, one might say—the better to show how alien they remain to people.