Guilt, Risk and Conceptual Art

"Ordinary language does not use itself to reflect upon itself"

"Pure conceptualism negates the need for reading in the traditional sense - one does not need to 'read' the work as much as think about the idea of the work"

- Robert Fitterman, Notes on Conceptualisms

I sat down to write my blog then stopped. Then I started again, then stopped. It occurred to me that according to the needs of the conceptual, a written response that provokes the reader "to think" could just as easily be a conceptual art piece as a sensical analysis. Isn't that part of the point? Or even the whole point?

Also, I am a poet and a person who learns by doing. So by creating conceptual writing, I was able to better understand it. My idea is not original, alphabetizing existing texts has been done by Kim Stefans, Cristobal Mendoza (I published it, see Every Word I Saved on springgunpress.com) and I'm sure many others. The concept of my piece however, is different from The Dream Life of Letters and Every Word I Saved, mostly because my piece was framed as a blog entry assignment for a graduate course. I subverted "the man" (or woman-Lori) by attempting to achieve the same level of thinking and communication of a concept rich scholarly essay on conceptual art, by creating/participating in conceptual writing. My source material is of course that of the intro to the Conceptual Writing Anthology on UBUWEB which adds another conceptual layer to the writing. It draws attention to the absurdity of having an introduction like this on conceptual writing, or having any scholarly writing on what is already self-conceptual and unconcerned with its outcome.

Now to get to my title. I immediately felt guilty after subverting my graduate student duty to complete this assignment on time and as an accountable member of the classroom community. It was so easy to alphabetize source text while my classmates typed away some serious and thoughtful analysis on conceptual writing and how it relates to digital poetry. I should mention I think the connection to digital poetry and conceptual writing is an obvious one and won't discuss that here. Back to my guilt. Hard work is rewarded in the world I live in. I feel good about myself when I work hard and make something meaningful. The nonproductive, easy act of alphabetizing this text gave me the opposite feeling. It was not hard work, and I felt like I was disappointing my classmates and Lori. I wondered if the inherent low-energy work and cleverness that goes into conceptual writing always feels this way, and this brings me to the risk part.

Participating in conceptual writing is risky because there is nothing but the concept and because of our social pact that hard work is a positive thing, peers may view the work as lazy, or easy. At least these were my fears. Like I said, I am a poet and when you think back to the workshop, you might hear things like, "I am not following the concept of your poem but lyric quality of the fourth and sixth lines are beautiful. The way your poem moves, feels like taking a shower while drinking lavender soda." Ok so that was a stretch but the point is, other writing has something else, or a lot of something elses and is therefore less risky. You have more to fall back on if the concept doesn't pan out.

Finally, there is yet another quote in Fitterman's Notes on on Conceptualisms that quotes Sol LeWitt: "If the artist changes his mind halfway through the execution of his piece, he compromises the result and repeats past results." Now it appears, I have done just this, but for the day when I was behind my decision to keep that post up there with no explanation (it is the explanation!) I had this quote in mind.