2/27/15

What makes something unpublishable?


In a VICE article my eyes fell on a picture of a page out of Elisabeth S. Clark’s work Between Words (2007). This work is more than, as VICE wants us to believe, “an reimagining of a classic text […] where Clark has gone through page by page in the original and removed everything but the punctuation.” On the artists website you can read:
Between Words investigates the topography of language, drawing attention to its construction, materiality and choreography. Using Raymond Roussel’s long 1274-line poem Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique as its source, it reflects it back, though void of words, as a mere “landscape of grammar” (a landscape of punctuation).

The artist, in this work, conceals the words of the poem to isolate an exact facsimile of the author’s original notational (punctuational) inscriptions found in his oeuvre. The initial book work is then re-translated into a score, arranged in four movements (four cantos) and devised as a: Piece for 4 instruments. The splayed punctuation is transcribed into a landscape of elaborate symphonic arrangement, ascribed with questions surrounding the duration, instrumentation, articulations and dynamics.”
An online version of the “punctuation facsimile” is available on UbuWeb.

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